Nvidia’s Earnings Week: Blackwell Ultra’s 50x Leap Raises the Bar for a Record Run

Nvidia’s Blackwell Ultra delivers 50x throughput gain; stock at record. Earnings on May 20 face high bar despite $2B beat expectations, with caution from prior post-earnings drops.

The numbers that have Nvidia in the spotlight this week are not just the financial ones due on May 20. The chipmaker’s Blackwell Ultra platform, detailed on Wednesday, delivers up to 50 times more throughput per megawatt than the Hopper generation it replaces. For autonomous AI agents, the cost per token has fallen by a factor of 35. Those metrics are landing in a market that has already pushed the stock to a fresh 52-week high, with the euro-denominated share closing at €192.90—a gain of nearly 59% over the past year.

Monday saw the shares climb another 1.98% to €196.72, extending the 30-day rally to 19.25%. That surge briefly lifted Nvidia’s market capitalisation above $5.5 trillion, cementing its position as the second-largest asset by market cap at $5.47 trillion. Yet the valuation remains modest relative to the growth trajectory: the stock trades at 21 times estimated 2027 earnings, a discount to several other mega-cap tech names.

What fuels this optimism is the tangible build-out of AI infrastructure. Microsoft, Oracle and CoreWeave are already integrating Blackwell Ultra into their data centres, seeking lower latency for interactive assistants. The broader cloud capex cycle shows no signs of slowing: Alphabet, Amazon, Meta Platforms and Microsoft together plan to spend more than $700 billion in 2026, with Meta, Alphabet and Microsoft having recently raised their targets. For Nvidia, more data centres mean more accelerator chips, networking gear and supporting hardware.

The report due after the US market close on May 20 will test whether the stock can meet the sky-high expectations. Wall Street’s consensus calls for $78.8 billion in revenue and earnings of $1.77 per share. Management had guided toward roughly $78 billion, so the official bar is already near analyst forecasts. But a simple beat may not be enough: traders increasingly expect revenue growth of at least 80% year-over-year, and the second-quarter outlook around $86.6 billion is seen as a critical threshold.

Goldman Sachs analyst James Schneider projects a revenue beat of about $2 billion above consensus. Betting markets echo that confidence—Polymarket puts the probability of an outperformance at roughly 90%. Yet the recent pattern of post-earnings moves offers a cautionary note. Despite beating estimates each of the last three quarters, the stock declined the following trading day. In February, revenue of $68.1 billion (data centre alone $62.3 billion, up 75%) topped expectations by $2.5 billion, yet the shares fell 5.46%.

The current rally leaves little room for disappointment, and management has flagged a wild card. The first-quarter forecast excludes data-centre compute revenue from China, where the market was pegged at around $50 billion by Jensen Huang, albeit with no clear timeline for a return. Separately, Nvidia is shoring up its supply chain: it announced a multi-year partnership with Corning for optical connectivity in the US, with plans to decuple relevant manufacturing and boost fibre-optic production by more than 50%. Three new plants in North Carolina and Texas are expected to create over 3,000 jobs, and Nvidia has the right to invest up to $3.2 billion in Corning.

All eyes now turn to the May 20 call. The first-quarter results are almost a given; the real signal will come from the second-quarter outlook and any commentary on the pace of cloud capex. With the stock at record levels, the market’s tolerance for even a minor miss is razor-thin. And later this year, the Vera Rubin architecture promises another leap, keeping the pipeline—and the pressure—alive.