Nvidia's August 26 Earnings Call Looms as the Real Test After a Choppy Summer

Nvidia shares bounce 3% but remain 14% below highs. With mixed technicals and slowing growth, is the AI trade stabilizing or fading?

The tape around Nvidia has been anything but quiet lately, even if the share price itself has spent months going nowhere. After a brutal July that saw the entire semiconductor complex shed more than a trillion dollars in market value — its worst monthly stretch since 2002 — buyers finally stepped back in late last week. Nvidia shares closed Friday at EUR 174.36, a gain of nearly three percent in a single session, as the sector clawed its way out of the hole.

That bounce, though, masks a more complicated picture. The stock remains roughly 14 percent below its 52-week high of EUR 202.50, set on May 14, 2026. And while the Friday pop was eye-catching, the 30-day return is just 1.47 percent — a reminder that the recovery has been concentrated in a handful of sessions rather than reflecting any sustained upward momentum.

A Market Caught Between Momentum and Math

The July sell-off was driven by a simple, unsettling question: are the billions pouring into AI infrastructure actually sustainable? Investors began to doubt whether the spending on data centers and chip capacity could hold up over the long haul. For Nvidia, the company most synonymous with the AI boom, those doubts hit especially hard.

Yet the late-week rebound suggests confidence hasn't evaporated entirely. The stock's year-to-date gain of 8.78 percent is respectable, but it's a far cry from the triple-digit advances that defined earlier phases of the AI trade. This looks less like the start of a new rally and more like stabilization after a shock.

The Technical Picture: No Clear Direction

The charts tell a story of genuine indecision. Nvidia sits below its 50-day moving average of EUR 178.69 but above the 200-day average of EUR 166.45 — a classic tug-of-war between short-term caution and longer-term conviction. The relative strength index at 46.7 confirms a market that hasn't made up its mind, while annualized volatility of 36.59 percent suggests the calm surface conceals plenty of churning underneath.

Over the past year, the stock has gained 11.79 percent. That's solid by most standards, but for a company that delivered 239 percent in 2023 and 171 percent in 2024, it represents a clear deceleration. 2025's 39 percent gain continued that cooling trend. The central question: has the AI trade simply normalized, or is Nvidia losing its edge?

Why the Pause Might Be Temporary

The bear case rests on genuine growth arithmetic. Analysts project revenue growth of 219 percent over the next three fiscal years — impressive, but a marked slowdown from the roughly 700 percent cumulative growth of the prior three years. With a much larger revenue base, some deceleration was practically inevitable, and the market has arguably been pricing that in since May.

The demand side, however, remains unusually strong for a stock that's been stuck in neutral. Cloud providers continue to expand their capital expenditure budgets rather than pulling back. And China, long a source of uncertainty, is gradually shifting from headwind to tailwind.

The Bank for International Settlements is now reviewing export licenses for Nvidia's H200 chip on a case-by-case basis, following President Trump's December 8, 2025 announcement allowing shipments of the H200 and similar products to approved customers in China. That marks a meaningful loosening from the complete license halt of April 2025, which had forced Nvidia to take a multi-billion-dollar writedown on H20 inventory.

The August 26 Reckoning

Everything now points to the quarterly report for the second fiscal quarter, due August 26. That release should settle the debate over growth trajectory — at least for now. The focus will be less on the quarter just completed and more on forward guidance, particularly around Blackwell shipments and China market access.

Nvidia has weathered the recent tech rout better than most of its chip-sector peers, sitting roughly 16 percent below its May record. The analyst consensus price target of EUR 262.49 implies upside of about 51 percent from current levels — a gap wide enough to reflect genuine conviction among the sell-side.

Whether that gap closes depends heavily on what management says in August. The company's core growth engine — data center demand, rising AI infrastructure budgets, and a slowly reopening Chinese market — appears intact. The stock is simply digesting a historic multi-year run. On August 26, the market will find out whether it's ready to move again.