Investing.com -- A potential $200 billion in off-balance-sheet credit exposure is the number Wall Street is watching when Nvidia reports its second-quarter results after Wednesday's close, eclipsing what is shaping up to be a near-doubling of revenue.

For BofA analyst Vivek Arya, it's the balance sheet that matters, not the earnings beat. More precisely, Arya says investors will be focused on "NVDA's potential disclosure of its multi-year, off-balance-sheet commitments to lock down supply, power, models and demand."

"Quantifying these liabilities won't erase AI buildout risk, but it lets the market price properly into what we see as a depressed valuation," he said yesterday.

Nvidia's hardware is the infrastructure layer that customers are borrowing to buy, and its balance sheet has become the implicit guarantee behind billions in AI datacenter financing — making any wobble in Jensen Huang's commentary on that model a direct risk to the stock.

Morgan Stanley on Tuesday initiated its first-ever credit coverage of Nvidia with a Neutral rating, warning that the chipmaker's balance-sheet-as-a-service approach introduces risks that conventional leverage ratios — currently a benign 0.4x, fail to surface.

Analyst Lindsay Tyler projected total AI-related credit exposure could approach $200 billion by end-2028. "We initiate credit coverage of NVIDIA with a neutral view as exceptional growth turns balance-sheet strength into a strategic AI financing tool, and introduces new risks," Tyler wrote, adding that the tail "remains too early-stage, opaque, and sizable to step in."

This month, the company helped arrange a $500 billion financing platform from six major U.S. financial institutions, Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR, for customers building AI infrastructure.

Separately, Nvidia agreed to guarantee up to $105 billion to help OpenAI lease a massive datacenter in Ohio for 20 years. The binding terms, loss-sharing rules, and the precise residual-value support percentage Nvidia offers per deal have not been publicly disclosed, details the market will be pressing management to clarify on Wednesday's call.

The financing anxiety arrives against a backdrop of rising stress in AI credit markets more broadly. AI hyperscaler debt issuance reached $220 billion in 2026 through early August, roughly $207 billion higher than the comparable period in 2025, per BNP Paribas data cited by Reuters.

Tech credit spreads have widened to 89 basis points over Treasuries, 9 basis points wider than the overall investment-grade market, reversing what had been a historically tight premium for the sector.

On the pure earnings side, analysts expect Nvidia's Q2 revenue to nearly double year-over-year to $92.18 billion, the fastest pace of growth in seven quarters, driven by more than a twofold increase in datacenter sales. Q3 consensus stands at $104.20 billion, implying an 82.8% year-over-year gain.

Options traders appear relatively sanguine about the magnitude of any move. The options market is pricing in a 5.4% swing in either direction after the print, implying roughly a $280 billion market-cap move. That is below the 6.5% implied move heading into May earnings and well below the 7.4% historical average swing over the past 12 quarters.

Nvidia shares rose 2.2% on Tuesday, snapping a seven-session losing streak, as the broader market climbed ahead of the report.