The S&P 500 Is at a Record. Ten Stocks Are Doing Most of the Work.

There is a familiar pattern to NVIDIA earnings: the company beats, the guidance exceeds consensus, and the stock does something unrelated to both. That is what happens when expectations are set by the options market rather than by the sell side.

Ahead of the 26 August report, consensus sits at roughly $1.32 in earnings per share on data-centre revenue that would again represent the overwhelming majority of the group total. Fifty-four of the sixty-two analysts covering the stock rate it a buy, with an average target around $205 against a share price near $178.

The three numbers that matter

First, next-quarter data-centre guidance. This is the line that has moved the stock in each of the last four reports, because it is the market's best available proxy for hyperscaler capital expenditure two quarters out.

Second, gross margin. Custom accelerators designed by cloud providers and built by competing suppliers are aimed squarely at NVIDIA's highest-margin inference workloads. Margin compression, if it arrives, will show up before volume does.

Third, supply commentary. Advanced packaging capacity has been the binding constraint on shipments for two years. Any indication that the constraint has eased changes the revenue trajectory more than any product announcement.

What the bears are actually arguing

The credible bear case is not that AI demand disappears. It is that the buyer base is small, that its spending is discretionary at the margin, and that a single large customer trimming a build-out schedule removes several billion dollars of quarterly revenue with no replacement demand behind it. Concentration risk on the customer side mirrors the index concentration on the market side.