It's pretty commonplace to see any chart that has to do with Nvidia's (NVDA) business over the past several years looking like a hockey stick.

From a more than 700% growth in the company's market and share price since the launch of ChatGPT in late November 2022, the charts are eye-catching. But in our Chart of the Day today, we wanted to highlight how the growth of Nvidia's actual products is just as astonishing.

The AI chip leader uses a metric called "AI FLOPS," which stands for floating-point calculations per second. The company provided Yahoo Finance's Laura Bratton with a breakdown of how many FLOPS each of its GPUs over the past several years has been able to hit.

Hopper, first launched in 2022, maxed out at 2,958 FLOPs. Nvidia's new Blackwell chip hits about 20,000 FLOPS.

You don't have to understand the granular parts of AI computing, or even what FLOPS means, to see this chart and comprehend why Nvidia is winning the AI race by a landslide right now. The productivity of the product they're selling to end users has skyrocketed just like their stock price.

The competition against Nvidia (NVDA) from other chipmakers, Big Tech giants, and startups is heating up. But Nvidia still dominates, and it can maintain its manufacturing lead in the AI space for at least a year, two tech analysts told Yahoo Finance on Tuesday.

"You know, the competition does have a roadmap that is expected to follow suit, but they're at least a year behind at this point," KeyBanc Capital Markets equity research analyst John Vinh said on Morning Brief.

Harvest Portfolio Management chief investment officer Paul Meeks estimated that Nvidia's manufacturing lead is around a year and a half.

Both analysts asserted that investing in artificial intelligence isn't an either/or proposition, especially with the kind of "voracious" demand Nvidia is expected to showcase. They highlighted AMD (AMD), Broadcom (AVGO), and Taiwan Semiconductor (TSM) as three other strong contenders in the chip race.

However, Nvidia simply maintaining its lead may not be enough for Wall Street, which is coming into Nvidia earnings with high expectations.

"I'm a little bit worried that although they will most likely not just meet but beat slightly, will that be enough to appease Wall Street?" Meeks said. "Remember, part of the thesis here was their revenues were going to rapidly reaccelerate in the second half of this year," he added. "With all the geopolitical turbulence, I don't know if that's the case."

China continues to be a major source of revenue for Nvidia, as Yahoo Finance's Laura Bratton reports the chipmaker made more than $6 billion from the country in Q1:

Read more here.

Wall Street is overwhelmingly bullish on Nvidia (NVDA) stock, with 87% of analysts holding a Buy rating on the stock.

But as Yahoo Finance's Brian Sozzi and Brooke Sweeney point out, there are still a few expecting disappointment when the AI chipmaker reports earnings on Wednesday.

The bear case:

Read more here.

The artificial intelligence gold rush could come at a steep cost for the environment, Yahoo Finance's Brian Sozzi and Brooke Sweeney report:

Read more here.

Here's another stat on Nvidia's stock performance around earnings, courtesy of Yahoo Finance's Laura Bratton:

Read more here.

Nvidia's earnings on Wednesday will be the market's biggest event this week.

And new data highlighted by Bloomberg on Tuesday suggests there could be trillions of dollars ready for deployment once these results clear.

Strategists at BBVA cited by Bloomberg see institutional investors as having exposure to US stocks that is "far from exuberance levels," meaning the $7 trillion currently parked in money market funds could come flowing back into stocks depending on these earnings break.

Throughout 2025, numerous headwinds have faced US stocks from an allocation standpoint, with the "Sell America" trade, tariff uncertainty, and rising interest rates offering all sorts of competition to US equities after two years in which Big Tech made US stocks the most important game in town for investors.

The idea, we'd note, is not that this cash will pile into Nvidia stock itself — or even Big Tech, necessarily — but that enthusiasm for US stocks which has waned considerably in recent months could be restored if twin tailwinds of a more positive trade backdrop and a return to the buoyant AI story powered by Nvidia return in force this week.

Yahoo Finance Tech Editor Dan Howley breaks down the key metrics to watch when Nvidia reports Q1 results on Wednesday after the bell:

Read the full earnings preview here.