New York, April 24, 2026, 12:05 PM EDT
- Nvidia’s next set of results lands after the bell on May 20, turning into a barometer for whether demand for AI chips continues to outpace rising competition.
- Friday saw shares hovering close to their all-time highs, with the chip rally expanding past Nvidia.
- Eyes are on Vera Rubin, Nvidia’s upcoming AI platform, as investors look for clues that major cloud players will keep their wallets open through 2027.
Nvidia shares rebounded Friday, edging close to their all-time highs as investors refocused on the AI chip giant’s valuation prospects ahead of next month’s earnings.
Timing played a role here. Chip stocks surged after Intel posted an outlook that beat forecasts—clear evidence investors aren’t shying away from big bets on the artificial intelligence wave. According to Reuters, the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index touched a record high and was heading for its 18th consecutive daily gain.
Nvidia shares climbed to $209.07 late Friday morning, rising roughly 4.7% for the session and pushing the company’s market cap past $5 trillion. That surge left the stock just shy of its previous record close, fueling fresh arguments over whether it can break higher or will remain stuck around $200.
Nvidia’s headline numbers remain tough to pick apart. For its fiscal fourth quarter, revenue clocked in at $68.1 billion—up a hefty 73% from last year. Data center revenue? That part jumped 75% to $62.3 billion. Looking ahead, Nvidia expects first-quarter revenue to land around $78 billion, give or take 2%. Notably, that outlook excludes any data center compute sales from China. The company’s GPUs—those same chips powering much of today’s AI wave—continue to anchor its results.
Nvidia will deliver its fiscal first-quarter numbers after the bell on May 20, marking the next big event for the stock. A Friday piece by The Motley Fool noted Nvidia’s strong momentum but flagged intensifying competition from custom AI chips as a growing concern.
Vera Rubin is the headline act here—Nvidia’s next AI computing platform. The company says products built on Rubin should hit the market through partners in the back half of 2026, with the system targeting as much as a 10x reduction in AI inference costs compared with Blackwell. “Rubin arrives at exactly the right moment,” CEO Jensen Huang said back in January. NVIDIA Newsroom
That’s got investors tuned in for 2027 demand clues, not just the usual clean quarterly numbers. “We are looking for 2027 datapoints to move the needle, which could come from Agentic AI,” wrote BNP Paribas analyst David O’Connor, cited by Barron’s. For Nvidia, he pointed to ramp-up details and demand signals around Vera Rubin as key. Barron’s
Competition here isn’t straightforward. Google rolled out its eighth-gen tensor processing units this week—TPUs, in Google’s language—dividing them into TPU 8t for model training and TPU 8i for inference. The company said to expect the hardware later this year. But Google also highlighted A5X bare-metal instances running Nvidia Vera Rubin NVL72, underscoring its double role: designing its own silicon while remaining a significant Nvidia partner.
Broadcom isn’t letting up. CEO Hock Tan pointed to a 106% jump in fiscal first-quarter AI revenue, now at $8.4 billion. The company’s seeing strong appetite for its custom AI accelerators and AI networking products, and projects $10.7 billion in AI semiconductor revenue for the second quarter.
Intel threw a new twist into the mix on Friday. A spike in demand for CPUs handling AI inference sent Intel shares surging. Reuters pointed out that AMD and Arm saw an uptick, too, as investors started recalibrating expectations about just how much AI work will end up outside Nvidia’s GPUs. “The AI build-out race is still on,” said Angelo Kourkafas, senior global investment strategist at Edward Jones. Reuters
Still, Nvidia’s road to a $300 stock isn’t a straight shot. The company’s own guidance already shows the impact of China export restrictions. Google and Broadcom, both building custom chips, could undercut Nvidia on pricing for certain workloads. If the Rubin rollout gets pushed back, there’s even less incentive for investors to raise their 2027 targets. Shares sit near $209 right now. Hitting $300 would take a roughly 43% jump.
Nvidia gets another shot—at least for now—to show its story isn’t topping out. May’s call can’t just deliver blowout revenue. Investors are looking for bookings, margin details, and signs Vera Rubin will keep Nvidia locked in as the heart of the next AI spend-up.
