Nvidia will report first-quarter results on May 20, a highly anticipated release that arrives as the company’s shares rally to record levels and CEO Jensen Huang travels to China alongside former U.S. president Donald Trump for a summit with President Xi Jinping. The stock’s climb has pushed Nvidia’s market capitalization to about $5.5 trillion, making the earnings print a focal point for investors gauging whether surging AI demand can sustain the chipmaker’s outsized valuation.
Market attention is particularly focused on whether the summit could ease the regulatory logjam surrounding shipments of Nvidia’s H200 AI processors to China. Nvidia said the U.S. government granted it a license to ship H200s, but China has not issued the necessary import licenses. Reuters reported on May 14 that U.S. authorities will allow roughly 10 Chinese firms — including Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance and JD.com — to buy the H200, though, according to people familiar with the matter, no H200 units have yet been delivered to China.
Huang has been candid about Nvidia’s position in the Chinese market. In a broadcast interview with the Special Competitive Studies Project on April 30, he said the company’s share in China has fallen to “zero,” a stark contrast with the roughly 90% global market share Nvidia once held in AI accelerators. The lack of deliveries, combined with broader trade and export-control frictions, makes the China angle a live risk for an earnings quarter dominated by data-center demand.
Analysts expect Nvidia’s first-quarter results to show a dramatic year-over-year jump. Bloomberg consensus estimates point to earnings per share of $1.76 and revenue of $78.75 billion, up from $0.96 and $44.06 billion a year earlier. The data-center business is projected to account for the lion’s share of sales, roughly $72.85 billion, with computing products contributing about $60.53 billion and networking around $12.45 billion. Gaming, by contrast, is seen as a modest drag, forecast at $3.64 billion, down about 3.3%.
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Nvidia used its GTC conference in March to roll out multiple product lines aimed at expanding its AI footprint, including a Groq 3 language processing unit (LPU) and a CPU-only server, along with Huang’s bullish projection that chips such as Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin could drive as much as $1 trillion in sales over time. Those new offerings and the continued dominance of data-center processors underpin investors’ upbeat expectations, but they also invite growing competition from rivals and customers.
Advanced Micro Devices is preparing to launch a competing rack-scale server system later this year, and cloud giants such as Amazon and Google are increasingly offering their own chips to third parties, moves that could erode Nvidia’s pricing power over time. Still, Nvidia’s shares have reflected the company’s leadership in generative-AI workloads: the stock was up more than 21% year-to-date and about 74% over the previous 12 months as of May 13.
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With consensus estimates calling for a near-doubling of revenue and a continued concentration of sales in data-center products, the May 20 report will test whether Nvidia can convert the AI frenzy into the kinds of results analysts are forecasting — and whether progress on China access will unlock an additional, politically sensitive market for its most advanced accelerators.
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