The Stock Market Wants an Earnings Blowout From Nvidia. It Could Make Things Worse.

Nvidia hotly anticipated fourth-quarter earnings, slated for after the close of trading Thursday, is widely expected to jolt markets from their recent poor run and power stocks into a new round of gains on the tailwind of the artificial-intelligence boom. The undisputed leaders of the AI race, with a hammerlock on its most important component, the Blackwell processor, contracts with the biggest hyperscalers, and investments in both OpenAI and Anthropic, Nvidia sits at the epicenter of the world’s hottest technology and the markets biggest growth engine. At present, two of the biggest concerns weighing on investors are inexorably tied to the AI trade, and both are likely to be intensified by a blowout earnings report from Nvidia.