Nvidia’s Big Rubin Test: Can New Chips Outrun Growing Doubts About AI’s Money Machine?
Nvidia reports earnings Wednesday with its next-generation Rubin chips debuting just as Wall Street grows uneasy about the circular financing deals fueling the broader AI infrastructure boom.
Nvidia will report fiscal second-quarter earnings on Wednesday, with investors watching whether its upcoming Vera Rubin chips can keep its rapid financial growth going.
LSEG analysts expect revenue to reach $92.18 billion, marking Nvidia’s fastest growth in seven quarters, driven mainly by data center sales.
But the backdrop has shifted: investors are now asking harder questions about how much of that demand is genuinely organic versus financed, in part, by Nvidia itself.
Vera Rubin Chips Face Their First Real-World Test
Nvidia’s shift from Blackwell, the chip reportedly used to train Kimi K3, to Vera Rubin processors is one of its biggest architecture changes yet, with shipments expected to begin this autumn.
Morgan Stanley estimating the new chips could contribute close to $9 billion in third-quarter sales alone.
The stakes extend beyond a product refresh: Big Tech’s data center spending is projected to exceed $730 billion this year, while several Nvidia backed cloud operators like CoreWeave are adding to the demand.
The company is also expanding its model lineup to keep pace with its infrastructure buildout, quickly following its Nemotron release with plans for a trillion parameter Nemotron 4 model, underscoring the pressure to justify the scale of compute it is selling.
Circular Financing Deals Draw Investor Scrutiny
The bigger overhang on Wednesday’s results isn’t chip supply; it’s money.
Nvidia’s stock has risen just 11.8% this year, lagging rivals, largely because investors worry about the company’s expanding role as a financier of its own customer base.
That concern intensified after Nvidia helped arrange $500 billion in financing from six major U.S. banks for AI infrastructure buyers, and after it agreed to a guarantee worth more than $100 billion tied to OpenAI’s 20-year Ohio data-center lease.
Zacks Investment Management’s Brian Mulberry described the arrangement as making Nvidia “a kind of central banking figure” in AI.
What Wednesday’s Numbers Will Really Reveal
The real story in Wednesday’s earnings won’t be whether Nvidia beats its expected 82.8% rise in third quarter sales guidance to about $104.2 billion.
Given Nvidia and Wall Street’s expectations around Rubin shipments, a beat is likely.
The more revealing figure will be gross margin, showing whether Nvidia can maintain premium pricing or is sacrificing margin to secure demand through financing.
That matters as inference challengers emerge, with Cerebras claiming its latest chip delivers roughly 30 times Nvidia’s inference speed.
If Rubin stumbles while financing concerns persist, investors may start viewing Nvidia less as an unstoppable monopoly and more as a company defending its lead with its own balance sheet.
Source: Nvidia faces growth test as Rubin debut meets AI financing scrutiny
