Nvidia's Earnings Day Arrives With a $105 Billion Question Hanging Over the Stock

Nvidia's Q2 2027 results face scrutiny as its $105B OpenAI financing and $500B AI infrastructure commitments raise balance-sheet risk concerns.

When Nvidia reports fiscal second-quarter 2027 results after Friday's closing bell, the headline numbers will be closely watched — analysts expect earnings of $2.09 per share on revenue of roughly $91.96 billion. But the more consequential test may be whether the company can convince investors that its rapidly expanding role as financier of the AI buildout isn't quietly becoming a liability.

The stock has been stuck in a consolidation phase, trading at €186.32 and sitting about 8% below its May peak of €202.50. The market's mood has swung between enthusiasm over Nvidia's infrastructure ambitions and wariness about what those ambitions mean for the balance sheet. On a weekly basis, the shares have slipped 4.2%, even as they hold roughly 3% above the 50-day moving average — a sign that the uptrend remains technically intact, if hardly exuberant.

From chipmaker to backstop

The crux of the matter is a series of financing commitments that have fundamentally altered how Nvidia does business. Just over two weeks ago, the company unveiled partnerships with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR aimed at mobilizing more than $500 billion in third-party capital for AI infrastructure. Days later came the blockbuster: a commitment of up to $105 billion for OpenAI's massive data center project in Ohio, delivered through a credit facility initially covering 4.25 gigawatts of computing capacity, with an option for an additional 3.75 gigawatts. The facilities are slated to come online gradually starting in 2028.

Nvidia is not merely writing checks. The company is investing $1.5 billion in SB Energy, a SoftBank subsidiary, to support the buildout of the PORTS-Pike technology campus, where Nvidia serves as exclusive compute provider and OpenAI is slated to be the anchor tenant under a 20-year agreement. The structure includes a residual value guarantee capped at $105 billion — a mechanism that ties future capital and risk to Nvidia's books, even if it only triggers under certain conditions.

Elon Musk cast doubt on the project's timeline Tuesday, posting on X that it would take "much longer to come online than the people involved think." The criticism cuts to a deeper concern: by becoming a financier of data center construction, Nvidia has shifted its risk profile from pure sales exposure to construction and execution risk that sits largely outside its control.

A web of commitments

The Ohio deal is part of a broader pattern. Nvidia recently announced a long-term partnership with Ilya Sutskever's startup Safe Superintelligence, accompanied by a $5 billion investment. Its equity portfolio tells a similar story — the SpaceX stake acquired through an investment in xAI was worth roughly $21 billion at the end of the second quarter, making it the second-largest position behind the Intel holding, which had fallen to about $22 billion from $30 billion at the start of the quarter.

Credit rating agencies have so far taken a measured view. S&P Global Ratings affirmed its "AA" issuer rating with a stable outlook on August 18, characterizing the impact of the new residual value guarantees on credit metrics as moderate. Moody's, meanwhile, confirmed its "Aa1" rating with a positive outlook in the wake of the financing announcements. Whether those assessments hold up after the earnings report — and as the number of such commitments grows — could matter as much for the stock's medium-term valuation as the revenue figure itself.

The bull and bear cases

The optimistic scenario is straightforward: if Nvidia beats the roughly $92 billion revenue expectation and delivers guidance confirming the ramp of Blackwell Ultra chips and the CPU business, it would bolster the argument that the infrastructure bets rest on genuine demand rather than financial engineering. A functioning financing network with partners like BlackRock and Blackstone would strengthen the narrative that Nvidia is structurally underwriting industry-wide AI investment, not just supplying it. That could help the stock close the gap to its previous high.

The bear case is less about the top line than about balance-sheet complexity. The $105 billion capped residual value guarantee and similar structures tie Nvidia's fortunes to the economic success of data centers whose utilization depends on third-party AI demand. Should that demand disappoint, the risk would fall not only on partners but on Nvidia itself.

There are also legal headwinds. In mid-August, a shareholder lawsuit was filed against Nvidia's board of directors, alleging the board knowingly allowed AI models to be trained on pirated material and biometric data without consent. The case remains unresolved — it is a complaint, not a judgment — but it adds another layer of uncertainty. Sentiment around supply chains for Nvidia chips to China has also been dented by the Super Micro Computer situation, even though an internal investigation there cleared current management. The stock's 36% annualized volatility reflects all of these crosscurrents.

What comes next

The immediate catalyst is tonight's earnings release, followed by how rating agencies and market observers interpret the true balance-sheet weight of the infrastructure commitments. Nvidia's own guidance pointed to revenue of around $91 billion for the quarter that ended in late July.

The company has other shareholder-return levers in place — a new dividend of 25 cents per share and an $80 billion buyback program approved in May — but those do little to address the central question. Since its September low, the stock has gained 33%, and the medium-term uptrend could continue as long as Nvidia meets growth expectations and agencies keep treating the financing structures as manageable. Should perceptions shift — if the residual value guarantees come to be seen as a material balance-sheet burden, or if the shareholder lawsuit erodes confidence in management — a repricing of the risk premium could follow.

The deeper question is whether Nvidia's move to underwrite the entire AI value chain is a masterstroke or an increasingly tangled concentration of risk. The answer won't come from tonight's numbers alone, but from whether the financed data centers actually come online on time and turn a profit.