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Nvidia stock (NVDA) has been struggling to regain momentum.
After a full-year rally of 171% in 2024, the AI-chip giant's stock has gained 4% in the past six months, underperforming the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq Composite indexes. Through the close on Feb. 24, the stock was off 3% this year.
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The stock lost nearly $600 billion in market value in one day, the biggest such drop on record, after the DeepSeek chatbot launched in late January. DeepSeek's developer says the system cost a fraction of what its U.S. rivals have put in to build their systems.
Nvidia is facing threats of tighter export restrictions from the administration of President Donald Trump, Bloomberg is reporting.
And DeepSeek's launch might also have sparked a potential overhaul of U.S. export rules as the Commerce Department investigates whether DeepSeek used chips that are banned from sale to China to train its large-language models. (LLMs are systems, trained on enormous amounts of data, that can understand human language and perform related tasks without human intervention.)
However, Nvidia remains the most critical U.S. company in the tech sector, with demand from its largest clients, including Meta Platforms (META) , Microsoft (MSFT) , Google (GOOGL) , and Amazon (AMZN) , still elevated.
Related: Fund manager who predicted Nvidia’s selloff makes a bold move
These tech giants, which operate massive cloud and data center infrastructure, rely heavily on Nvidia's graphics-processing units to power their AI and computing workloads.
Wednesday’s fiscal-Q4 earnings report will be extremely important for Nvidia as the market closely watches Blackwell chip demand and sales, tariff risks, the impact of DeepSeek on profitability, and other key developments in the AI-chip industry.
What to watch in Nvidia’s next earnings report?
Nvidia’s report, for the fiscal fourth quarter ended in January. is set for Wednesday, Feb. 26, after the market close.
At the bottom line, analysts expect profit of around $25.3 billion, or 84 cents a share, with gross margin in the region of 73.5%.
Wall Street is looking for overall revenue of $38.05 billion, a 72% increase from a year earlier, with data-center sales rising 82% to $33.6 billion.
The company has beaten Wall Street's EPS estimates for eight consecutive quarters.
Nvidia thrives on its data-center business, which generates most of its revenue through AI hardware sales.
Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress said in November that Blackwell was in “full production” and was on track to generate “several billion dollars” of revenue in the fourth quarter.