Nvidia, the world's most valuable company and the central player in the AI boom, reports earnings today.

Here's what to look for in its second-quarter performance:

-- Infrastructure financing: Earlier this month, Nvidia announced a massive initiative that would help make more money available for the development of AI infrastructure like data centers and chip purchases. A week later, the chip giant announced it would backstop a massive southern Ohio data center complex. Investors have begun to worry that Nvidia is overextending itself with these deals. They'll want to hear more about what the company hopes to accomplish with all these financing deals and how and when it expects them to pay off.

-- Vera Rubin ramp: At a chips-industry conference this week, Nvidia indicated that its new Vera Rubin servers are on track to ship starting in the third or fourth quarter of this year. If that timing holds, it will be a good sign for the company. Recall that Nvidia's previous generation of AI chips, known as Blackwell, were delayed for several months by design flaws that needed to be corrected.

-- Open models: This past weekend, news broke of Nvidia's $6 billion licensing deal to grab the technology and engineering talent of the startup Poolside, the developer of an open-weight AI model. The effort to turbocharge Nvidia's open model, Nemotron, could trigger competition among frontier labs that will necessitate even more chip purchases and prompt a virtuous revenue cycle for Nvidia.

-- China sales: After more than a year of Nvidia cajoling government officials in both the U.S. and China to allow sales of its top processors in the country, the company has taken to downplaying the prospect. But news recently began bubbling up that suggests Chinese regulators were growing more open to sales of Nvidia's H200 processors in the country. If things appear to be thawing in the world's second-largest AI market, it could be very significant for Nvidia's sales.

-- Margin compression: Nvidia's gross margins are still hovering at around 75%, some of the highest in tech. With rising prices for memory and intensifying competition from custom chips and novel types of processors, customers have more options and Nvidia could get more pushback when it tries to pass along higher costs.