A year ago, chipmaker Nvidia (NVDA) was really riding high. Sales of its chips were jumping as it transformed itself from a maker of computer chips used for computer gaming into something much more profound:
It had become ground zero for artificial intelligence.
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The shares were soaring. CBS 60 Minutes produced a segment on the company and co-founder Jensen Huang.
In June, Nvidia split its stock ten-for-one and was added to the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
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Artificial intelligence quickly became part of contemporary vernacular.
At least three times in 2024 and this year, Nvidia was the most valuable company in the world.
A year later, the fever has broken. The shares are just about flat so far in 2025 at $134.43 after a 171% gain in 2024.
Nvidia’s quarterly earnings results loom
Nvidia, however, still has a market capitalization of about $3.3 trillion and is still the second-most valuable company in the world — behind Apple (AAPL) and ahead of Microsoft (MSFT) .
Tensions are building inside and outside Nvidia ahead of the release of its fourth-quarter earnings after Wednesday’s close.
The stakes are huge for Nvidia, for Jensen Huang and, indeed, for all the players in artificial intelligence, especially Microsoft, Facebook-parent Meta Platforms (META) , Amazon.com (AMZN) and Google-parent (GOOGL) . The four are fast-developing AI applications.
Because there’s a new worry: Competition is growing rapidly, not just from competitors in Silicon Valley but now from at least one player in China, DeepSeek.
DeepSeek claimed on Jan. 27 that it can build large language model technologies to compete against ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, and, yes, because he’s everywhere, Elon Musk’s Grok.
What sets DeepSeek apart is its claims that it can build an AI system for much less than Nvidia and others, using lower-powered chips that are not subject to U.S. export controls.
Nvidia shares plunged 17% that day, but they had recovered most of their losses by Feb. 20. Then came Friday’s slump.
So, Nvidia has to show it’s still got game by at least these measures:
- Its Blackwell graphical processing units, the ultra-fast processors it introduced last year, can be delivered at scale and remain dominant.
- Its technology has to be strong enough to continue commanding a premium price from Nvidia customers, who may have to wait a year to get their orders filled.
- It has to scale up production to be able to deliver products more quickly to maintain its market dominance.
- It has to offer investors enough guidance to make the current price target of $172.22 achievable. This target would translate into a 28.1% gain from Friday’s close.
Here’s a quick look at how Nvidia’s numbers may shake out on Wednesday.
Quarterly earnings estimate: 85 cents a share, up 60% from a year ago.
Quarterly revenue estimate: $38.2 billion, up 72.6% from a year ago.
Full-year earnings estimate: $2.95 a share, up 127% from a year ago
Full-year revenue estimate: $129.3 billion, up 112%.
This brings us back to the DeepSeek issue.
Artificial intelligence’s selling point is this:
If you join cutting-edge processing speed and capacity with fantastic amounts of data, a user can ask an AI computer a question and promptly get back an answer that considers all the data the machine already has stored in it.
The intellectual jump may be as profound as when space scientists realized computers could solve complex engineering problems faster than slide rules.
At the heart of the computations are the chips, whether Nvidia’s or someone else’s.
Salesforce and Dell to offer more snapshots of AI
Nvidia is not the only company reporting results next week. And markets will likely be jittery after sizable losses on Thursday and Friday.
The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index fell 1.6% for the week. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 2.6%, thanks partly to a 749-point swoon on Friday. The Nasdaq Composite Index slid 2.5%.
An immediate catalyst was a nearly 10% drop in the University of Michigan’s widely watched consumer sentiment index. The key worries: fears of more inflation, tariff worries and uncertainty caused by the Trump Administration massive cost-and-job cutting.
Among the big reports coming is Salesforce (CRM) .
It reports at just about the same time as Nvidia on Wednesday, and it is already a big user of artificial intelligence applications in its business.
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The fiscal third-quarter earnings estimate is $2.61 a share, up nearly 14% from a year ago. Sales are projected at $10 billion, up 8.1% from a year ago.
Dell Technologies (DELL) reports after Thursday’s close. It has evolved into a major supplier of high-end servers used in AI. The earnings estimate for the fourth quarter is $2.51 a share, up 14% from a year ago. Revenue of $24.5 billion would be up 9.9%.
More AI Stocks:
- AI startup smashes funding round, signals big changes for health care
- Analyst revisits Palantir stock forecast following annual report filing
- Analyst who predicted Palantir rally picks best AI software stocks
Home Depot, Lowe’s and TJX set to report
- Also reporting: Home Depot (HD) , Tuesday morning. The estimate is $3.04 for the fourth quarter. Sales are projected at $38.7 billion, up 11.7%. Shares are down 1% this year.
- Lowe’s Companies (LOW) , Wednesday morning. The estimate for the Home Depot competitor is $1.84 for the fourth quarter, up 4%. The sales estimate is projected at $38.7 billion, down 1.7%. Shares are down 3.1% this year.
- TJX Companies (TJX) , operator of the TJ Maxx chain, Wednesday morning. The estimate is $1.16, down from $1.22 a year ago. The sales estimate is $16.2 billion, down 1.1% from a year ago.
With these three, watch for how the companies describe their customers’ outlooks. Walmart (WMT) helped off last week’s stock slump when it offered lower-than-expected guidance for the current quarter.
“Wallets are still stretched,” CFO John David Rainey told the Wall Street Journal.
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