MW Nvidia's earnings will play second fiddle to these big investor debates
By Hannah Pedone
Morgan Stanley is looking to see how Nvidia is managing the memory crunch and whether it can generate significant revenue outside of GPUs
Nvidia will report earnings on Wednesday after the market closes.
When Nvidia reports earnings on Wednesday, the numbers will be almost beside the point. The company has a nearly unblemished track record of earnings and revenue beats that stretches back dozens of quarters.
Instead, investors will be looking to glean new insights into bigger themes, such as where Nvidia (NVDA) stands in the artificial-intelligence buildout and how newer products are impacting the company's financials.
Morgan Stanley's Joseph Moore said that the company's ability to secure market share in specialized processing chips is up for debate. It's not so much a question of whether Nvidia will retain its dominance in the market for graphics processing units, but rather a of whether it can bring in serious revenue from central processing units and from chips based on Groq technologies. These have the potential to be needle movers for Nvidia if the ventures are successful.
Read more: Nvidia is getting some help as it props up S&P 500 earnings growth
He'll also be looking to see how Nvidia manages supply constraints within dynamic random-access memory. While Moore upped his Blackwell and Vera Rubin estimates on Monday, he noted that these chips have the potential to be negatively affected by a component crunch.
There's a cost aspect to the memory-chip shortage as well, as prices have skyrocketed in the face of tight supply. But Moore believes that the company's previous purchase commitments should be able to help Nvidia meet demand for expected shipments in the next year.
Freedom Capital Markets managing director Paul Meeks wrote in comments shared with MarketWatch that he's pleased Nvidia has "finally broken out" of its $175-$195 price range, where it had traded since July 2025. Shares recently changed hands above $221.
Meeks said that over that period, the stock had significantly underperformed some of its AI-infrastructure peers.
"Unless you think [Nvidia's] business is going to collapse in the following year, which I don't, you should probably bet on this stock for the next two years," Meeks wrote.
Shares of Nvidia were down 1.5% midday on Monday.
See also: Cerebras's stock looks like a risky bet on AI hype
-Hannah Pedone
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May 18, 2026 14:17 ET (18:17 GMT)
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