Demand for artificial intelligence infrastructure has been an enormous tailwind for semiconductor company Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA). Its revenue and earnings have increased at a triple-digit pace in the last five quarters, and its share price has surged 910% since January 2023.

Nvidia will announce financial results for the third quarter after the market closes on Wednesday, Nov. 20. The stock has been exceptionally volatile following recent earnings events, which presents investors with a difficult choice: Is it smart to buy shares now?

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For what it's worth, Wall Street is overwhelmingly bullish. Among the 65% of analysts who follow Nvidia, 92% rate the stock a buy and the other 8% rate it a hold ahead of the company's third-quarter earnings report. Not a single analyst recommends selling Nvidia at the present time.

Here's what investors should know.

Nvidia specializes in accelerated computing. The company is known for its graphics processing units (GPUs), chips that are the industry standard in speeding up computationally intensive data center workloads, like artificial intelligence (AI). But Nvidia is truly formidable because it provides vertically integrated compute solutions that span hardware, software, and services.

To elaborate, Nvidia has created a rich ecosystem of software development tools called CUDA. The platform includes over 300 code libraries and 600 pretrained models that let programmers write GPU-accelerated applications across use cases, from robotics to scientific simulation. The company also builds adjacent data center hardware, including central processing units (CPUs) and high-speed networking equipment.

Nvidia blends those products into an integrated AI service called DGX Cloud, which lets businesses provision through the internet the supercomputing infrastructure and software development tools needed to build and manage AI applications. Importantly, while GPUs are still the primary source of revenue, software and services businesses will reach an annual revenue run rate of $2 billion this year, and its networking business already hit an annual run rate of $14 billion.

According to CEO Jensen Huang, Nvidia's vertically integrated approach to accelerated computing lets it build systems with a superior total cost of ownership. In other words, Nvidia GPUs are not only the fastest AI chips on the market but also the cheapest when accounting for direct and indirect costs. That affords the company a durable competitive moat.