Live Earnings Updates: 3 Catalysts That Can Send NVIDIA (NVDA) Shares Soaring Tonight

The earnings call is winding down, and NVIDIA is up about 1.7% as of 5:45 p.m. ET.

At this point, NVIDIA is large enough that there are few ‘surprises’ in its earnings calls. With a lot of uncertainty recently focused on the AI space after DeepSeek, perhaps having more ‘boring’ earnings is a good thing.

One interesting late quote is that Jensen Huang said he believes NVIDIA’s revenue in the future will be much larger for enterprises than CSPs.

He partially explains this by a diffusion of physical systems that will require a new kind of AI. It seems like as NVIDIA builds their narrative for growth beyond the hyperscaler boom, the beginning of agentic AI and robotics will be their big ‘sales pitch’ in the years ahead.

Jensen Huang was asked about the battle between NVIDIA and custom ASICs from companies like Broadcom.

Speaking about custom ASICs, Jensen noted that just because you have a design win doesn’t mean it’ll get deployed.

Broadcom has won contracts with major companies like Google (which has scaled already), and also ByteDance, OpenAI, Meta, and Apple.

Broadcom is up today following NVIDIA’s earnings announcement. Its worth noting that NVIDIA saying their networking strength is centered in their Ethernet solutions is a positive for Broadcom, which is the main Ethernet competition for NVIDIA.

NVIDIA is targeting an extremely aggressive ramp for the 300 series of Blackwell – or Blackwell Ultra.

There has been some chatter that the release of Blackwell Ultra may be delayed, but NVIDIA said Ultra remains on track for a launch in the second half of 2025.

One other note, Jensen teased the announcement of their next product lineup beyond Rubin at this year’s GTC.

While NVIDIA disappointed with 71% gross margins (versus expectations of 72%) guidance for the next quarter, the company has defended a gross margin profile that will return to the mid-70s later in the year in their conference call.

Will that be enough to satiate Wall Street? The stock remains up about 1.6% as of 5:35 p.m. ET.

Jensen continues to push several growth fronts as the next wave of AI beyond today’s data center buildout:

• Agentic AI for enterprises
• Sovereign investment from countries around the world
• Robotics hitting an inflection point

Question one is what impacts the growth of reasoning models and test-time computer that rely less on pretaining and more on inference will have on NVIDIA.

• Jensen answers this question by saying today reasoning requires 100X more compute, but as complexity increases and companies run things like simulations that number could increase to 100,000X or more.
• He highlights that the question of what architecture will be needed for future reasoning models supports NVIDIA, as they’re extremely flexible.

NVIDIA’s CFO has finished her section, which is heavy on rehashing information that was available in the company’s CFO commentary on their website.

Jensen Huang will speak next as Wall Street asks questions, and its likely comments from him could shape the direction of the stock more. Right now shares are up about 1.8%.

So far, nothing really interesting in NVIDIA’s earnings call. A few notes:

• NVIDIA said they expect China revenue won’t rise meaningfully from current levels, which is perhaps a different viewpoint than recent reports that export compliant orders have surged after DeepSeek.
• The company noted that Reasoning Models that use ‘test time compute’ take up to 100X more compute for inferencing. This massive jump in compute needs has been known, but its still an impressive number to highlight.
• NVIDIA did provide a number on the robotics market, saying it will hit $5 billion this year. There has been a significant acceleration in the announcement of new robots as many companies have embraced fully utilizing neural networks.

We’re having a hard time accessing NVIDIA’s earnings call – it appears the service that provides calls (Q4) is struggling to keep up with all the traffic.

That sums up how rabid attention on NVIDIA is right now!

While we continue trying to access NVIDIA’s conference call – one interesting note is that Blackwell sales ended up hitting $11 billion last quarter. That means Blackwell is now about 1/3 of NVIDIA’s Data Center compute revenue. That number will continue scaling in the quarters to come.

It’s almost time for NVIDIA’s conference call. Updates may slow as the company has to repeat much of what’s already been outlined on its press release.

We recommend you leave this page open and refresh in about 30 minutes if you’re looking for more substantive updates.

A few more things have caught our eye as we’re preparing to listen to what NVIDIA has to say on their call:

• NVIDIA has built a large data center networking business, but it came in well below expectations last quarter and missed once again this quarter. Surely some Wall Street bank will have to ask about this, but it’s a puzzling factor that could be holding back growth.
• One area that could be a big factor in Wall Street’s reaction tomorrow is whether export restrictions led the company to be more conservative with its guidance next quarter.

NVIDIA shares have now rebounded and are up about 2% after hours. It’s not inconceivable that with the ‘right’ answers in areas like gross margins, how DeepSeek impacts the company, Blackwell demand, and Jensen Huang’s excitement about new scaling laws, NVIDIA shares could trade up firmly in the green tomorrow.

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We’ll keep this live blog going as NVIDIA hosts its conference call that begins at 5 p.m. ET.

It’s unlikely we’ll see an extremely outsized move (earlier in this live blog we cast doubt on the options market’s implied 10% move for NVIDIA – its earnings just don’t provide the fireworks they used to!)

Here are some areas Wall Street is likely to poke at:

• Why Gross Margins at 71% Next Quarter: This number is below expectations and likely explains a good portion of why NVIDIA isn’t rising after hours. Expect that Wall Street will ask questions to get at why margins are below expectations. If the answers NVIDIA provides are satisfactory (likely related to where Blackwell is in its ramp), that could help provide a positive catalyst for the stock tomorrow.
• Blackwell Commentary: Does Jensen Huang or NVIDIA’s CFO Colette Kress provide more specific commentary on Blackwell’s demand. Last quarter they gave specific woding about Blackwell demand exceeding supply for several quarters. What specific language is used surrounding Blackwell demand?
• China Demand: Finally, commentary about demand from China and also the impacts of new scaling laws (reasoning and test-time compute) will be areas Wall Street will watch closely.

Answers on any of these key areas will likely shape whether NVIDIA ends up turning green tomorrow. It’s likely there will be plenty of defense from Wall Street, which has generally been turning more bullish headed into Q4 earnings.

If you’re looking at NVIDIA’s stock after hours and wondering why it’s not rising, here are three reasons why:

• Not A Big Enough Guide: NVIDIA’s Q1 guide of $43 billion in revenue is about 2% above expectations, but NVIDIA investors likely expected a higher beat than this number. Guidance also disappointed last quarter.
• Gross Margin Guidance: We said to pay attention to gross margins, and they came in at 71% last quarter, which was below expectations of 72%. This is an area Wall Street is particularly concerned with as there are fears NVIDIA will be unable to maintain the beefy margins that fuel its incredible level of profits.
• Free Cash Flow: Came in at $15.5 billion versus expectations of $19.1 billion. Free cash flow can be lumpy, but this might be an area Wall Street pokes at in NVIDIA’s Q&A session.

We’re continuing to review data from NVIDIA’s newest earnings release, here are a few areas that catch our attention:

• Great Data Center Sales: NVIDIA’s Data Center sales came in at $35.6 billion, which was roughly 5% above expectations. The biggest ‘miss’ was NVIDIA’s gaming unit, which used to be the most important part of NVIDIA’s business but is now just a small piece of it. That unit came in 16% below expectations.
• Automotive Soars Again: NVIDIA’s Automotive unit is small, at just $570 million in quarterly revenue, but it blew past expectations by a wide margins after doing so last quarter. The company clearly has significant momentum in the self-driving car space. Could this unit surpass NVIDIA’s gaming division in the years to come?

NVIDIA shares have no moved down slightly, about 1%. Investors may have initially been happy about the size of the company’s EPS boost but didn’t like the size of next quarter’s guidance beat. The size of NVIDIA’s earnings ‘beats’ have been decreasing in recent quarters as the company has grown in size and last quarter its guidance disappointed investors as well.

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After initially jumping nearly 4%, NVIDIA shares are now up about 1.3%. Expect the stock to stay choppy as investors digest all the information in NVIDIA’s earnings release.

Here’s the Initial Numbers:

Q4 EPS: $.89 vs Wall St. expectations of $.84

Revenue: $39.3 billion vs Wall St. expectations of $38 billion

Guidance for Q1: $43 billion vs Wall St. expectations of $42 billion

Stock is immediately up 3%, we will continue reporting on the news in this live blow.

Other earnings to watch after hours in the AI space include:

• Snowflake: Up 10% after announcing earnings
• Salesforce: Down 5%
• Synopsys: Up 2%
• Pure Storage: Down 7%

We are five minutes away from NVIDIA reporting earnings. In the meantime, grab a free copy of our ‘The Next NVIDIA‘ report that includes:

• 3 Research Reports
• A full write-up on AI developments
• A complete industry map of investments
• And much more!

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As we noted in our write-up below, reports this week point to Chinese companies ordering a record number of export-compliant H20 chips.

That might surprise investors considering NVIDIA dropped 17% following the ‘DeepSeek panic’ in January. More news points to booming demand post-DeepSeek today, with 3F Research releasing data that the availability of NVIDIA’s H100’s has plummeted from more than 90% to less than 15% today.

Pay close attention to commentary around demand from China when Jensen Huang answers Wall Street questions. That situation continues to be volatile as further restrictions from the Trump Administration could squeeze growth, but as of right now it looks like demand from China is booming.

We are now 10 minutes from NVIDIA’s earnings release. The company ended up closing up 3.67% on the day and trades at a market cap of just north of $3.2 trillion headed into today’s release.

One question on investors’ minds might be how ‘expensive’ NVIDIA is in the lead-up to this earnings release relative to where it has traded in the past. Consensus Media crunched the numbers:

• Before today’s Q4 earnings, NVIDIA trades for 29X forward P/E
• Before Q3: 38.7X forward P/E
• Before Q2: 41.7X
• Before Q1: 35.1X

When was the last time NVIDIA was this ‘cheap’ on a forward P/E basis? That would be the first quarter of 2023, which was the quarter that NVIDIA first announced blockbuster results.

When NVIDIA announced their Q4 last year, the company included first-quarter guidance for:

• Revenue
• GAAP/Non-GAAP Gross Margins
• GAAP and Non-GAAP Operating Expenses
• GAAP and Non-GAAP tax rates

And in the company’s earnings call, NVIDIA provided full-year operating expense growth estimates.

That is to say, while many companies will provide a full-year guide, the reaction to NVIDIA stock will likely be driven by the more limited window into Q1 expectations.

The market has yet to close on Wednesday, but NVIDIA shares are rising into the close. The stock is up about 4.1% as of 3:45 p.m. ET after it had reached an intraday low at about 2 p.m.

Options activity points to a move of a little under 10% for NVIDIA tomorrow. We’ll take the under on that level of movement, but the market has been swinging wildly and quick to sell off AI stocks since the DeepSeek incident.