Nvidia stock (NVDA) has been struggling to regain momentum.
After a full-year rally of 171% in 2024, the AI-chip giant’s stock has gained 4% in the past six months, underperforming the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq Composite indexes. Through the close on Feb. 24, the stock was off 3% this year.
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The stock lost nearly $600 billion in market value in one day, the biggest such drop on record, after the DeepSeek chatbot launched in late January. DeepSeek’s developer says the system cost a fraction of what its U.S. rivals have put in to build their systems.
Nvidia is facing threats of tighter export restrictions from the administration of President Donald Trump, Bloomberg is reporting.
And DeepSeek’s launch might also have sparked a potential overhaul of U.S. export rules as the Commerce Department investigates whether DeepSeek used chips that are banned from sale to China to train its large-language models. (LLMs are systems, trained on enormous amounts of data, that can understand human language and perform related tasks without human intervention.)
However, Nvidia remains the most critical U.S. company in the tech sector, with demand from its largest clients, including Meta Platforms (META) , Microsoft (MSFT) , Google (GOOGL) , and Amazon (AMZN) , still elevated.
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These tech giants, which operate massive cloud and data center infrastructure, rely heavily on Nvidia’s graphics-processing units to power their AI and computing workloads.
Wednesday’s fiscal-Q4 earnings report will be extremely important for Nvidia as the market closely watches Blackwell chip demand and sales, tariff risks, the impact of DeepSeek on profitability, and other key developments in the AI-chip industry.
Nvidia is up only 0.1% year-to-date as of Feb. 24′ s close.
PATRICK T. FALLON/Getty Images
What to watch in Nvidia’s next earnings report?
Nvidia’s report, for the fiscal fourth quarter ended in January. is set for Wednesday, Feb. 26, after the market close.
At the bottom line, analysts expect profit of around $25.3 billion, or 84 cents a share, with gross margin in the region of 73.5%.
Wall Street is looking for overall revenue of $38.05 billion, a 72% increase from a year earlier, with data-center sales rising 82% to $33.6 billion.
The company has beaten Wall Street’s EPS estimates for eight consecutive quarters.
Nvidia thrives on its data-center business, which generates most of its revenue through AI hardware sales.
Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress said in November that Blackwell was in “full production” and was on track to generate “several billion dollars” of revenue in the fourth quarter.
“Every customer is racing to be the first to market,” Kress said.
Investment firm Wedbush affirmed a bullish view on Nvidia shares ahead of the report.
“We expect another strong performance, with a ‘beat and raise’ report that should ease investor concerns as [Chief Executive Jensen Huang] outlines the massive demand drivers from Blackwell and AI [capital outlays] fueling the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution,'” analyst Daniel Ives said in a Feb. 23 report.
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“Demand appears to be far outstripping supply for Blackwell, and after speaking with numerous enterprise AI customers, we have yet to see any AI deployment slow down or change due to DeepSeek,” he said.
“About 70% of customers we have spoken with have increased their AI budgets.”
Analysts remain bullish on Nvidia stock before Q4 earnings
Last week, KeyBanc raised its price target on Nvidia to $190 from $180 and reiterated an overweight rating ahead of the earnings report, thefly.com reported.
The investment firm expects Nvidia’s Q4 results to “solidly” beat analysts’ estimates and the company’s fiscal-Q1 guidance to come in “conservatively and moderately higher” than consensus.
UBS analyst Timothy Arcuri also said Nvidia should deliver solid results and guidance at or ahead of expectations as investor sentiment has shifted from bullish to mixed.
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UBS has a buy rating and a $185 price target on Nvidia shares.
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