NEW YORK (Reuters) - Traders in the U.S. equity options market are expecting Nvidia's ( NVDA ) upcoming earnings report to spark a more than $300 billion swing in the shares of the world's most dominant artificial intelligence chipmaker.

Options pricing shows that traders anticipate a move of around 9.8% in the company's shares on Thursday, a day after it reports earnings, data from analytics firm ORATS showed. That's larger than the expected move ahead of any Nvidia ( NVDA ) report over the last three years and well above the stock's average post-earnings move of 8.1% over that same period, according to ORATS.

Given Nvidia's ( NVDA ) market capitalization of about $3.11 trillion, a 9.8% swing in the shares would translate to about $305 billion, likely the largest expected earnings move for any company in history, analysts said.

Such a move would dwarf the market capitalization of 95% of S&P 500 constituents, including Netflix ( NFLX ) and Merck ( MRK ), according to LSEG data.

The results from Nvidia ( NVDA ), whose chips are widely seen as the gold standard in artificial intelligence, also have big implications for the broader market. The stock is up some 150% year-to-date, accounting for around a quarter of the S&P 500's 18% year-to-date gain.

"It alone has been a huge contributor to the overall profitability of the S&P 500," said Steve Sosnick, chief strategist at Interactive Brokers. "It's the Atlas holding up the market."

Options pricing suggests traders are more concerned about missing out on a large upside move from Nvidia ( NVDA ) than getting hurt by a large drop.

Traders are assigning a 7% chance the stock rises more than 20% by Friday, while only a giving a 4% probability to a more than 20% sell-off, according to a Susquehanna Financial analysis of options data.

"(Ahead of earnings) people typically want to buy hedges, they want to buy insurance, but in Nvidia's ( NVDA ) case, a lot of that insurance is FOMO insurance," Sosnick said, referring to the popular acronym for "fear of missing out."

"They don't want to miss a rally."

Part of the reason options traders are pricing this large a move for Nvidia ( NVDA ) has to do with how volatile the company's shares have been in the past.

Nvidia's ( NVDA ) average 30-day historical volatility this year - a measure of how much the stock has gyrated over a rolling 30-day period - is about twice the average of the same measure for all other companies with market caps higher than $1 trillion, according to a Reuters analysis of Trade Alert data.

"The options are just reflecting how the stock is actually moving," said Christopher Jacobson, a strategist at Susquehanna Financial Group, which makes markets in the securities of Nvidia ( NVDA ).

"(It's) is just a function of continued uncertainty/optimism with regards to AI and the ultimate size of the opportunity coupled with NVDA having become such a widely followed stock among institutional and retail," he said.