#英伟达财报周 Nvidia’s earnings “curse” strikes again! With expectations fully priced in, what kind of report tonight can break the downtrend?

At around 4:00 a.m. Beijing time on August 27, AI leader Nvidia (NVDA) is set to unveil its fiscal 2027 second-quarter earnings report.
But the question facing the chip giant may not be “Can results beat expectations?” but a trickier one: How much of a beat will satisfy Wall Street?
Over the past few years, Nvidia has surged ahead, with revenue and earnings repeatedly reshaping market perceptions. But the other side of high growth is that investor expectations have also continued to rise. The “earnings beat” that once drove the stock higher may now have become “business as usual” in the market’s eyes. As a result, Nvidia appears to be caught in an increasingly obvious earnings curse.

A review of four consecutive quarters of declines the next day
A notable pattern has repeatedly emerged over the past four quarterly reports: no matter how impressive the earnings figures, Nvidia’s stock has closed lower on the next trading day after the report for four consecutive quarters.
More notably, this pattern of “earnings beating expectations while the stock fails to respond” did not begin only recently.
Bespoke Investment Group calls simultaneously beating earnings expectations, beating revenue expectations, and raising guidance a “Triple Play.”
Over the past 20 quarters, Nvidia achieved this 14 times; yet after the most recent three consecutive “Triple Plays,” the stock still declined in subsequent trading. The logic behind this is not complicated: the market has already grown accustomed to Nvidia’s beats. When a company’s “surprise” is repeated constantly, the surprise itself gradually gets priced into the stock in advance.
Some institutional analysts have pointed out that Nvidia has consistently delivered results above market expectations over the past few years, leading investors to develop a psychological inertia—the market often does not look only at the guidance provided by the company, but assumes Nvidia will ultimately do even better.
In other words, a normal “beat” is no longer enough to satisfy the market. What truly determines the stock price may be whether Nvidia can once again provide next-quarter guidance far above expectations.
Market expectations are too high, making third-quarter guidance the decisive factorFactSet’s latest compilation shows that Wall Street currently expects Nvidia’s adjusted second-quarter earnings per share to be approximately $2.09, with quarterly revenue of about $92.3 billion.
By comparison, the midpoint of Nvidia’s own second-quarter revenue guidance issued last quarter was $91 billion. In other words, before the earnings report is officially released, the market has effectively already assumed that Nvidia will once again exceed its own guidance. The real focus is rapidly shifting to the third quarter. FactSet’s current consensus has already risen to approximately $104.2 billion in third-quarter revenue.
This means that even if Nvidia provides quarterly revenue guidance above $100 billion, it may still be insufficient to surprise the market. Some analysts have offered two more intuitive benchmarks: $105 billion could bring some surprise, while $110 billion might be viewed by the market as very strong guidance.
It is particularly worth noting that $105 billion is already quite close to the current market consensus of approximately $104.2 billion. This also shows that the “room for surprise” Wall Street is leaving Nvidia is becoming increasingly limited.

Will Nvidia further “share the wealth”?
Besides revenue and earnings guidance, this earnings report also has another important variable that is easy to overlook: shareholder returns. As Nvidia generates increasingly massive free cash flow, the market has begun to focus on one question: Beyond continued investment in AI infrastructure, research and development, and industry investments, how much of this money will ultimately return to shareholders?
When it announced its first-quarter results in May this year, Nvidia had already announced an additional $80 billion stock buyback authorization and raised its quarterly cash dividend from $0.01 to $0.25 per share.
Management had previously said it planned to return approximately 50% of free cash flow to shareholders this year; Jensen Huang subsequently said the company planned to return 50% or more of its free cash flow to shareholders this year, next year, and over the longer term. Stock buybacks and dividends have therefore become important indicators for the market to assess Nvidia’s capital allocation strategy.
For a technology giant that already has enormous cash flow and ranks among the world’s largest companies by market capitalization, further expanding the scale of stock buybacks or dividends could become another market focus alongside growth. However, rather than simply interpreting this as “buybacks will inevitably drive the stock price higher,” the more accurate description is that Wall Street is watching whether Nvidia can find a new balance between high-intensity AI investment and shareholder returns.

Can Rubin take over the baton?
Another major focus of the market is whether the commercialization of Nvidia’s next-generation AI platform, Vera Rubin, will materialize in this earnings report. But compared with a few months ago, Rubin is no longer at the stage of “whether it has customers.”
Nvidia has announced that Rubin has entered full-scale production and plans for partners to launch related products successively in the second half of 2026. Major cloud service providers including AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, as well as AI cloud providers such as CoreWeave, Lambda, Nebius, and Nscale, have all been included on the list of initial customers deploying Vera Rubin.
Therefore, what the market truly cares about now is no longer “Does Rubin have buyers?” but “How quickly can Rubin be converted into revenue?” Investors will next need to watch Rubin’s actual shipment pace, cloud providers’ capital expenditure intensity, customer deployment speed, and whether supply-chain or margin pressures emerge during the transition from Blackwell to Rubin.
If these indicators remain strong, Rubin could become an important growth driver for Nvidia’s next phase. But simply announcing stronger chip performance may no longer be enough to serve as a “shot in the arm” for the stock.

Nvidia’s earnings report becomes a “stress test” for the AI rally
The importance of this earnings report extends far beyond Nvidia itself. Over the past few years, global technology giants have continued to increase AI capital expenditure, with a large portion of that money ultimately flowing into GPUs, networking equipment, servers, and data center infrastructure.
Nvidia sits at the core of this industrial chain. Therefore, what the market truly wants to find in this earnings report are several broader answers:
(1) Is demand for AI computing power still accelerating?
(2) How long can major cloud providers sustain their capital expenditure? (3) Can Blackwell and Rubin continue to support Nvidia’s rapid growth?
(4) In the face of competition from custom ASICs, AMD, and other AI chips, can Nvidia continue to maintain its leading advantage?
This is why a single quarterly earnings report from Nvidia can often affect the entire semiconductor sector and even influence the market’s risk appetite for AI trades.
What truly needs to be watched tonight is not “the beat,” but “the magnitude of the beat.” Therefore, the biggest suspense surrounding Nvidia’s earnings report this time may no longer be “Will it beat expectations?” but “How much will it need to beat them to exceed Wall Street’s already fully priced-in expectations?”

At present, the market may focus on four key areas:
First, whether second-quarter revenue can significantly exceed the market expectation of approximately $92.3 billion;
Second, whether third-quarter revenue guidance can exceed the market consensus of approximately $104.2 billion and even approach $105 billion–$110 billion;
Third, whether shipments and demand for Blackwell and Rubin can continue to demonstrate that AI infrastructure investment remains strong;
Fourth, whether Nvidia will provide further signals of expanding shareholder returns such as stock buybacks and dividends.
According to Nvidia’s official schedule, the company is expected to announce its second-quarter results at approximately 4:20 a.m. Beijing time on August 27 and hold its earnings conference call at 5:00 a.m.
When “beating expectations” has already become the market’s default answer, Nvidia’s real test tonight is whether it can once again deliver an answer beyond the market’s imagination. This report may also become an important reference for gauging the temperature of the AI rally in its next phase.$NVDA ‌