Earnings Scoreboard - The Blackwell referendum of AI

“Yeah. Well, we were never brutal. We were cheap and mean. Now we're just cheap and cheerful. New aircraft, on time flights, I mean the last year... customer service satisfaction went up from 86% to 89%. I never thought I'd see the day when I got more than 50% customer satisfaction, but, hey, who knew?”

— Michael O’Leary, CEO of RyanAir, on Bloomberg Television, on 18 May 

Who’s scoring highest and why

From 12 May to 19 May, 8 S&P 500 companies (including 2 Dow Jones Industrial Average constituents, Cisco Systems and Home Depot) reported earnings. According to FactSet, with 89.9% of the S&P 500 constituents having reported as of 15 May, the blended Q1 earnings growth rate has accelerated to 27.7%, more than the 13.1% pace anticipated at quarter-end and the highest quarterly growth rate since Q4 2021, when the index posted 32.0%. Revenue growth has likewise climbed to 11.4%, the strongest top-line print since Q2 2022 when it was 13.9%, and the blended net profit margin of 14.7% is on track to be the highest since FactSet began tracking the metric in 2009. Furthermore, 83.0% of reporting companies have beaten EPS expectations against the prior four quarter average of 78.1%, and the aggregate earnings-surprise factor of 17.9% is the highest since Q1 2021, when it was 22.2%.

This week's earnings calendar is compact in names, but enormous in signal value. At its centre sits Nvidia's Q1 print, the most anticipated earnings event of the season, flanked by Walmart and Target on the consumer side, Deere and AutoZone bridging the industrial-consumer divide, and Workday and Salesforce closing out the week with what may be the most revealing test yet of enterprise AI monetisation. Nordson, a quieter name, anchors the precision industrial segment and offers its own read on the semiconductor supply chain.

Beyond AI, the tariff regime of 2025–2026 has turned this week’s earnings calendar into a live test of cost transmission. Companies are responding in distinct ways: Home Depot has absorbed the pressure through margins, AutoZone has passed it through selectively, Walmart is raising prices incrementally while using supplier leverage to defend scale economics and Deere is offsetting a $1.2 billion annual tariff headwind through pricing, localisation and supply-chain adjustments. Together, these results should show where tariff costs are settling across the value chain. The implications extend beyond earnings: if margins absorb the shock, inflation pass-through may remain contained; if costs are transferred more broadly to consumers, the inflation outlook for Q2 and Q3 becomes less predictable for the Fed.