Nvidia’s quarterly earnings have been must-watch events ever since its stock began a dramatic ascent in 2023, following OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT and the start of the generative AI boom. Now that it’s the world’s most valuable public company, Nvidia’s results face intense scrutiny as investors seek reassurance that AI-driven capital spending remains justified.
Certainly, the company’s bona fides have not changed amid the recent stock roller-coaster ride: Nvidia controls the vast majority of the market for GPUs, the chips used to train and run large AI models like ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude. Its CUDA software platform, which lets developers write code optimized specifically for Nvidia hardware, has become the industry’s de facto standard, reinforcing that dominance. Meanwhile, the company’s rapid cadence of new chip generations—from Hopper to Blackwell, with Rubin on deck—signals no intention of slowing down.
A growing field of startups focused on chips built specifically for inference—the process of generating outputs from trained AI models—also poses a challenge. Nvidia has moved to hedge against that threat, entering a high-profile, nonexclusive licensing deal with one of the most well-known of these startups, Groq, that included bringing CEO Jonathan Ross and other staffers to Nvidia.
The rise of AI agents—including tools like Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex, as well as the viral OpenClaw—has further sharpened the focus on inference. Unlike chatbots, agents are designed to run continuously, which requires even more computing power. This is raising new questions about which chips will power this next phase of AI at such a massive scale.
Investors want to continue to see the undisputed leader of the pack Nvidia’s year-over-year revenues increase. But these days, Nvidia is also a proxy for the entire AI boom—and the company’s results will be read as a verdict on whether the AI spending boom is still on track, or starting to crack.
