Apple reports second-quarter earnings after the bell
Apple CEO Tim Cook greets former President Barack Obama at the inauguration of U.S. President Donald Trump at the U.S. Capitol Rotunda in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 20, 2025.
Julia Demaree Nikhinson | Getty Images
Apple reports fiscal second-quarter earnings Thursday after the bell.
Wall Street is eager to hear from Apple for the first time about how it is planning to deal with the Trump administration’s tariffs. Investors will also want to know what impacts tariffs might have on the company’s sales, earnings and product prices.
Neither Apple nor CEO Tim Cook have yet to publicly comment on the hefty tariffs President Donald Trump announced for every country around the world on April 2 or the revised plans to place tariffs of up to 145% on imports from China.
Apple makes about three-quarters of its revenue from physical products such as iPhones, Macs and iPads that are mostly made in China, and the U.S. is its largest market.
Analysts at TD Cowen have estimated that the current tariffs could cost Apple 6% of its earnings per year.
Investors will also look to see what Apple says about the current quarter. While Apple hasn’t given formal guidance since 2020, it typically provides investors with several comparisons and data points that can be used to back into a forecast.
But the plans around Trump’s tariffs have already changed several times, and several other companies have stopped giving guidance, citing macroeconomic uncertainty.
Analysts polled by LSEG are expecting Apple to signal that it expects $89 billion in sales in the June quarter, or about a 4% increase on an annual basis.
Tariffs might have one silver lining for Apple — customers in the U.S. and retailers may have stocked up on iPhones and other products to beat the tariffs, which could elevate the March quarter’s revenue. Wall Street is expecting $94.68 billion in revenue, which would be a 4.2% increase on an annual basis, according to LSEG.
Apple’s sales in China will also be under a microscope. Some investors have worried in recent years that Chinese nationalism was reducing the appeal of the American-designed iPhone in the country, and the current trade war threatens to kick up the economic rivalry even more.
Analysts will likely ask Cook and finance chief Kevan Parekh on Thursday about the company’s outlook for mainland China. Wall Street is looking for $17 billion in sales, according to FactSet, which would be 3.6% growth on an annual basis.
Here’s what Wall Street expects, according to LSEG:
- Earnings per share: $1.63
- Revenue: $94.68 billion
WATCH: Street’s biggest Apple bear says a production move to India is unrealistic
Jensen Huang, chief executive officer of Nvidia Corp., during the US-Saudi Investment Forum at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, US, on Wednesday, Nov. 19, 2025.
Stefani Reynolds | Bloomberg | Getty Images
In the weeks leading up to Nvidia’s third-quarter earnings report, investors debated whether the markets were in an AI bubble, fretting over the massive sums being committed to building data centers and whether they could provide a long-term return on investment.
During Wednesday’s earnings call with analysts, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang began his comments by rejecting that premise.
“There’s been a lot of talk about an AI bubble,” Huang said. “From our vantage point we see something very different.”
In many respects, Huang’s remarks are to be expected. He’s leading the company at the heart of the artificial intelligence boom, and has built its market cap to $4.5 trillion because of soaring demand for Nvidia’s graphics processing units.
Huang’s smackdown of bubble talk matters because Nvidia counts every major cloud provider — Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Oracle — as a customer. Most of the major AI model developers, including OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI and Meta, are also big buyers of Nvidia GPUs.
Huang has deep visibility into the market, and on the call he offered a three-pronged argument for why we’re not in a bubble.
First, he said that areas like data processing, ad recommendations, search systems, and engineering, are turning to GPUs because they need the AI. That means older computing infrastructure based around the central processor will transition to new systems running on Nvidia’s chips.
Second, Huang said, AI isn’t just being integrated into current applications, but it will enable entirely new ones.
Finally, according to Huang, “agentic AI,” or applications that can run without significant input from the user, will be able to reason and plan, and will require even more computing power.
In making the case of Nvidia, Huang said it’s the only company that can address the three use cases.
“As you consider infrastructure investments, consider these three fundamental dynamics,” Huang said. “Each will contribute to infrastructure growth in the coming years.”
Reversing the slide
In its earnings release, Nvidia reported revenue and profit that sailed past estimates and issued better-than-expected guidance. Last month, Huang provided a $500 billion forecast for sales of the company’s AI chips over calendar 2025 and 2026.
The company said on Wednesday that its order backlog didn’t even include a few recent deals, like an agreement with Anthropic that was announced this week or the expansion of a deal with Saudi Arabia.
“The number will grow,” CFO Colette Kress said on the call, saying the company was on track to hit the forecast.
Prior to Wednesday’s results, Nvidia shares were down about 8% this month. Other stocks tied to the AI have gotten hit even harder, with CoreWeave plunging 44% in November, Oracle dropping 14% and Palantir falling 17%.
Some of the worry on Wall Street has been tied to the debt that certain companies have used to finance their infrastructure buildouts.
“Our customers’ financing is up to them,” Huang said.
Specific to Nvidia, investors have raised concerns in recent weeks about how much of the company’s sales were going to a small number of hyperscalers.
Last month, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon and Alphabet all lifted their forecasts for capital expenditures due to their AI buildouts, and now collectively expect to spend more than $380 billion this year.
Huang said that even without a new business model, Nvidia’s chips boost hyperscaler revenue, because they power recommendation systems for short videos, books, and ads.
People will soon start appreciating what’s happening underneath the surface of the AI boom, Huang said, versus “the simplistic view of what’s happening to capex and investment.”
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