What Nvidia Earnings Mean for VOO and QQQ
The world's most valuable company reports Wednesday. Here's what's at stake for VOO, QQQ, and the AI trade.
Nvidia reports earnings after the bell on Wednesday. As the world's most valuable company, it's still a big event. But with the AI rally broadening out significantly this year, Nvidia's sway over the market doesn't feel quite as commanding as it did in 2024 or 2025.
Still, the earnings numbers could have an impact. At $5.3 trillion in market cap, Nvidia accounts for 8.5% of the Vanguard S&P 500 ETF (VOO) and 9% of the Invesco QQQ Trust (QQQ).
Through Monday's close, the stock was up 19.2% year to date.
Big Contributor
Nvidia has been a meaningful contributor to the market’s returns in 2026. It's added 1.5 percentage points to the S&P 500's 8.6% gain this year, or roughly 17% of the total, tying it with Alphabet for the top spot. In the Nasdaq-100, Nvidia has contributed 1.65 percentage points to QQQ's 15% gain, though that puts it behind Micron and Intel.
Nvidia's GPUs remain central to the AI buildout, but other parts of the data center supply chain have grown in importance, including Micron's high-bandwidth memory and Intel's CPUs.
Earnings Expectations
For its fiscal first quarter, analysts expect Nvidia to report $1.78 in earnings per share on $79 billion in revenue. That would represent revenue growth of 80% year over year, an acceleration from 73% in the prior quarter.
Nvidia has beaten revenue estimates every quarter since 2022, but the stock reactions have been mixed. Shares have dropped after each of the last three reports: 5.5% after fourth quarter earnings, 3.2% after the third quarter, and 0.8% after the second. The last double-digit post-earnings move came in February 2024, when the stock jumped more than 16%.
Beyond the first quarter numbers, investors will be focused on guidance for the second quarter, where consensus sits near $87.2 billion in revenue (up 87% year over year). The status of Rubin, the next-generation chip after Blackwell, will also be in focus, along with commentary on future demand, potential China sales, and how bottlenecks in memory and other key components might affect the company.
The numbers, along with any comments from CEO Jensen Huang on the call, could have repercussions across the AI ecosystem, impacting not just Nvidia but a long list of AI-related stocks.
Semiconductors now make up around 17% of the S&P 500 by market cap, and many AI-fueled names sit outside that industry, from industrials to utilities.
In that regard, Nvidia's earnings are still very much a market-moving event.
