Nvidia Earnings Countdown: $1 Trillion Revenue Vision from Goldman as Corning Deal and IREN Option Expand Capacity

When Nvidia opens its books on May 20, investors will be watching for more than just a headline beat. The chipmaker’s quarterly report has become a bellwether for the entire technology sector, and this time around the options market is pricing in a staggering 8.6 percent swing in either direction — nearly three times the average reaction over the past four quarters. That level of implied volatility reflects a broader uncertainty: can Nvidia keep delivering the kind of growth that has already pushed its shares up more than 60 percent over the past year?

The company itself has guided for first-quarter revenue of $78 billion, representing a 77 percent jump from the prior year. Wall Street’s consensus sits slightly higher, around $79 billion. Morgan Stanley, which reiterated its overweight rating and lifted its price target to $285, expects the familiar pattern of a beat accompanied by a multi-billion-dollar guidance raise. Cantor Fitzgerald followed suit, bumping its target to $350. The bullishness is underpinned by customer spending that shows no signs of cooling: Amazon, Alphabet, Meta and Microsoft have collectively raised their AI infrastructure budgets to $725 billion, with Morgan Stanley noting three-year supply contracts that are sometimes prepaid in full.

That demand is driving Nvidia to lock down its own production capacity. The company recently struck a partnership with Corning that aims to dramatically increase U.S. output of optical interconnects, with a goal of multiplying current capacity tenfold. In a separate move, Nvidia secured a deal with data-center operator IREN covering five gigawatts of AI infrastructure, along with an option to take an equity stake in IREN worth up to $2.1 billion. These agreements underscore the lengths Nvidia is going to secure supply long before rivals can catch up.

Should investors sell immediately? Or is it worth buying Nvidia?

Yet geopolitics remain a wild card. Reports had suggested the U.S. government approved the sale of Nvidia’s H200 chips to Chinese tech giants such as Alibaba and Tencent. But after a summit in Beijing, President Donald Trump confirmed that China has now blocked domestic companies from purchasing those same chips, opting instead to develop homegrown alternatives. The contradiction — U.S. licenses granted, Chinese purchases denied — has weighed on the stock, which fell about 4.4 percent in recent sessions. The Chinese market had long been seen as a potential growth catalyst, and its sudden closure creates a fresh headwind.

Looking beyond the immediate quarter, Goldman Sachs published a long-range analysis on May 17 that set a trillion-dollar revenue target for Nvidia’s data-center segment. The catalyst, the bank argues, is “Agentic AI” — autonomous systems capable of reasoning and performing tasks independently. This next phase goes far beyond generative AI, requiring vastly more high-speed interconnects and specialized memory bandwidth. Nvidia’s gross margin, currently around 75 percent, could be sustained even as production costs rise if this architecture takes hold.

The earnings release on Wednesday will therefore be less about the past three months than about the road ahead. Three items dominate the watch list: the production yield and delivery schedule for the GB200 Blackwell systems; the status of the Vera Rubin platform, which is slated for mass production by late 2026; and the trajectory of Sovereign AI programs, which analysts estimate will contribute more than $30 billion in revenue this year alone. Nvidia shares trade at roughly 196 euros, about 3 percent below their 52-week high from May 14. Technicians point to a support zone around $224, the 0.382 Fibonacci retracement of the recent rally. Whether that level holds depends on whether management can convince the market that the next growth step — from Blackwell to Vera Rubin, from generative AI to autonomous agents — is on track.

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