Nvidia Q4 Results Preview: Will DeepSeek impact the AI bellweather’s earnings report? Here’s what Wall Street expects | Stock Market News

Nvidia Q4 Results Preview: Nvidia is all set to announce its fourth-quarter earnings on Wednesday, February 26, post-US-market hours. Silicon Valley’s artificial intelligence (AI) poster child is a Wall Street heavyweight stock, part of the Magnificent Seven group, and has been a major reason for the S&P 500’s recent surge to record highs, with the latest coming last week.

Wall Street expects Nvidia to report fourth-quarter adjusted earnings of 85 cents per share on revenue of $38.08 billion. The AI chip manufacturing giant’s net income is expected to reach $19.58 billion. Investors will focus on the sales and revenue figures of Nvidia’s pricey AI chips after recent low-cost AI models from China’s DeepSeek rattled Silicon Valley’s AI sector.

The AI chip major has grown into the second-largest company on Wall Street, which means the stock’s movement carries more weight on the S&P 500 and other indexes than every company except Apple. According to US market data, the tech giant, based in Santa Clara, California, is now worth over $3 trillion. Nvidia’s earnings scorecard impacts the entire US stock market.

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Nvidia Q4 Results: How does the AI-chip giant impact Wall Street?

Nvidia and other companies benefiting from the AI boom have been major reasons the S&P 500 has climbed to record after record recently, with the latest coming last week. The profit surge has helped propel indices despite worries about stubbornly high inflation and possible pain coming for the US economy from tariffs and other policies of US President Donald Trump.

Nvidia alone accounted for more than a fifth of all of the S&P 500 index’s total return last year. None of the other 499 companies in the index came close. Notably, for the past two years, the elite Magnificent Seven Group—Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Tesla, Nvidia, and Meta—have dominated the markets, driving much of the gains in the S&P 500 index.

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The titans surged over 160 per cent between 2023-2024, creating a market increasingly reliant on just a handful of stocks. “But in 2025, that momentum has stalled. While the S&P 500 has edged up four per cent this year, with the Magnificent Seven barely moving, adding just per cent—with significant losses in Tesla, Microsoft, and Alphabet,” said Nigel Green, CEO of deVere Group.

The fourth-quarter earnings will be the company’s first report since Chinese company DeepSeek boasted it had developed a large language model that could compete with ChatGPT and other US rivals. However, DeepSeek was more cost-effective in using Nvidia chips to train the system on troves of data.

The frenzy over DeepSeek temporarily vanished $595 billion in Nvidia’s wealth. However, the company commended DeepSeek’s work as “an excellent AI advancement” that leveraged “widely available models and compute that is fully export control compliant.” Nvidia had carved out an early lead in the AI applications race, partly because of founder and chief executive officer Jensen Huang’s huge bet on the chip technology used to fuel the industry. 

According to the Associated Press, the tech giant is no stranger to big bets. In 1999, Nvidia’s invention of the graphics processor unit, or GPU, helped spark the growth of the PC gaming market and redefined computer graphics.

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On Tuesday, Nvidia’s share price dropped two per cent on Wall Street ahead of the chipmaker’s much-anticipated quarterly earnings report, which is expected after the bell on Wednesday. This pulled the Philadelphia SE Semiconductor index down 2.1 per cent. The S&P 500 and the Nasdaq were on track to notch their fourth consecutive sessions in the red, while the Dow was higher.

With inputs from the Associated Press, Reuters

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