“Pretty much everything,” he said Yahoo Finance on Tuesday.

Even smaller companies in the enterprise software business that are only marginally relevant to the AI ​​gold rush – such as ServiceNow, SAP or Adobe – are, in his view, ahead, whether they perish or survive: “The trend will sweep the entire technology market along, whether up or down.”

The options market is forecasting that its gains could trigger a 10% swing in Nvidia alone, the biggest in three years, according to data from analytics firm ORATS, which was compiled by ReutersThat’s equivalent to around $300 billion, or the entire value of Coca-Cola, Bank of America, or Netflix – companies that are among the 35 largest in the world in terms of market capitalization.

“It’s the most important stock in the world right now,” Eric Jackson of EMJ Capital admitted last week.

In other words, it’s not just sell-side bulls like Dan Ives of Wedbush Securities who are portraying today’s results as a defining moment for the entire technology sector.

One reason there is so much at stake is the extreme pendulum swing into greed and fear that we saw earlier this month. By far the worst day for stocks since 2022 was followed by by far the best Day for stocks since 2022 in the period from less than a week.

The pioneer of this development was Nvidia, which has caused record highs in the broader S&P 500 and Nasdaq indices in recent weeks.

Nvidia is the frontrunner in the broader AI business precisely because it is miles ahead of the competition, controlling about 90 percent of the global market for AI training and inference chips. Competitors large and small – whether Lisa Su’s AMD or startup Groq – have neither the hardware nor the software to challenge its dominance.

Delays at Blackwell could jeopardize exponential growth in AI chip business

So the biggest immediate threat to Nvidia’s stock price is actually Nvidia itself, as investors have become accustomed to the company’s exponential growth.

Data center revenue has increased rapidly over the past twelve months, reaching an average growth rate of 52%. every quarter– from just $4.3 billion in the first quarter of last year to an incredible $22.6 billion in the first quarter of 2024.

The question is how sustainable this development will be in the future. A company like Nvidia cannot increase its total revenue by almost four times from one year to the next.

That may be why CEO Jensen Huang predicts the pace will slow somewhat in the second quarter. He expects total revenue across all business segments to be around $28 billion, sequential growth of 7.5 percent compared to the first three months of this year, combined with a non-GAAP gross margin between 75 and 76 percent.

Assuming results are exactly in line with forecasts, this would be a slowdown from the 18% quarter-on-quarter revenue increase and 78.9% gross margin reported in May.

The biggest near-term risk that investors will be focusing on right now is the launch of Blackwell, the company’s next-generation artificial intelligence chip architecture. This architecture can train large language models with trillions of parameters four times faster than the company’s Hopper H100 chip, while consuming less power.

Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI and Tesla have all signaled their intention to buy the latest B200 GPUs, according to Nvidia. While Huang promised that his latest blockbuster product would be launched later this year, a report in The information suggests that there could be a delay of up to three months due to a design flaw.

“That Blackwell risk is probably the most important X-factor of the quarter,” Gene Munster of Deepwater Asset Management told CNBC on Tuesday. He expects the stock, which is just below its all-time high, to see some selling after the results are released.

The stock closed at $128.30 on Tuesday after hitting a high of just over $140 a share in June. If Tuesday’s results result in a 10% gain, it will be back at its all-time high.

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