The air around the tech market has become strangely heavy – it calmed down before a change in the weather – and everyone seems to be waiting for Nvidia to break it. Over the past two weeks, stocks have tumbled, nerves have frayed, and the AI boom, which once seemed invincible, suddenly looks vulnerable. Nvidia’s results released Wednesday, for the third quarter of its 2026 fiscal year, have become the moment when investors are dealing like a storm: either the skies open up again, or the forecasts get much darker.
It’s a strange position for a company to be in, especially when it releases numbers on a schedule as routine as the earnings calendar. But Nvidia hasn’t been a normal company for very long. It has become the market bellwether for all of AI development – a proxy for hyperscaler investments, sovereign spending, corporate ambition and investor psychology. If the AI cycle is the story of the moment, Nvidia is the protagonist that investors keep returning to, eager to see if the story continues to move forward.
This tension colors everything until Wednesday. Wall Street is expecting another impressive quarter: According to Zacks, that means revenue of about $54.6 billion, EPS of about $1.24, with overall revenue still up in the mid-50% range year over year, driven largely by data centers. Nvidia guided this quarter to around $54 billion a few months ago, excluding any contribution from Chinese H20 chips, and no one seriously floated the idea that Nvidia would miss out. Instead, the Street is testing the limits of its own imagination – wondering whether numbers this big can stay this high, and what it means if they can’t.
What the street is waiting for
If the consensus seems overblown, the analyst models surrounding it seem almost surreal.
Oppenheimer just raised its price target to $265 (from $225) and outlined a $55 billion quarter — the kind of transition trajectory that most companies would present as a decade-long ambition. Their note focuses on the driving factors: the move to GB300 Ultra, growing demand for the NVL72 system at rack scale, and what they describe as the “insatiable appetite for AI” among hyperscalers. They also recalled CEO Jensen Huang’s projection that Blackwell and Rubin could generate $500 billion in combined revenue by the end of 2026, serving a $4 trillion addressable market.
Wells Fargo hit that target of $265 (up from $220), but went further in the long-term calculation. They’re now modeling $209 billion in revenue for FY26, $301 billion for FY27, and almost $383 billion for FY28 — growth curves that would have been considered fanciful a year ago. Their logic is that hyperscalers haven’t slowed down, and until they do, Nvidia’s numbers remain too low.
Citi took a different angle, focusing on the architecture of capital spending. They now expect global spending on AI infrastructure to exceed $2.8 trillion by 2029, with hyperscalers pumping nearly $490 billion in AI investments by the end of 2026. They say Nvidia’s full-year EPS has 2-8% upside potential built into the cycle, and none of this requires a heroic assumption.
And then there’s Gene Munster, whose optimism comes with its own gravitational pull. He says Street estimates for 2026 remain “too conservative,” noting that Blackwell and Rubin’s revenues could easily exceed those of Wall Street models by 10%, especially with the intervention of sovereign AI programs.
Investors won’t be showing up next Wednesday to see if Nvidia can deliver a blockbuster quarter. Wall Street is already taking inspiration from it. They tune in to see if the tone of the call – the nuance, the calibration, the emphasized phrases – matches the boldness of these predictions. Nvidia has made a habit of confirming its own mythology. This quarter has the burden of proving that mythology can survive a market wobble.
Yet the mood is different today than it was just a month ago. The Nasdaq fell, AI stocks lost billions, and analysts shifted from open optimism to something closer to cautious confidence. The street wants a vision, but it also wants to be reassured. And Nvidia finds itself in the middle of all this contradiction: the company should bring the market back to conviction, even if the market has started to murmur its doubts. That means Nvidia is being counted on to post another monster quarter and tell a story of a world where this momentum can continue.
The figures that could move the title
The problem with such a strong quarter is that the overall results almost don’t matter. Nvidia can cross the $55 billion mark and still make investors nervous if the comment hints at friction. And the friction is real.
Data center operators have started talking openly about power caps, not only in Asia or Europe, but also in major regions of the United States where network expansion cannot keep pace with demand. Bringing a gigawatt online is an infrastructure project, not an engineering project. Recent results suggest that Big Tech has become a Big Power. Hyperscalers have already started staggering deployments to match availability. Goldman Sachs estimates that global data center energy demand could increase by about 50% by 2027 and up to 165% by the end of the decade, largely driven by AI workloads. McKinsey, looking specifically at AI-ready capacity, pegs the growth rate at around 33% per year through 2030.
This gap between how quickly chips can be shipped and how slowly gigawatts come online is already reflected in profits. Nvidia doesn’t control this dynamic, but it lives in the resulting revenue cadence.
In the world of Nvidia, the questions are more specific. Blackwell is expected to be the backbone of the next stage of growth, and the GB300 platform remains the centerpiece of almost every bullish model in the market. Stifel’s Ruben Roy has tried to stay focused on the order book – his supply chain checks still indicate an increase in GB300 orders through the end of the year “even as sustained GB200 demand continues” – but investors want to know from Nvidia whether “up” still means acceleration or just maintaining a very high level.
China stands slightly aloof from these operational matters, but adds its own volatility to the story. Washington briefly reopened the door to H20 exports in September, then turned around and reportedly moved to block sales of the B30A — Nvidia’s Blackwell-based, export-compatible chip designed specifically for China — before it really gained momentum. Beijing, meanwhile, has asked state-funded data centers to completely stop using foreign AI chips and remove them from new projects that are less than 30% complete.
When Nvidia guided this quarter toward that $54 billion in revenue, it asked investors to consider any Chinese sales of the H20 as a benefit to that guidance. And even though Nvidia wants to find its way back into the Chinese market, the company’s business in the country right now, Huang said, has fallen to zero. Trump said the company couldn’t sell its best AI chips to Beijing. For The Street, this means that China functions less as a catalyst for growth and more as a stress test. Any signal that demand is stabilizing – or that the B30A is gaining ground without causing new regulatory issues – will be read as a free option.
And all of these threads point back to the question that drives every AI debate on Wall Street: Will hyperscalers continue to spend at vertical velocity? Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Alphabet and Oracle have transformed AI infrastructure into the largest investment wave in modern business history, spending colossal sums – hundreds and hundreds of billions – without slowing down. There have been a few hiccups, but the street still largely believes in this wave. What he expects from Nvidia is confirmation that the water level is not dropping.
Nvidia won’t offer investment forecasts, but the way it talks about customer demand, developments and future capabilities will tell analysts whether their long-term models are still too conservative or suddenly too bold.
This is why Wednesday seems heavier than it should. Nvidia’s earnings call will serve dual roles: a financial update and a sentiment reset – and the market is already treating it that way. A clean quarter will be treated as a time out. A cautious guide – even a nuanced one – could be seen as the first signal that the supercycle is changing pace. Investors don’t want perfection; they need continuity – proof that the AI cycle always has altitude, that the clouds above are temporary, that the weather is changing in their favor.
Nvidia’s results this week won’t settle the AI debate. But they will reset the atmosphere around her. This is the company that has shaped market psychology over the past two years more than any other. Nvidia’s task next week on Wednesday will be to show that the story continues to expand – not just in terms of the numbers, but also in the world those numbers depict.
📬 Sign up for the daily briefing
