Shares of Nvidia (NVDA) slipped Monday as investors paused following the stock’s recent rally and turned their attention to the chipmaker’s earnings report later this week.
The stock fell roughly 1.5% to around $222.97 in morning trading after dropping 4.4% on Friday, interrupting a powerful multi-session advance that had pushed shares to record highs.
The broader market also weakened following a strong week for equities, with investors continuing to monitor oil prices, Treasury yields, and geopolitical tensions in the Middle East.
The S&P 500 declined 0.2%, while the Nasdaq Composite fell 0.5%.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average added 91 points.
Earnings now the key catalyst
Nvidia’s earnings report on Wednesday has become the next major catalyst for both the company and the broader artificial intelligence trade.
Wall Street remains heavily focused on whether Nvidia can maintain its dominance in AI processors as competition expands across the industry.
A growing portion of investor attention has shifted toward inference, which many companies increasingly view as the next major battleground in AI infrastructure.
Some rivals, including Cerebras Systems, are attempting to challenge Nvidia by promoting alternative architectures optimized for inference workloads.
At the same time, enthusiasm around central processing units, or CPUs, has increased as companies look for lower-cost ways to run AI applications.
KeyBanc analyst John Vinh expects Nvidia to further strengthen its position by unveiling stand-alone CPU server racks during the upcoming Computex conference in Taiwan in early June.
Wall Street expects another beat-and-raise quarter
Analysts broadly expect Nvidia to once again deliver results above expectations.
Morgan Stanley analyst Joseph Moore said he expects Nvidia to follow its familiar “beat-and-raise” pattern.
Moore projects the company could exceed revenue expectations by roughly $3 billion and guide future sales approximately $4 billion above current consensus forecasts.
Morgan Stanley recently raised its April-quarter revenue estimate for Nvidia from $78.25 billion to $79.26 billion and lifted earnings-per-share estimates from $1.69 to $1.72.
The bank also significantly increased longer-term projections.
Its fiscal 2028 revenue estimate jumped from roughly $452 billion to nearly $587 billion, while earnings-per-share forecasts rose from $10.14 to $13.11.
According to Visible Alpha consensus estimates, Nvidia is expected to report approximately $78.5 billion in fiscal first-quarter 2026 revenue.
The company’s data-center business remains the primary growth engine, with consensus forecasts projecting around $72.8 billion in quarterly data-center revenue.
That figure has surged from estimates near $53.8 billion less than a year ago, highlighting the extraordinary pace of AI infrastructure demand.
AI spending boom still supports Nvidia
Despite increasing competition and short-term volatility, Nvidia remains the central beneficiary of the global AI infrastructure buildout.
Major technology companies, including Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, and Alphabet, have all sharply increased capital expenditure forecasts tied to artificial intelligence.
That wave of spending continues to reinforce expectations that Nvidia’s GPUs will remain the backbone of AI training and inference systems globally.
Investors will now closely watch Nvidia’s guidance around production capacity, gross margins, inference demand, and potential opportunities in China.
The China outlook remains especially important after repeated US export restrictions limited Nvidia’s ability to sell its most advanced chips into the market.
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