Sales of Nvidia's artificial intelligence chip Blackwell will be top of mind when the company releases its latest financial results Wednesday, with analysts eyeing future demand amid a Chinese upstart's claim that it can train competitive AI models using far fewer resources.
The fourth-quarter earnings will be the company’s first report since Chinese company DeepSeek boasted it had developed a large language model that could compete with ChatGPT and other U.S. rivals, but was more cost-effective in its use of Nvidia chips to train the system on troves of data.
The chip company has grown into the second-largest company on Wall Street, which means the stock’s movement carries more weight on the S&P 500 and other indexes than every company except Apple.
If Nvidia can’t keep up its momentum, particularly when critics say its stock price has climbed too much and too quickly, Americans holding S&P 500 index funds in their 401(k) and other investing accounts could be set for pain.
Nvidia and other companies benefiting from the AI boom have been a major reason the S&P 500 has climbed to record after record recently, with the latest coming last week.
