Nvidia's Blackwell Ultra Shoves Throughput to 50x Levels as $5.5 Trillion Market Cap Sets Earnings Stage

Nvidia's Blackwell Ultra platform boosts throughput 50x and slashes AI token costs 35x, driving stock to €192.90. Analysts expect 78% revenue growth, but margin pressures test faith ahead of May 20 earnings.

The technical numbers are staggering. Nvidia's Blackwell Ultra platform delivers up to 50 times more throughput per megawatt than its Hopper predecessor, with the cost per token for autonomous AI agents slashed by a factor of 35. Those figures, released midweek, sent the stock to a fresh all-time high of €192.90 on the German market and briefly pushed the company's market capitalisation above $5.5 trillion.

But the rally is already colliding with expectations that are themselves stratospheric. On May 20, Nvidia will report fiscal first-quarter results for the period ended April 26. The company has guided for revenue of roughly $78 billion, give or take 2%. Analysts are pencilling in earnings per share of $1.77 and a year-on-year sales gain of 78%. At the prediction market Polymarket, the implied probability of a beat stands at around 90%.

The upside scenario draws much of its force from the sheer size of the addressable market for AI data-centre systems. Bank of America has raised its target for that market in 2030 to $1.7 trillion, up from a prior estimate of $1.4 trillion. The bank's price target for Nvidia shares now sits at $320, lifted from $300, with a buy rating intact. Wells Fargo followed suit on May 12, boosting its target to $315 from $265, driven by a new model that ties data-centre revenue more tightly to physical capacity. By fiscal 2029, the bank forecasts AI infrastructure will exceed 25 gigawatts, putting real-world buildout at the centre of valuation.

Cloud hyperscalers are providing the concrete underpinning. Investment plans for the five biggest operators have been revised sharply higher — from an initial assumption of 19% growth to over 60% now. Microsoft, Oracle and CoreWeave are already integrating Blackwell Ultra systems to secure low latency for interactive assistants. Morgan Stanley expects the overall market to expand nearly 80% this year to $805 billion, followed by another 39% in 2025.

Yet the same forces that are driving the top line are also beginning to squeeze margins. Bank of America forecasts a gradual decline in gross margin of 30 to 50 basis points annually, citing the high cost of high-bandwidth memory, intensifying competition from AMD and the rise of custom chips built by major cloud providers. The stock currently trades at roughly 21 times estimated 2027 earnings, a discount to some other large-cap tech names, but the bar for the May 20 report is high.

A second-half catalyst calendar could provide further ammunition. The Computex conference in June, a potential new CPU launch and the expected arrival of the Vera Rubin architecture — promising yet another massive leap — all lie ahead. For now, Nvidia's technical lead has never looked wider, but the earnings print on May 20 will test whether the market's faith in that lead can withstand the law of large numbers.