Semiconductor maker Nvidia (NVDA) will deliver a much-anticipated quarterly earnings report tomorrow evening, and on Tuesday, several members of a very crowded bull camp expressed high expectations for the tech darling’s results.
Nvidia is scheduled to report results from the first quarter of its fiscal 2027 after the closing bell on Wednesday, May 20, and the analyst community has some pretty steep progress built into their estimates:
- Revenues: $373.6 billion (+73% year-over-year)
- Adjusted earnings per share (EPS): $8.37 (+75% YoY)
That’s not much of a surprise: Wall Street’s pros are overwhelmingly bullish on NVDA stock, putting it among the best-rated names in the public markets.
At this moment, 58 equity researchers call NVDA stock a Buy, while one calls it a Sell, and two are on the sidelines calling it a Hold, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence data. Those analysts have an average 12-month price target of $278.53, implying 25% upside from here. And over the long term (the next three to five years), they expect brisk average annual earnings growth of around 40%.
| Nvidia (NVDA): Quick Stats | |
|---|---|
| Market cap | $5.4 trillion |
| Dividend yield | < 0.1% |
| Forward price-to-earnings (P/E) | 26.5 |
| Price/earnings-to-growth (PEG) | 0.68 |
| Source: Yahoo! Finance. Data is as of May 19, 2026. | |
Below, we’ll take a look at what three analysts had to say Tuesday about what to watch for in Nvidia’s report.
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Bank of America Sees “Compelling Valuation”
A team of BofA Global Research analysts reiterated their Buy rating on Tuesday, noting that NVDA stock “is trading at a significant discount to its large-cap growth, the so-called Magnificent-7 (Mag-7), peers.”
Specifically, NVDA’s forward price-to-earnings (P/E) ratios of 26 (on calendar 2026 earnings) and 19 (on calendar 2027 earnings) represent a roughly 50% discount to the Mag-7 average of 49 and 42, respectively. The disparity is even greater on a free-cash-flow (FCF) basis, where NVDA’s 28/20 enterprise value-to-FCF is a 66% discount. And NVDA’s price/earnings-to-growth (PEG) ratio, which also factors in future growth estimates, is well below not only the peer average of 2.61, but the S&P 500’s 1.3.
“While NVDA at $5.46 trillion is the largest market cap in the S&P 500 Index, it trades at a ~28% discount to the combined $7.5 trillion-lus market cap of Apple and Microsoft combined despite the potential for generating even greater amount of free cash flow,” BofA’s team adds.
As for the earnings report itself, BofA’s analysts expect “the usual historical 2%-4%/$2 billion-$4 billion sales outperformance relative to current sell-side expectations.” Among the most important headlines? The potential for enhanced cash returns (in the form of dividends and/or buybacks); timing on the ramp-up of Nvidia’s next-generation AI platform, Vera Rubin; and competitive landscape changes against Google’s tensor processing units (TPUs), agentic CPUs, and more.
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HSBC Looking for Beat-and-Raise
Frank Lee, Global Head of Tech Hardware & Semi Research for HSBC Global Investment Research (Buy), says he expects another “beat and raise,” believing Q1 revenues will come in 3% to 4% higher than management’s guidance, and that Q2 revenue forecasts will come in at $91.1 billion, ahead of consensus estimates for $85.6 billion. He also raised his fiscal 2028 EPS estimates by 27% to $13.01 per share, which is 16% higher than the consensus expectation for $11.20.
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However, Lee says that Nvidia’s continued dominance won’t necessarily be enough—that the company will need to demonstrate that it’s branching further out.
“Despite the ever increasing [capital expenditure] trend by CSPs that shows no signs of abating, Nvidia now has to share the capex with memory makers, AI networking, and server CPU vendors,” he says. “Hence, Nvidia needs to show evidence of diversifying its non-CSP customer base to fuel its AI GPU momentum. New [total addressable market] opportunities via agentic AI server CPUs and its recent optics-related deals could also potentially be emerging narratives that could lead to more significant earnings revisions or re-rating.”
Lee reiterated his Buy rating on NVDA stock and raised his price target to $325 from $295 previously. He also raised fiscal 2027 and 2028 EPS estimates by 3% and 27%, respectively.
Nvidia Will Keep Pounding the Rock, But the Stock Faces Structural Headwinds
Truist Managing Director William Stein (Buy) says to “Buy *the* AI company, NVDA,” reiterating his Buy call and $287 price target on the belief that strengthening fundamentals and a reasonable valuation offers a good setup for investors.
Stein believes that Nvidia’s sales growth has reaccelerated following its bottoming-out in the July 2025 quarter at 56% YoY (“that’s some bottoming!”). He now sees sales growth hitting 78% in Q1 and 82% in Q2.
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“Three factors give us incremental confidence this quarter,” he says. “(1) Aggregate hyperscaler capex continues to improve, as we show in the following exhibit. (2) our industry contacts, while less specific than we’ve had in the past, continue to express seemingly ever-extending demand, with the key shortage now seeming to be more foundry related than other factors. (3) We can point to specific potential upside drivers, including sales to China (were guided to zero), and new products like the CPU clusters and Groq 3 LPU clusters that we expect to materialize and have not been quantified before.”
That said, Stein notes a few non-results-related matters that may have been holding NVDA back compared to the SOX semiconductor index, and could continue to do so.
He sees a technical challenge for any stock that represents more than 5% of the S&P 500 given the “5% rule” of mutual funds (referring to a diversification guideline recommending single-stock exposure shouldn’t exceed 5%). Also, “we believe fund flows into semi ETFs contribute to NVDA’s underperformance [versus the SOXX and SMH exchange-traded funds] owing to its weighting in these indexes that under-represents its market cap,” Stein says. He also believes investors are turning their eyes toward derivative and incremental AI suppliers and away from traditional AI winners.
Still, he believes given Nvidia’s high sales and earnings growth, NVDA appears inexpensive.
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