Nvidia (NVDA) will report earnings Wednesday November 19, for the quarter that ended on October 25.
According to Zacks Investment Research, based on 13 analysts’ forecasts, the consensus EPS forecast for the quarter is $1.17. The reported EPS for the same quarter last year was $0.78. Visible Alpha reports slightly different estimates. Nvidia is expected to report adjusted earnings per share of $1.26 on revenue of $55.28 billion, each up more than 55% from the same time a year ago. Data center revenue, the chips Nvidia sells that other companies buy to train and run a variety of AI models, is expected to grow 61% and make up $49.53 billion of Nvidia’s revenue.
I expect the earnings report to move the market.
How could it not? It’s almost as if the financial market’s stage director had cleared the boards for Nvidia’s report. We’ve got nothing to distract us. The Fed doesn’t meet until December 10. The Supreme Court won’t rule on the constitutionality of the Trump tariffs until 2026. Because of the recently ended government shutdown, we won’t have
current economic data on inflation and jobs for weeks.
And the stock market spent the last week making the case that Nvidia’s earnings will be critical to the performance of stocks in the AI sector. For the week that ended on Friday, November 14, Meta Platforms (META) fell 1.97% and the stock is now down 14% in the last month. Oracle (ORCL) lost 6.86% for the week and is now down 25.47% in the last month.
The worry-of-the-week is that AI will never be profitable enough to justify the massive amounts of money being spent to build out AI infrastructure. Which is why the biggest punishment was dished out this past week to companies like Meta and Oracle with the biggest, splashiest plans for increasing capital spending.
Nvidia’s earnings report will drop into this context. Good news will relieve some of the fears around the AI bubble–for a while–and we’re likely to see some solid buying on the dip. Bad news and I’d expect the slide in AI stocks to continue
The big difficulty here, though, is figuring out what “good” and “bad” mean. Nvidia “always” beats consensus–although that hasn’t been such a given in recent quarters. In the April 2025 quarter, Nvidia missed estimates by 3.75%. In the July quarter Nvidia beat by only 5.32%. Last October, October 2024, Nvidia beat by 11.43%. With analysts such as those from Jefferies and Wedbush saying in recent notes that they expect the artificial intelligence giant to “beat and raise,” it might take matching or exceeding that 5.32% beat from July or the 7.59% beat from January 2025 for the earnings results to qualify as good news.
And what would qualify as bad news. An earnings miss, certainly–although I think that’s unlikely. Anything in the numbers or executive comments that sounds like the possibility of a slowdown in chip orders. And anything that hints at production problems, as happened in the initial roll-out of Nvidia’s recent chip technology, that might make it difficult for the company to meet demand.
Nvidia shares closed nearly 2% higher on Friday at around $190. The stock has gained 42% since the start of the year.
