Nvidia must show Blackwell chip can drive growth in earnings report

Despite rising competition, Nvidia holds 80% of the fast-growing market for artificial intelligence chips as the tech industry’s graphics processing unit, or GPU, of choice for making and deploying generative AI software.

What investors will want to see when Nvidia reports its third-quarter earnings on Wednesday is whether it can continue to grow at a fierce rate, even as the boom in AI enters its third year.

Nvidia is entering “uncharted territory” as it attempts to continue growing on a $3.5 trillion market cap, wrote HSBC analyst Frank Lee in a report this week.

“We have pondered this amazing growth trajectory and not only do we see no signs of a slowdown, we expect further upside in 2026 data center momentum,” Lee said in his note. He has a buy rating on the stock.

Future growth will have to come from Blackwell, its next-generation chip that has just started shipping to end-users such as Microsoft, Google and OpenAI. More important than Nvidia’s third-quarter results will be what the company says about demand for the Blackwell chip.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang will likely update investors about how that is shaping up on Wednesday, and he will potentially address reports that some of the systems based on Blackwell chips are experiencing overheating issues.

In August, Nvidia said it expected about “several billion” in Blackwell sales during the January quarter.

“Our base case is for NVDA to ship ~100K Blackwell GPUs in 4Q, which we believe is near the low-end of investor expectations,” Raymond James analyst Srini Pajjuri wrote in a note last week. He has a strong buy rating on the stock.

Since Nvidia’s last earnings report, the stock is up nearly 19%, capping off a stunning run that has seen the share price rise eightfold since ChatGPT was released in late 2022. Alongside the stock’s rise has been a fierce increase in sales and margin, and its forward price to earnings ratio has expanded to just under 50, according to FactSet.

Growth is slowing, but that is partially because Nvidia’s top line is so much larger than before. Nvidia reported 122% growth in sales in the most-recent quarter. That was lower than the 262% year-over-year growth it reported in the April quarter and the 265% growth in the January quarter.

Analysts polled by LSEG are expecting around $33.12 billion in revenue, which would be nearly 83% growth compared to a year ago. The company is also expected to post 75 cents in earnings per share, according to LSEG consensus estimates.

Nvidia’s data center business accounted for nearly 88% of sales in the most-recent quarter, taking the focus off the company’s legacy computer games business.

The company makes the chip for the Nintendo Switch, for example, which the Japanese video game company says is seeing major sales declines as the game console ages. Nvidia’s gaming business is expected to grow about 6% to $3.03 billion, according to a FactSet estimate. Its automotive business, making chips for electric cars, is still small, even though analysts expect it to grow 38% to about $360 million in sales.

But none of that will matter as long as Nvidia’s data center business continues to grow at a rate that is nearly doubling on an annual basis and Huang signals to investors that the party won’t end.