US stock indexes closed near flat on Wednesday, with little excitement on the tape as investors awaited Nvidia's quarterly earnings report, set for release at 4:20 p.m. ET, shortly after the closing bell. Quiet sessions often precede heavily watched corporate events, with much of the market's attention concentrated on a single release.

Closing changes for the day:

• S&P 500: +0.1%
• Nasdaq Composite: -0.1%
• Russell 2000: -0.1%

The S&P 500 and the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite gauge large-cap US equities, while the Russell 2000 tracks small-cap stocks.

Attention now turns to Nvidia (NVDA), the semiconductor company whose graphics processors underpin much of today's artificial intelligence computing. Nvidia's results are widely watched as a bellwether for AI-related demand, and for the pace of AI infrastructure spending more broadly, a subject of close investor scrutiny as the largest technology companies commit heavy capital to data centers. The company is also a component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, and it ranks among the largest companies in the S&P 500 by market value, so the reaction to its report can carry weight in the indexes themselves. The release will be followed by a conference call, where the focus typically falls on the company's guidance, on the data-center segment that generates the bulk of its revenue, and on management's remarks about demand from the cloud providers and other large customers building out AI computing capacity.

In early post-market trading, big gains were already visible in shares of Salesforce (CRM), the cloud-based customer relationship management software maker, and CrowdStrike (CRWD), the cybersecurity provider.

Source: ForexLive