NEW YORK, Aug 27 (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.