NVIDIA is in almost everything: What to know before NVDA earnings

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TL;DR: What traders should know before Wednesday

The event: NVIDIA reports Q1 FY2027 earnings after the close on Wednesday, May 20. The earnings call begins at 5 pm ET.

For perps traders:

The options market is pricing approximately a ±8–10% implied move through the May 23 expiry. NVDA is up roughly 10% in the past month, trading around $222 about 6% below its 52-week high of $236.54. The stock has declined after a majority of its recent earnings reports—including consecutive quarters where it beat EPS by 5–8% and still fell. The trigger is the Q2 revenue guide: consensus sits at ~$87 billion; Goldman Sachs is at $87.7 billion. A guide above $88 billion breaks the historical pattern. Across 24 venues, the NVDA perp carries $167.7 million in aggregate open interest with $284.5 million in 24-hour volume—a 170% volume surge alongside modest OI growth (+1.7%), suggesting traders are repositioning around the event rather than adding directional exposure. Funding rates across venues range from −0.60 bps to +4.10 bps, reflecting mixed positioning heading into earnings.

For RWA traders:

NVDAon—the Ondo-tokenized version of NVIDIA stock—has $49.4 million in total asset value, up 91.64% from 30 days ago, with $119 million in monthly transfer volume and 9,581 holders. Activity has been accelerating into earnings week. The sharpest price discovery on NVDA happens in the 30–60 minutes following the call, typically around 5:30–6:00 pm ET. The spread between NVDAon and the underlying stock may widen around a high-volatility event. [DEEPLINK: NVDAon via MetaMask Swaps]

The one number that matters most: Q2 revenue guidance. Consecutive beats stretching back years have made the Q1 print a formality in the market’s eyes. What moves the stock is what management says about the next quarter.

The Deep Dive: Meet the most valuable company on Earth

$5.4 trillion. That’s NVIDIA’s current market cap, placing it comfortably ahead of Alphabet and Apple by more than half a trillion dollars.

Compare that figure to annual GDP and only two economies on Earth—the United States and China—have a yearly output comfortably larger than NVIDIA’s market cap.

Wednesday’s earnings report is about more than what NVIDIA makes and whether it beats. It is a quarterly update on what it has become and how thoroughly it has embedded itself in almost every financial instrument, every AI product, and every portfolio that touches public markets.

It’s probably already in your portfolio

NVIDIA accounts for approximately 8% of the S&P 500—the largest single-component weighting in the index’s history, above Apple’s peak at roughly 7.6%. Every broad index ETF, every pension fund tracking the market, every 401k with passive equity exposure holds NVIDIA whether the account holder knows it or not. A 5% move in NVDA on Thursday morning shifts the S&P 500 by roughly 0.4%. It’s more of a macro event than a stock report.

It’s probably already in the AI you use

NVIDIA controls approximately 80% of the AI accelerator market by revenue. The large language models behind the AI tools used daily by hundreds of millions of people were trained on NVIDIA GPUs. The inference infrastructure serving them runs on NVIDIA GPUs. Amazon, which has built one of the most sophisticated in-house chip programs in the industry, acknowledged in its most recent earnings call that it still relies on NVIDIA for the most powerful AI compute. Alphabet said NVIDIA GPUs are a “core part” of its AI accelerator program alongside its own Tensor Processing Units. Microsoft noted it continues to work closely with NVIDIA on AI infrastructure.

The four largest cloud providers—Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft—have collectively committed to more than $700 billion in capital expenditure in 2026. Three of the four raised their full-year guidance estimates during Q1 earnings calls. The primary destination for that spending runs through Santa Clara.

The numbers behind the numbers

NVIDIA’s revenue was $26.97 billion in fiscal 2023. In fiscal 2026, it was $215.9 billion. Eight-fold growth in three fiscal years, at a scale where that kind of acceleration has no modern precedent in large-cap corporate history.

The Data Center segment made $193.7 billion in fiscal 2026. In fiscal 2020, that same segment generated approximately $3 billion. The roughly 65x expansion happened in six years—driven almost entirely by the decision, first made by a handful of AI researchers in the early 2010s, that GPUs originally designed for gaming graphics were the right hardware for training neural networks.

The profit margin is the number that has no peer. NVIDIA generated $120.1 billion in net income last year on a 55.6% net margin. Apple runs at roughly 25%. No large-cap company has sustained margins above 55% at revenue approaching $216 billion. At GTC in March, Jensen Huang said NVIDIA expects purchase orders for Blackwell and Vera Rubin processors to reach $1 trillion through 2027—a figure larger than the annual GDP of most countries.

What analysts expect

Consensus estimates heading into the Q1 FY2027 report call for approximately $79 billion in revenue and $1.78 in non-GAAP EPS. NVIDIA’s own guidance for the quarter was approximately $78 billion, plus or minus 2%—and NVIDIA has beaten its guidance in every quarter since the AI boom began, by margins ranging from roughly $1 to $6 billion above the midpoint.

Goldman Sachs is modeling a beat of roughly $1 billion above consensus, putting Q1 closer to $80 billion. The firm’s Q2 revenue forecast is $87.7 billion, modestly above Wall Street’s average of approximately $87 billion. The Q2 guide, not Q1 results, is what the market is actually watching. Consecutive beats stretching back years have made the Q1 print a formality. What moves the stock is whether management signals the Blackwell ramp is accelerating, holding, or compressing.

Gross margin is the secondary watch item. NVIDIA guided Q1 non-GAAP gross margin at approximately 75%, plus or minus 50 basis points. Q4 FY2026 showed the GAAP gross margin at 71.1%, a step down from the mid-70s of the Hopper era, reflecting the transition cost of scaling a new chip architecture at volume. Any further compression below the guided floor of 74.5% would signal the Blackwell ramp is more expensive than modeled.

The paradox nobody talks about

Here is the most counterintuitive data point in the setup.

Polymarket prices the odds of an EPS beat at approximately 90%. NVIDIA has beaten consensus in 21 of its last 23 quarters. The stock has declined after a majority of its recent earnings reports.

Q4 FY2025: beat EPS by approximately 5%, stock fell roughly 8.5% the next day. Q4 FY2026, the most recent print: beat EPS by roughly 5%, stock fell approximately 5.5% on the day and was down roughly 11% a month later. NVDA is currently trading around $222, up approximately 20% in the past month, about 6% below its 52-week high of $236.54.

The options market is pricing an implied move of approximately 8–10% in either direction through the May 23 expiry—a range of roughly $200–$245. That’s broadly in line with NVDA’s actual post-earnings moves in several recent quarters. The pattern that has repeated: when Q2 guidance lands materially above expectations, the stock moves higher. When guidance meets consensus—even on a clean beat—it sells off. The 20% pre-earnings run has already priced in a strong quarter. The question is whether Wednesday’s call prices in a strong year.

Three risk cases

The base case—a clean beat on revenue and EPS with Q2 guidance roughly in line with Goldman’s $87.7 billion estimate—is reflected in near-consensus pricing and a 20% monthly rally. Three scenarios would produce outsized moves.

Gross margin misses guidance. A non-GAAP gross margin print below 74.5%—the bottom of NVIDIA’s guided range—would signal Blackwell scaling costs running above expectations. This is the bear case with the most price impact.

China revenue shortfall. NVIDIA excluded Data Center compute revenue from China in its Q1 guidance following US export restrictions on H20 chips. If actual China exposure is larger than disclosed, or if the earnings call surfaces new restriction risk, that’s an unmodeled headwind in a valuation with very little room for negative surprises.

Q2 guide meets consensus, not the whisper. If Q2 guidance comes in at the Wall Street average of approximately $87 billion rather than Goldman’s $87.7 billion, the market is likely to read it as deceleration. Given the stock’s pre-earnings run, in-line guidance may be the most likely path to a negative reaction.

The scenario that breaks the pattern: Q2 guidance above $88 billion with gross margin above 75.5%. That combination validates both the Blackwell ramp and the margin recovery. Neither the options market’s ±8–10% implied move nor the broader consensus reflects it—which is exactly why it would move the stock.