By Bill Peters and Britney Nguyen

Nvidia is due to report earnings on Wednesday, and 'a very broad universe of companies' is tied to the themes that the chip giant represents

Nvidia's earnings report on Wednesday afternoon will be a closely followed market event.

Nvidia was once nearly synonymous with the artificial-intelligence build-out. Now, there are a handful of other AI companies capturing investor attention as they rake in hefty profits.

But earnings results from the chip maker (NVDA), which remains at the heart of the AI boom and has a market value of around $5 trillion, are still a closely watched macro event every three months. Even amid concerns about about circular dealmaking within the AI industry and the sustainability of high data-center spending, analysts expect the company's profits to make up an ever-greater share of the S&P 500 index's SPX overall earnings this year.

In seven of the last 11 quarters, including estimates for the second quarter, Nvidia has been the biggest contributor to S&P 500 earnings growth, according to data from Seaport Research.

Nvidia is due to report quarterly results on Wednesday afternoon - and this time around, its profit contributions probably won't be index-leading. Amazon.com (AMZN) and Alphabet (GOOGL) (GOOG) have seen explosive recent earnings growth, mainly driven by paper gains related to their equity investments.

Meanwhile, Micron Technology (MU) has been seeing explosive growth on the heels of the memory-chip bonanza, and that could help push Nvidia further down the rankings. If Nvidia's second-quarter results go as Wall Street expects, the company would be the fourth-biggest contributor to earnings growth for the second quarter - its lowest rank over that 11-quarter period.

Alphabet and Amazon are currently the largest and second-largest contributors to the index's growth, respectively; Micron ranks third. But take the paper gains out, and Micron would be first, with Nvidia in second place. Micron's profits have surged as Big Tech's AI expansion gobbles up the supply of available memory chips.

But factor out the one-time investments gains from Alphabet and Amazon, and Nvidia is set to become an even bigger contributor to S&P 500 earnings performance than it has been in years past, said Joseph Abbott, chief quantitative strategist at Yardeni Research.

Nvidia's share of those earnings rose from 0.3% in 2019 to 1.7% by 2023, Abbott noted. Its share then hit 3.4% in 2024 and reached 4.9% of the index's total earnings last year. Without the one-off gains from Amazon and Alphabet, Abbott said Nvidia's share is expected to expand to 7.2% this year.

Jonathan Golub, chief equity strategist at Seaport Research, said Nvidia's results aren't a referendum just on the cloud giants behind the industry's gargantuan data-center push, but also on all the other businesses supporting the technology.

"It's companies that are providing power that goes into the data centers, and the building of the data centers, [and] the banks that lend money into the data centers, or the capital-markets companies involved in the IPOs of these businesses," Golub said. "So there is a very broad universe of companies that are tied to the theme."

Nvidia's quarterly results are significant to the broader market because the company sits at the center of the AI trade, which itself is a major driver of the market, Jacob Bourne, a tech analyst at Emarketer, told MarketWatch.

Still, there's a limit to what the chip maker's numbers can say about the sustainability of AI spending, given most of the investment is coming from hyperscalers and other AI companies, Bourne said in emailed comments. What the report can show is where spending is going and whether demand for AI infrastructure is still strong, he added.

At the same time, Nvidia's chips need to be plugged in and powered on, and the availability of power is becoming a constraint, while "data-center construction has become a political lightning rod in parts of the country," Bourne noted. Therefore, even if there's continued demand for Nvidia's products, how quickly that turns into revenue is tied to the pace of the data-center build-out, he said.

Meanwhile, Bourne acknowledged that hype around Nvidia's results has changed as investors increasingly expect an earnings beat. In his view, Nvidia needs to show investors how its growth will continue.

SpaceX's (SPCX) announcement in July that it will only use Nvidia's chips "is a significant validation of its competitive position," Bourne said. The bar remains high, however.

"Investors increasingly want evidence that these enormous infrastructure investments are moving toward sustainable economic returns," Bourne said - and Nvidia can only do so much to prove that.

What Nvidia says about its product ramp with the upcoming Rubin platform will be a focus area for investors, Matt Stucky, chief portfolio manager of equities at Northwestern Mutual, told MarketWatch.

He noted that the company's previous guidance for $1 trillion in revenue from its Blackwell and Rubin platforms doesn't yet include the SpaceX deal and its standalone Vera central processing units, which the company said opens it up to a $200 billion total addressable market.

-Bill Peters -Britney Nguyen

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