Nvidia earnings preview: margins in focus
Nvidia reports earnings after the close and the market is nervous, though the setup looks cheap for buyers willing to look past the noise.
- Nvidia almost always beats, but the stock has fallen after each of the last four reports, so a beat may not be enough.
- The whole story is margins: Nvidia raised chip prices 15% while memory costs jumped far more.
- Big customers are shifting toward cheaper "inference" chips — OpenAI's new Broadcom-built chip, Google's TPUs, even gaming cards — and those carry thinner margins than the top-end racks.
- Money keeps pouring in anyway: SpaceX, Google, and a likely Anthropic listing all raise cash that ends up buying chips.
- A quiet warning sign: regulators loosened the rules on packaging data-center debt into securities, with less disclosure required — echoes of 2008.
Outlook: Expect a beat, with the stock's move hinging on what management says about margins and frontier-chip demand.