OpenAI just pulled model access from Cursor the moment SpaceX took ownership, turning a years-long personal feud into a live stress test of who actually controls AI infrastructure and who gets left scrambling.
The long-running dispute between OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Elon Musk has simmered for years, rooted in Musk’s exit from the AI lab he co-founded and his subsequent legal and public challenges over its direction. That rivalry just moved from boardroom barbs to operational consequences.
On Friday, OpenAI cut off model access for Cursor after SpaceX (NASDAQ:SPCX | SPCX Price Prediction) completed its $60 billion acquisition of the coding platform, turning a personal and philosophical clash into a concrete test of control over AI infrastructure.
The Compute Advantage at the Center OpenAI threw shade at Musk, directly naming him as the reason behind its decision:
“We are making this choice because we cannot be confident that SpaceX will use our technology within our terms of service, based on our experience with Elon Musk’s companies violating contracts.”
Beyond the drama, though, the real story sits in SpaceX’s Colossus clusters. The system seeks to scale to the equivalent of 1 million Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) H100 chips. That hardware is the bottleneck Cursor itself flagged before the deal: the coding tool needed massive dedicated compute to train competitive models of its own.
By owning both the compute and now the application layer that reaches expert software engineers, SpaceX is running the same vertical-integration playbook it used to drive launch costs from roughly $10,000 per kilogram down toward $100. Cursor brought roughly $4 billion in annualized revenue at the time of the acquisition at a 15-times multiple. Folding that distribution into Colossus removes reliance on rival labs and turns a potential supplier risk into an owned asset.
Ironically, OpenAI’s decision accelerates rather than derails that plan. Cursor can still route developers to their own OpenAI API keys or other providers in the interim, and Anthropic has already signaled increased Claude support. Yet future OpenAI models, including the forthcoming Astra, stay off the table. That pushes SpaceX harder toward proprietary Grok-powered coding agents trained on its own iron.
Even so, SpaceX says that OpenAI serve about 5% of Cursor user traffic, and it is working with OpenAI to resolve the dispute.
What the Numbers Say for SpaceX Shareholders SpaceX closed at $141.50 on Friday, giving it a market capitalization of about $1.92 trillion, up from $1.77 trillion at its June 12 IPO. The $60 billion Cursor purchase represented roughly 2% to 3% dilution depending on the exact share-price timing. Analysts tracking the name put average price targets near $219, implying more than 50% upside from recent levels, with revenue-growth forecasts exceeding 100% over three years in some models.
Compare that to pure-play AI peers that still rent compute. SpaceX already monetizes excess capacity to outside customers while keeping the densest clusters for internal use. Cursor’s developer dataset — edit histories, completions, agent traces — now feeds directly into those clusters. In short, the feud removes one external dependency and strengthens the case that SpaceX’s AI segment can scale without margin leakage to competitors.
Granted, integration risks exist. Cursor users may grumble during the transition, and execution on proprietary models is never guaranteed. That said, SpaceX has repeatedly converted ambitious hardware timelines into operational reality. The $10 billion alternative fee in the original April partnership terms shows both sides priced the compute relationship as valuable either way.
Key Takeaway Smart investors should view the OpenAI cutoff as confirmation that SpaceX’s ownership of Colossus-scale compute plus a leading coding interface creates durable optionality in AI. The $60 billion all-stock deal already embeds Cursor’s $4 billion run-rate into a $1.92 trillion platform.
Long-term investors who believe vertical integration will compound the same way launch costs did now have clearer evidence the strategy is in motion. Short-term noise around the feud is real, yet the underlying asset — owned compute powering an owned application layer — remains the more important signal.
Contact [email protected] for any questions or corrections.
Analyst’s Disclosure: I/we have a beneficial long position in the shares of NVDA either through stock ownership, options, or other derivatives. I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it (other than from Seeking Alpha). I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article.
Seeking Alpha's Disclosure: Past performance is no guarantee of future results. No recommendation or advice is being given as to whether any investment is suitable for a particular investor. Any views or opinions expressed above may not reflect those of Seeking Alpha as a whole. Seeking Alpha is not a licensed securities dealer, broker or US investment adviser or investment bank. Our analysts are third party authors that include both professional investors and individual investors who may not be licensed or certified by any institute or regulatory body.
It has done it again. Nvidia (NVDA -4.58%) blew past Wall Street estimates in its second-quarter (Q2) earnings, sending the stock back toward its all-time high share price of $225. The chipmaker now has a market cap approaching $5.5 trillion, making it the largest company in the world.
Where Nvidia truly shone was its guidance for the next fiscal year, which has astounded investors. In fact, it could put the company on the doorstep of becoming the first business in world history to generate $1 trillion in annual revenue, up from well under $100 billion just a few years ago.
But does that make the stock a buy today? Let's find out.
Image source: Nvidia.
Monster guidance for next year For context, let's give some numbers around Nvidia's current financial performance. Over the last 12 months, it has generated $303 billion in revenue. Last quarter, which ended in August, saw revenue grow 106% to $106 billion. If this type of growth continues for the next two quarters of this fiscal year (which ends in January of 2027), then Nvidia is likely knocking on the door of generating over $400 billion in sales in a 12-month period.
What was even more impressive was the fact that Nvidia is already projecting 70% revenue growth next fiscal year, which is named fiscal year 2028. This is due to the insatiable demand from the cloud providers for artificial intelligence (AI) computer chip systems, neoclouds like Space Exploration Technologies, and Nvidia raising prices. Add 70% growth to the $400 billion in fiscal year 2027 revenue, and Nvidia may generate $700 billion to $800 billion in revenue next fiscal year.
That is up from just $27 billion in revenue in fiscal year 2023, only a few years ago.
If Nvidia can grow its sales by 70% next fiscal year to $700 billion, it will only need around 40% revenue growth in fiscal year 2029 to eclipse $1 trillion in sales. This feels highly achievable if AI infrastructure investments continue to grow at today's pace.
But will Nvidia be the first stock to $1 trillion? That is a harder question to answer because of Amazon (AMZN +3.97%). Amazon is already at $775 billion in revenue, meaning it will only need two years of 15% revenue growth to eclipse $1 trillion. Its sales grew 20% year over year last quarter, mainly due to AI demand. What this means is that if Nvidia keeps growing revenue at this pace, Amazon will likely do the same and reach $1 trillion in revenue first.
Either way, both companies -- but especially Nvidia -- are growing rapidly today because of AI.
Data by YCharts.
Is Nvidia stock a buy? Unlike Amazon, whose capital-intensive e-commerce and cloud operations require significant capital spending, Nvidia can offload capital spending to its hardware providers, allowing it to generate fantastic profit margins. Over the last 12 months, it has posted an operating margin of 65%, implying $650 billion in operating earnings in fiscal year 2029 if this margin is maintained and revenue grows to $1 trillion.
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That would be up from $197 billion over the last 12 months, making Nvidia by far the most profitable business in the world. The final question is: How durable would this $1 trillion in revenue and $650 billion in earnings be? If spending on the AI boom slows -- which may happen within the next 10 years -- Nvidia's revenue could be significantly lower in the near future.
This makes the stock very difficult to value today, especially given its $5.5 trillion market cap. That looks cheap compared to $650 billion in earnings a few years from now, but who's to say what the average earnings power for Nvidia will be every year for the next decade?
Analyst’s Disclosure: I/we have a beneficial long position in the shares of NVDA either through stock ownership, options, or other derivatives. I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it (other than from Seeking Alpha). I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article.
The article is for informational purposes only (not a solicitation or recommendation to buy or sell stocks). David is not a registered investment adviser. Investors should do their own research or consult a financial adviser to determine what investments are appropriate for their individual situation. This article expresses my opinions, and I cannot guarantee that the information/results will be accurate. Investing in stocks involves risk and could result in losses.
Seeking Alpha's Disclosure: Past performance is no guarantee of future results. No recommendation or advice is being given as to whether any investment is suitable for a particular investor. Any views or opinions expressed above may not reflect those of Seeking Alpha as a whole. Seeking Alpha is not a licensed securities dealer, broker or US investment adviser or investment bank. Our analysts are third party authors that include both professional investors and individual investors who may not be licensed or certified by any institute or regulatory body.
Investors seeking to earn $100 from Nvidia’s (NASDAQ: NVDA) next dividend payment will need to own 400 shares, based on its declared quarterly dividend of $0.25 per share.
With Nvidia closing at $217.55 on August 28, 2026, purchasing 400 shares would require an investment of approximately $87,020.
Shareholders who own the stock before the September 10, 2026 ex-dividend date will be eligible to receive the payout, which is scheduled for October 1, 2026.
Nvidia dividend payment schedule. Source: Dividend.com The company currently offers a forward dividend yield of about 0.46%, with a forward payout ratio of 6.44%, indicating that only a small portion of earnings is being distributed to shareholders.
The upcoming dividend follows the previous payment of $0.25 per share made on June 26, 2026. Nvidia has increased its dividend for three consecutive years, although income remains a relatively small part of the stock’s overall investment appeal.
Nvidia stock fundamentals While Nvidia maintains a dividend, the company remains primarily a growth-focused investment driven by artificial intelligence demand.
On August 26, the chipmaker reported fiscal second-quarter results that exceeded Wall Street expectations. Revenue surged 106% year-over-year to $96.2 billion, while adjusted earnings per share climbed 120% to $2.22.
Data center revenue reached $89 billion, up 117% from a year earlier, underscoring continued demand for Nvidia’s AI hardware.
Looking ahead, Nvidia expects third-quarter revenue of approximately $108 billion, which would mark its first quarter generating more than $100 billion in sales.
The technology company also projected roughly 70% revenue growth for fiscal 2028, citing strong AI infrastructure spending across hyperscalers, enterprises, and cloud providers.
The strong outlook has reinforced bullish sentiment among analysts, many of whom maintain ‘Buy’ ratings on the stock, with price targets ranging from above $300 to as high as $515.
Featured image via Shutterstock
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It’s been an eventful week for the stock market, with PCE inflation data and AI-staple NVIDIA ((NVDA - Free Report) mid-week. This morning, the news comes from Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where the Kansas City Fed hosts the annual economic symposium. This year’s theme is “Financial Innovation: Implications for Payments and Policy.”
Perhaps it seems strange for the focus to be on things like cryptocurrency when there are so many other things more directly affecting the U.S. economy — oil prices and the Iran war, along with tariffs and higher-than-optimal inflation rates. But this allows for Fed Chair Kevin Warsh to give his first keynote address at this symposium and speak at length about the topic at hand. As we’ve seen from his two press conferences following monetary policy meeting with the FOMC, these other areas of interest are things he keeps pretty close to the vest.
What to Expect from the Stock Market TodayAfter today’s opening bell, we look for a couple key regional surveys. These include the Chicago Business Barometer for August, with a snapshot Purchasing Managers Index (PMI), and the University of Michigan final consumer survey, also for August. These are expected to move in opposite directions: 58 on Chicago Business, up from 57.6 reported a month ago, and a 51 on the U. Mich survey — below the 55.2 reported last time.
Neither of these is expected to move the trading needle today, as we are in the final weeks of summer when the stock market gets a bit more quiet. Also, the big news of the week — higher-than-expected inflation from July PCE at +3.7% year over year, and another stupendously successful quarterly release form NVIDIA — has already occurred. Whatever moves we might have expected in reaction to real-time events (and results were ultimately quite complementary, mostly thanks to NVIDIA) have already manifested themselves.
What to Expect from the Stock Market Next WeekWe’re still another week away from the Labor Day holiday, which comes a week from Monday, but next week brings us the latest Jobs Week. Tuesday has JOLTS data from July, and Wednesday brings us private-sector payroll results from ADP ((ADP - Free Report) for August. Thursday is our normal Weekly Jobless Claims and Friday is the Big Kahuna: non-farm payrolls from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).
Of these, the jobless claims are likely to imply the strongest results for the current labor market, as they have been hovering near 60-year lows for much of the summer. The monthly reports average out to around break-even: +44K on ADP for July and -23K on BLS. The labor market in these monthly reports have dwindled over the past year, and aren’t expected to get much wind in their sails from the current month.
Alphabet and NVIDIA both just reported blockbuster earnings, but two legitimate ways of measuring profit point to opposite winners. The answer hinges on whether a massive paper gain from a single private-company stake counts as real money.
Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL | GOOGL Price Prediction) and NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA) have both reported. Which is now America’s most profitable company? Two defensible metrics give opposite answers. Our August scoreboard named Alphabet the leader on reported net income and pointed readers to NVIDIA’s Q2 FY2027 earnings report. That report has landed.
Alphabet Leads on Reported Net Income On a trailing twelve-month basis, Alphabet booked $244.119B in net income against NVIDIA’s $192.879B. The windows differ: Alphabet’s covers Q3 2025 through Q2 2026; NVIDIA’s covers Q3 FY2026 through Q2 FY2027. Different fiscal calendars create a real mismatch.
Alphabet’s most recent quarter shows the gap: net income of $112.107B, up 297.6% year over year, on revenue of $119.796B.
Four Quarters of Equity Gains, Not One Alphabet booked equity securities gains in every quarter of the window, spreading the effect across the full period.
Quarter Equity Securities Gain Q3 2025 $10.73B Q4 2025 $2.3B Q1 2026 $36.91B Q2 2026 $99.03B Per outside reporting, roughly $94B of the Q2 mark is attributed to Alphabet’s SpaceX stake, repriced after the June 2026 IPO. That position began as a $900 million investment in 2015, and most shares remain locked up. Cash flow tells a different story: capex was $44.924 billion, free cash flow was negative $5.855 billion, and the buyback was suspended. Record reported profit alongside negative free cash flow illustrates paper versus cash most clearly.
NVIDIA Wins on Operating Income Strip below-the-line noise and the ranking flips. TTM operating income comes in at $197.579B for NVIDIA versus $147.628B for Alphabet. In the most recent comparable quarter, Alphabet posted more revenue ($119.796B versus $96.221B) yet less operating profit ($40.770B versus $63.734B). NVIDIA converts more of each sales dollar into operating income. Non-GAAP gross margin ran 75.0%; Alphabet’s operating margin was 34%. Operating income excludes taxes, interest, and real gains and losses. It is the better lens for core execution here, because equity marks sit below the operating line for both companies.
NVIDIA Is Also Marking Up Private Stakes The parallel matters. NVIDIA’s Q1 FY2027 net income of $58.321B exceeded its operating income of $53.536B. That inversion reflects $15.9B in net equity securities gains. Both companies are repricing frontier-AI holdings.
Microsoft in One Line, and the Answer Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) posted fiscal 2026 GAAP net income of $133.7B on revenue of $331.8B.
Alphabet leads on what most readers mean by profit. NVIDIA leads on the measure that better isolates the operating business. Both figures are snapshots, and Alphabet’s headline number is unusually sensitive to the paper value of a single private-company stake. What “most profitable” means depends on whose position just got repriced.
Contact [email protected] for any questions or corrections.
SummaryMicron Technology, Inc. has fallen from above $1,036 toward $935 despite DRAM prices rising 58% to 63% sequentially in Q2.HBM4E’s approaching 4:1 trade ratio could tighten conventional DRAM supply as AI consumes increasingly more wafer capacity.Micron has secured $22 billion of commitments through strategic agreements, with major contracts extending through 2030 on take-or-pay terms.MU stock trades at just 6x FY2027 consensus earnings, as EPS is expected to more than double to $155.03. Oleh Stefaniak/iStock via Getty Images
Micron Technology, Inc. (MU) features a unique AI infrastructure model whereby fundamentals are getting stronger even as the stock is falling. The stock has dropped from above $1,036 to around $935 amid high yields, crowded
8.55K Followers
Analyst’s Disclosure: I/we have a beneficial long position in the shares of MU either through stock ownership, options, or other derivatives. I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it (other than from Seeking Alpha). I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article.
Seeking Alpha's Disclosure: Past performance is no guarantee of future results. No recommendation or advice is being given as to whether any investment is suitable for a particular investor. Any views or opinions expressed above may not reflect those of Seeking Alpha as a whole. Seeking Alpha is not a licensed securities dealer, broker or US investment adviser or investment bank. Our analysts are third party authors that include both professional investors and individual investors who may not be licensed or certified by any institute or regulatory body.
Amazon (AMZN +3.97%) got the kind of news on Wednesday that artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure stocks usually rally on. Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Nvidia (NVDA -4.58%) announced that AWS will deploy 2 million additional Nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs) across its global infrastructure in 2027 and 2028. The commitment roughly triples the total the cloud giant had signed up for just five months earlier.
The market's reaction split the two companies. Nvidia, which reported earnings this week, jumped almost 9% on Thursday. Amazon, however, slipped about 1.5%, trading at about $256 as of this writing.
Which is it for Amazon shareholders: confirmation that demand for AI computing keeps outrunning supply, or 2 million more reasons to worry about a capital budget that already reached $220 billion this year?
Image source: Nvidia.
The commitment roughly tripled in five monthsAt Nvidia's GTC conference in March, AWS announced plans to add more than 1 million Nvidia GPUs starting in 2026. Since then, demand has exceeded those expectations, the companies said Wednesday. AWS now plans to deploy an additional 2 million GPUs (Nvidia's Blackwell Ultra, Rubin, and Rubin Ultra chips) in 2027 and 2028. That takes the committed total from more than 1 million to more than 3 million.
"NVIDIA and AWS have built one of the great growth engines of the AI era, and demand is running ahead of every forecast," Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang said in the announcement.
The announcement reaches beyond the GPUs, too. The companies plan to build AI factories for the U.S. government, including 100,000 GPUs on secure AWS infrastructure.
And Amazon's chip unit will work with Nvidia's custom high-bandwidth memory technology in the next generation of Trainium, Amazon's own AI silicon.
The bill was already $220 billionAmazon's capital spending was climbing before any of this. In February, the company estimated 2026 capital expenditures of about $200 billion, and it held that estimate in April. Then, on July's earnings call, CEO Andy Jassy raised the figure to about $220 billion, citing the higher cost of memory.
The money is already being spent. Amazon's purchases of property and equipment, net of what it gets back from sales and incentives, totaled $169 billion over the trailing 12 months as of the second quarter of 2026 -- an increase of $66.1 billion year over year that the company ties primarily to its investments in AI. Operating cash flow rose 33% to $161.4 billion over the same stretch. And free cash flow swung to an outflow of $7.6 billion, down from an inflow of $18.2 billion a year earlier.
"Even at that amount, we will still not have enough capacity to meet all the demand we have in 2026, and I believe this dynamic will also be true in 2027, too," Jassy said on the call. "In fact, the demand we already have for 2028 is striking."
That timing matters here. The new GPUs arrive in 2027 and 2028, past the window this year's budget covers. In other words, Wednesday's commitment signals that spending stays elevated well beyond 2026.
Is the demand showing up in revenue?It is. AWS revenue rose 28% year over year in the first quarter, then accelerated to 37% in the second, reaching $42.2 billion. It was the segment's fastest growth since 2021.
Even more, the contracted side of the business is moving faster. AWS's backlog of signed-but-not-yet-delivered work stood at $496 billion in the second quarter, Jassy said, growing at a triple-digit rate year over year. And AWS's AI revenue run rate has climbed past $25 billion annually, also growing at a triple-digit percentage year over year.
After all, a company doesn't triple a hardware commitment against demand it merely hopes shows up.
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Why did the stock slip on the news, then?
Nvidia's Thursday jump had a driver of its own -- the chipmaker reported blockbuster quarterly results Wednesday afternoon. Amazon's decline is the half that needs explaining, and the simplest explanation, I'd argue, is which side of the purchase order the company sits on. The same 2 million GPUs are future revenue for Nvidia and future spending for Amazon. And Amazon is the one whose free cash flow has already gone negative.
Sure, the outflow may widen before it reverses, and a $220 billion budget leaves Amazon little room to be wrong about where AI workloads are headed. Demand forecasts can miss.
But between the two readings of Wednesday's news, I think the evidence sits with demand. AWS is accelerating, its backlog is growing at a triple-digit rate, and Jassy has said capacity, not demand, is the constraint through at least 2027. The dip doesn't change any of that.
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Amazon is surging 4% on a massive GPU expansion deal with the very chip supplier that is simultaneously sinking 4% on the same news. The split tells a story about where Wall Street thinks AI infrastructure profits are really going.
Shares of Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN | AMZN Price Prediction) are moving hard against their own sector this afternoon after the company and its largest chip supplier confirmed a sharply expanded infrastructure deal. Amazon stock is up 4% to $265.25, extending a run that had already carried the shares up 11% year to date through Thursday’s close. The catalyst is a joint announcement to deploy far more GPU capacity for AI, robotics, and agentic workloads.
The twist is on the supplier side. NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA) stock is down 4% to $218.68, even as NVIDIA is the vendor selling those chips. NVIDIA stock had been up 22% year to date through Thursday’s close, and the current slide traces to a broad pullback in semiconductors rather than to the announcement itself.
The Technology Select Sector SPDR ETF (NYSEARCA:XLK) is down 1% to $185.89, and the Invesco QQQ Trust (NASDAQ:QQQ) is down 0.7% to $715.86. Amazon’s rally is running directly against both.
AWS Chip Deal Fueling Amazon The catalyst was confirmed by both companies: Amazon Web Services and NVIDIA announced an expanded partnership to deploy 2 million additional GPUs and next-generation infrastructure for agentic and physical AI. The announcement was made Wednesday evening, August 26, and coverage has continued through today, with TechCrunch characterizing the move as Amazon tripling its NVIDIA chip order on surging demand. Scope extends across AI infrastructure, agentic AI, and warehouse robotics.
The market is treating the deal as validation of AWS momentum. Second-quarter AWS revenue rose 37% year over year to $42.23 billion, its fastest growth in 18 quarters, and CEO Andy Jassy said the AI and Chips businesses each eclipsed run rates of more than $25 billion. The buildout has to be powered, cooled, and networked by somebody, which is the whole premise of our free report on seven AI infrastructure suppliers that aren’t chipmakers. Evercore ISI raised its Amazon price target to $355 from $315.16 after a survey pointed to strong Alexa AI shopping conversion.
Why NVIDIA Stock Is Falling on Its Own Good News NVIDIA is the company selling those chips, so the divergence looks strange, but the two moves have different causes. NVIDIA stock is sliding alongside a broad pullback in semiconductors and AI hardware, and no NVIDIA-specific catalyst has been verified today. The deal is a positive for both parties on its face.
The fundamentals from Tuesday’s report also raised the bar. NVIDIA delivered revenue of $96.221 billion and Data Center revenue of $89.023 billion, with CEO Jensen Huang stating that “AI has reached its inflection point. It’s doing useful work. Its tokens are productive and profitable. Now, compute is revenue.” Management also warned that “memory scarcity today is being driven in large part by the AI build-out itself,” and expects gross margin to trough near 71% to 72%, with that margin risk weighing on the group.
Peers Ride the Same Split Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) stock is up 2% to $517.09, and Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL) stock is up 2% to $346.45. Hyperscale platforms with visible customer commitments are catching a bid while their upstream chip supplier lags.
The bear case on Amazon hasn’t disappeared. Amazon spent $131 billion on capital expenditures in 2025, up from $83 billion in 2024, and raised its 2026 figure to approximately $220 billion, while trailing free cash flow turned to negative $7.6 billion against $161.4 billion in operating cash flow over the twelve months ended June 30. Some traders are treating the deal as confirmation of AWS scale, while others focus on capital intensity and depreciation pressure.
What to Watch Next Investors can watch for Amazon stock holding its gains as the technology sector weakens, alongside NVIDIA stock stabilizing once semiconductor selling exhausts. Options positioning skews light on downside insurance, with NVIDIA’s put/call ratio at 0.56 across the full chain.
Given the split tape, position sizing matters more than direction today. Traders who are comfortable with volatility can keep their exposure modest on both names, treating any Amazon extension above recent highs and any NVIDIA reclaim of its post-earnings level as the next technical checkpoints. The forward story hinges on 2027 AWS monetization and NVIDIA supply catching up to demand.
Contact [email protected] for any questions or corrections.
Jim Cramer spent Tuesday questioning Nvidia's biggest strategic moves, then reversed course Wednesday with one of his most bullish calls in years. Here is what changed his mind.
Two days after NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA | NVDA Price Prediction) reported fiscal Q2 2027 results, Jim Cramer argued that the numbers have refuted the bear case on hyperscaler AI spending. “The era of profitless chip buying is over. The era of humongous profits has begun.“
Just one day earlier, Cramer had questioned whether NVIDIA’s $30 billion OpenAI investment helped to finance OpenAI’s new competing chip. Now, Cramer’s bullish stance is great news for investors.
Customer Diversification Widens One of the big reasons for Cramer’s change in stance is Nvidia’s new diversification of its customer mix: “Hyperscalers, who want so much of Nvidia’s book of business, are now down to 50% of it. Sovereign buyers, neo cloud infrastructure builders getting the other 50%, far less dependence on a handful of titanic clients,” he said.
Bears read this as customers walking away, but investors like Cramer see this as diversification among key customers. NVIDIA’s ACI&E segment, which houses neoclouds, sovereigns, and enterprises, generated $40 billion in revenue with 138% year-over-year growth, and CFO Colette Kress said non-hyperscaler demand is expected to represent roughly half of NVIDIA’s data center business.
Useful Life Stretches to Seven Years Cramer directly addressed the obsolescence worry around Nvidia chips. “The chips are lasting far longer than anyone thought, maybe as long as seven years, because software updates keep them refreshed,” he said. If that estimate holds, the payback window on hyperscaler capex would lengthen materially. Profitability for hyperscaler investment could embolden decision makers to continue investing, which benefits Nvidia.
Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) disclosed that its servers have useful lives of at least 5-6 years and that server and networking investments break even in a little less than 3 years. Jensen Huang’s parallel claim: “The investment that you make will be preserved and useful and productive for a lot longer time.”
Customer Margins Expanding The profitability argument directly answers Principal Asset Management’s Seema Shah, who told CNBC on August 24 that investors would no longer accept capex plans without proof of monetization. AWS grew 36.7% year over year to $42.2 billion in Q2 2026, its fastest growth in 18 quarters, at a 39% operating margin.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang put it bluntly: “NVIDIA’s compute is so productive, the tokens they’re generating, the GPU hours they’re renting out is insanely profitable, as you know. Their margins are fantastic.“
AWS Commitment and Guidance Cramer noted that “Amazon Web Services plans to deploy 2 million GPUs, the kind of semis Nvidia specializes in, as well as plenty of Nvidia CPUs.” NVIDIA confirmed deployment starts this quarter and runs through the second quarter of fiscal 29, including Vera CPUs. Andy Jassy framed the choice as complementary, calling it a “deep partnership with NVIDIA” even as Amazon’s Trainium and Graviton chips business runs at over $25 billion annualized.
Management labeled the fiscal 2028 outlook as supply-constrained, with customer forecasts pointing to demand doubling next year. That aligns with BofA’s Vivek Arya, who on August 26 argued the balance sheet and ecosystem funding disclosures were the point, and called shares 30 to 50% cheap relative to earnings growth. NVIDIA’s Q2 FY27 8-K discloses supply commitments of $279 billion, primarily tied to Vera Rubin memory procurement.
AI ROI Debate Continues Huang wrapped the buildout in national terms: “This is America’s great opportunity. This is an extraordinary opportunity. AI data centers, AI factories are generating so many jobs all across America. Hundreds of thousands of jobs.“
NVIDIA’s quarter strengthened the argument that AI infrastructure is already producing real economic returns. Its customer base is widening, AWS plans to deploy 2 million GPUs, and demand could double again next year despite the company’s enormous scale. Concerns about funding and long-term returns have not disappeared, but Cramer now believes NVIDIA’s numbers have moved the burden of proof firmly onto the bears.
Contact [email protected] for any questions or corrections.
U.S. stocks turned lower Friday afternoon after Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh delivered a hawkish first Jackson Hole address, while Nvidia (NVDA -4.58%) gave back most of Thursday's post-earnings surge.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average (^DJI -0.02%) is dead flat, up 0.01% as of 1:05 p.m. ET. The S&P 500 (^GSPC -0.25%) is down 0.13% and the Nasdaq Composite (^IXIC -0.52%) has slipped 0.30%. All three were up around 0.5% earlier. Then, Warsh's words sank in and the gains melted away.
^DJI data by YCharts
Rate-hike odds rise and stocks fade Warsh didn't mince words in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Inflation is running too high, price stability comes first, and the Fed needs to see prices falling "clearly and at sufficient speed." Otherwise, the Fed will need to take uncomfortable action, which might include raising interest rates again.
Translation for investors: rate cuts are not on the menu in 2026, but potential hikes are back in the conversation.
The two-year Treasury yield jumped about 0.1 point, its biggest one-day move since June, and the odds of a September rate increase firmed up from 40% to a coin flip.
Federal Reserve chairman Kevin Warsh, speaking at the White House in May 2026. Image source: Getty Images, photographer Daniel Torok.
Higher rates weigh most on richly valued growth stocks, and the day's biggest drag reflected that. Nvidia (NVDA -4.58%) fell 4%, giving back roughly half of Thursday's 8.4% earnings jump. Semiconductors fell broadly, with the iShares Semiconductor ETF (SOXX -3.20%) down 3.3%.
It's not all doom and gloom, though. Exactly half of the 30 Dow stocks are up today. Apple (AAPL +1.63%) stock rose 1.9% as the company announced significant price increases for its Apple TV and Apple One services. And the safe harbor assets people usually flock to in uncertain times were actually down today. Gold and Bitcoin (BTC -3.17%) prices both fell by 2.9%.
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Friday reset the market's expectations The market had quietly started betting the Fed was done raising rates, despite stubborn inflation readings. Warsh, backed by Cleveland Fed President Beth Hammack's "raise rates now" comment a day earlier, just told everyone not to get too comfortable with that projection. Next month's rate-setting decision is genuinely up in the air, and the long-term economy looks murky.
The reversal also underscores how much this market depends on the rate outlook. Thursday's rally ran on Nvidia's earnings; Warsh's speech drove Friday's decline.
For long-term investors, the close of August is a reminder that strong earnings and a hawkish Fed can pull in opposite directions. Nvidia's results didn't change, but the financing-rate backdrop did. Nvidia won the week on paper, but the Fed set the tone for September.
Nvidia guided to 70% revenue growth and the stock jumped, but a KeyBanc analyst revealed the real demand figure is significantly higher, and understanding why the company cannot meet it changes everything about what you are actually buying.
John Vinh, Senior Research Analyst at KeyBanc Capital Markets, went on CNBC after NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA | NVDA Price Prediction) reported and said what actually moved the stock. “The outlook for next year was very impressive. Street was looking for up 45%. That was what was, I think, put NVIDIA over the top here.”
The company guided fiscal 2028 revenue growth to roughly 70% against a Street bar near 45%. Shares rose 8.74% on the day and closed at $227.98.
The interesting number is the gap Vinh described between real demand and deliverable supply, because that gap changes what kind of company you are underwriting when you buy the stock.
How the 100% Demand, 70% Supply Gap Reframes the Risk Vinh said the quiet part directly. “NVIDIA yesterday said that they actually have demand for 100% growth next year. But they’re actually supply constrained. And as a result is only currently able to grow 70%.”
Jensen Huang confirmed the same picture on the call, saying, “Our entire supply chain is challenged. And everybody is really running flat out.”
A company that cannot produce enough product is facing a manufacturing and supply chain problem, which carries different risks than a demand problem.
The bullish read is that the reported 70% growth understates the true demand, suggesting the backlog persists into 2028. Vinh believes it does. “I do think that demand is clearly durable through all of next year and probably into a good part of 2028 right now.”
The hidden risk is that supply-constrained revenue depends on partners NVIDIA does not control, including memory suppliers, foundry capacity, and data-center power (we profiled seven of the infrastructure suppliers behind that buildout in a free report). A demand figure the company cannot fulfill is also unverifiable from outside, so you are taking the guidance on trust.
Supply obligations climbed to $279.00 billion, largely for memory tied to Vera Rubin, which shows how big the check has to clear before the revenue does.
What 20 Times Forward Earnings Actually Means Vinh set a price target of $330, saying “It’s based on 20 times our numbers.”
A forward earnings multiple is the price you pay today for each dollar of expected earnings next year. Twenty is roughly what an investor pays for a solid large-cap growing at a much slower rate than the one NVIDIA just guided to.
The stock currently trades at a forward multiple of 24x, which is not stretched for a company that reported 105.85% revenue growth last quarter.
Vinh’s target rests on the earnings estimate coming true at roughly the multiple the market already assigns. That is where real skepticism belongs. If fiscal 2028 EPS comes in below plan because memory prices squeeze margins to the guided 71%-72% trough, or because supply slips, the multiple is fine and the earnings number is not.
Merchant Alternative Question Vinh also said, “There is no other merchant AI chip solution out there on the market that is a credible alternative to NVIDIA right now.”
As stated, that is true. AMD’s Instinct line is real but not at the same rack-scale system maturity, and Intel’s Gaudi has not taken hold at hyperscale.
The word doing the heavy lifting is merchant. Hyperscalers building their own silicon, including Google’s TPU, Amazon’s Trainium, and Microsoft’s Maia, are not merchant vendors and do not appear in that framing.
NVIDIA disclosed its Q2 revenue of $96.22 billion in an 8-K filing and, in the same release, announced an AWS expansion of 2 million GPUs, even as Amazon promotes its own Trainium accelerators.
Custom silicon is a slower threat than a competing merchant part because it steals the internal workload of one buyer over years rather than the incremental buyer, which is why Vinh’s claim holds for now.
What Would Break This Thesis The thesis breaks if memory pricing does not normalize and gross margin gets stuck below 72%, because that is the assumption inside the earnings estimate.
It breaks if a hyperscaler’s custom chip reaches the point where it displaces NVIDIA at the margin for inference workloads, since inference is where volume compounds fastest.
It breaks if China Data Center compute does not return and the assumed zero contribution becomes a permanent absence, though management already excludes it from the $108.0 billion Q3 guide.
The most likely point of fracture is the financing structure. NVIDIA has invested nearly $50 billion in frontier AI labs and organized more than $500 billion of third-party capital with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs, and KKR.
Huang addressed the framing head-on. “We recognize the scale of this support, and we know some will call this circular financing. We see it differently.” The thesis holds while that capital keeps clearing. It breaks the moment it stops.
Contact [email protected] for any questions or corrections.
Earlier this week, Meta agreed to pay $18 billion and make sweeping changes to how minors access its social networks to settle a lawsuit brought by 29 states. But the eye-popping settlement figure wasn't what caught the attention of the Equity podcast team.
"Fantastic" tech earnings, showcased the most by Nvidia (NVDA), offers what Dennis Dick considers a solidifying AI trade. Marvell (MRVL) then "pulled the rug out" from under Wall Street.
Earlier this week, Meta agreed to pay $18 billion and make sweeping changes to how minors access its social networks to settle a lawsuit brought by 29 states. But the eye-popping settlement figure wasn’t what caught the attention of the Equity podcast team. Instead, it was what Meta did next. The social media giant sent an open letter to TikTok and YouTube asking the companies to join it in setting industry-wide standards for teens, including daily time limits, blocking access to apps at night, and restricting notifications during school hours.
But will these other companies follow? The Equity team doesn’t think they will.
On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Rebecca Bellan, Kirsten Korosec, and Sean O’Kane dig into the Meta settlement, what it could mean for other social media companies, and more of the week’s headlines.
Listen to the full episode to hear more about:
How investors are pouring money into robotics startups and driving up valuations. For instance, Generalist reached a $3 billion valuation, while General Intuition hit the $6 billion mark. Even though robotics is a hot sector, there is pain point: robots still lack the know-how to do value-creating work. What senior reporter Sean O’Kane discovered when he dug into OSHA data connected to robotaxi companies like Waymo and Zoox. What self-driving truck startup Gatik’s $200 million raise means for the sector. Hugging Face is reportedly being acquired by Nvidia. The team weighs in what this means for the industry. Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and wherever you get your podcasts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.
Topics
Kirsten Korosec is a reporter and editor who has covered the future of transportation from EVs and autonomous vehicles to urban air mobility and in-car tech for more than a decade. She is currently the transportation editor at TechCrunch and co-host of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast. She is also co-founder and co-host of the podcast, “The Autonocast.” She previously wrote for Fortune, The Verge, Bloomberg, MIT Technology Review and CBS Interactive.
You can contact or verify outreach from Kirsten by emailing [email protected] or via encrypted message at kkorosec.07 on Signal.
Sean O’Kane is a reporter who has spent a decade covering the rapidly-evolving business and technology of the transportation industry, including Tesla and the many startups chasing Elon Musk. Most recently, he was a reporter at Bloomberg News where he helped break stories about some of the most notorious EV SPAC flops. He previously worked at The Verge, where he also covered consumer technology, hosted many short- and long-form videos, performed product and editorial photography, and once nearly passed out in a Red Bull Air Race plane.
You can contact or verify outreach from Sean by emailing [email protected] or via encrypted message at okane.01 on Signal.
Rebecca Bellan is a senior reporter at TechCrunch where she covers the business, policy, and emerging trends shaping artificial intelligence. Her work has also appeared in Forbes, Bloomberg, The Atlantic, The Daily Beast, and other publications.
You can contact or verify outreach from Rebecca by emailing [email protected] or via encrypted message at rebeccabellan.491 on Signal.
Marvell's (MRVL) new relationship with Alphabet (GOOGL) is what Noah Hamman sees as the catalyst the custom silicone developer needs to become a key tech player. Earnings from Nvidia (NVDA) confirming the AI trade is still in full swing is another factor Noah sees benefitting Marvell and similar companies.
Nvidia (NVDA -4.58%) left no doubt it remains the king of AI when the company reported its fiscal Q2 earnings after the bell on August 26. The chipmaker's revenue surged in the quarter, while its guidance came in well ahead of analyst expectations. It also did something it's never done before, giving a forecast more than a year out.
Let's dig into Nvidia's fiscal Q2 results and prospects to see why the semiconductor stock still remains a top AI stock to buy.
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No slowing down The law of large numbers is still not catching up with Nvidia, as the company's fiscal Q2 revenue growth accelerated to an eye-popping 106%, coming in at $96.2 billion. That's up from 85% growth in fiscal Q1, 73% growth in Q4 2025, 62% growth in Q3 2025, and 56% growth in Q2 2025.
Adjusted earnings per share (EPS), meanwhile, skyrocketed 120% to $2.22 from $1.01. The results easily topped analyst expectations for adjusted EPS of $2.09 on sales of $92.3 billion.
Data center segment revenue once again led the way, up 117% year over year to $89 billion. Nvidia's smaller edge computing segment, meanwhile, saw revenue rise 27% to $7.2 billion.
Within its data center segment, hyperscaler revenue soared 102% to $48.7 billion, helped by these companies' large AI infrastructure buildouts. AI cloud, industrial, and enterprise (ACIE) revenue, meanwhile, skyrocketed 138% to $40.3 billion. It said the growth was driven by neocloud expansions to meet rising enterprise, sovereign, and AI-start-up demand. It said it has nearly 20 customers that contribute $1 billion or more in annual recurring revenue.
Nvidia highlighted the strength of its ecosystem and new products as a big differentiator. Its networking business once again shone, with Spectrum-X Ethernet revenue growing 2.6 times year over year. Meanwhile, it expects its central processing unit (CPU) revenue to double in fiscal 2028, while Groq 3 LPX, its first rack-scale language processing unit (LPU) system built for inference, is in full production.
The company continues to throw off a huge amount of cash, with operating cash flow of $24.1 billion and free cash flow of $21.4 billion in the quarter. It ended the period with cash and marketable securities of $99.3 billion and $32.4 billion in debt. It also has $51.2 billion in non-marketable securities, which are its investments in non-public companies.
Looking ahead, Nvidia guided for fiscal Q3 revenue to come in around $108 billion, which would represent 89% growth. The growth will be led by the ACIE segment, with hyperscaler revenue picking up in fiscal Q4 and into fiscal 2028. What really shocked investors, though, was that the company projected revenue to grow by 70% in fiscal 2028, well above the 44% growth analysts have been projecting, while saying growth would be higher if not for supply constraints.
Image source: The Motley Fool.
The stock is still a buy Nvidia continues to demonstrate why it's one of the best companies on the planet. It's much more than just a graphics processing unit (GPU) designer nowadays, becoming a complete AI infrastructure solutions provider with leading networking, CPU, and other chips that it can combine to create end-to-end AI server racks for specific AI tasks, including inference, agentic AI, and AI model training.
Notably, this quarter was the first time Nvidia has ever given a forecast a year in advance, speaking to the long-term visibility the company is seeing. CEO Jensen Huang also noted that demand is more broad-based and that the AI ecosystem is healthier than a year ago, as OpenAI is no longer the only force driving the AI infrastructure buildout, with multiple frontier model labs scaling up and a thriving open-model ecosystem, as well.
Despite its remarkable growth and increasing visibility, Nvidia's stock is still attractively valued, trading at a forward price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio of around 17 times based on the fiscal 2028 analyst consensus, with estimates likely to go up. Between its growth, valuation, and improving visibility, Nvidia is a must-own AI semiconductor stock.
Nvidia's (NVDA -4.58%) data center business booked $89.0 billion in revenue during the second quarter of fiscal 2027 (the period ended July 26). That was 117% higher than a year earlier, and up 18% from the prior quarter. In 13 weeks, that one business brought in more than the entire company did in any quarter before this fiscal year.
Here's my prediction: before fiscal 2027 closes in late January, the data center business clears $100 billion in a single quarter.
That is not a bold call about demand. It's mostly math on numbers Nvidia has already published. And the outcome is closer than the growth rates suggest.
Image source: Getty Images.
Two things have to hold for the milestone to arrive. Total revenue has to land near Nvidia's guidance, and the data center business has to keep its share of the total. Both have been moving in one direction.
A year ago, in the second quarter of fiscal 2026, data center revenue was 87.9% of Nvidia's total. The share rose to 89.8% the next quarter, then 91.5%, then 92.2%, then 92.5% in the quarter just reported.
So its share has risen every quarter for a year, though each step has been smaller than the last. The artificial intelligence build-out simply swamped everything else Nvidia sells.
The rest of the company is not shrinking, to be sure. Edge computing revenue (everything Nvidia sells outside the data center, from workstations to automotive) rose 27% from the year-ago period. Data center just grew more than four times faster.
Does the October quarter get there?Nvidia's guidance for the fiscal third quarter calls for total revenue of $108.0 billion, plus or minus 2%. Hold the data center mix at last quarter's 92.5%, and data center revenue works out to $99.9 billion -- about $100 million short of the line.
So the October quarter comes down to a rounding error. For the business to clear $100 billion this quarter, its share of revenue needs to tick up to just 92.6%, a smaller step than it has taken in any of the past four quarters. One more quarter of the same drift gets there.
Notably, the guidance assumes zero data center compute revenue from China. Any licensed shipments there would be upside, supply permitting.
And Vera Rubin, the company's next-generation platform, began production shipments in August. Management expects it to account for about 20% of data center revenue in the current quarter -- new supply arriving inside the business, one more reason the mix should hold.
I'd still treat October as too close to call. Guidance is a midpoint, not a floor, and a result at the bottom of the guided range would leave it near $98 billion even at a richer mix.
January settles itThe fourth quarter is where the prediction stops being close. Nvidia has a record of beating its own numbers -- the July quarter's $96.2 billion came in more than $3 billion above the top of the guided range. And the company said growth in its hyperscale business (sales to the giant cloud computing providers and the biggest consumer internet companies) should reaccelerate in the fiscal fourth quarter as Vera Rubin supply builds.
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Even if revenue merely held flat at $108 billion, one more small step in mix pushes the business past $100 billion. After all, for the milestone to slip past January, that yearlong climb would have to stall out entirely, just as the company's newest platform ramp lands squarely inside it.
Could that happen?
Of course. A supply disruption or a demand shock could do it, and a company guiding to 89% year-over-year growth carries plenty of ways to surprise. But nothing in the company's published numbers points that way.
So my prediction stands. The January quarter likely clears $100 billion comfortably, and the October quarter has a decent shot at getting there first. Either way, a single business line is about to produce more revenue in a single quarter than the vast majority of S&P 500 companies produce in a year. That scale, not any one quarter's milestone, is what investors are paying for when they buy this stock. And to me, it remains the strongest growth engine the market has to offer, for now.
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Nvidia delivered a “shockingly bullish” outlook for its next fiscal year, in the words of one analyst — but the sheer level of expected growth has some investors wondering what's behind such upbeat projections.
Listen to the audio version of this article (generated by AI).
Earlier this year, the bull case for space stocks rested largely on what could happen next.
Six months later, our technology expert Luke Lango says several of those potential catalysts are becoming reality.
In today’s Friday Digest takeover, Luke revisits the space trade and highlights four developments that he believes have made the investment case significantly stronger: 1) Washington is moving from pro-space policy to actual regulatory reform. 2) SpaceX is now a publicly traded company with financial results that validate the commercial opportunity. 3) Orbital AI is moving from science fiction toward real hardware. 4) And falling launch costs could make entirely new space businesses economically viable.
Put it all together, and Luke believes we’re approaching an important inflection point – not necessarily for one particular space stock, but for an entire ecosystem of companies that could benefit as more money flows into orbit.
And Luke sees one common thread running through all four catalysts. In his latest presentation, he explains what it is – and highlights one overlooked supplier he believes could be especially well positioned if this space boom accelerates. You can watch it right here.
For now, I’ll let Luke walk you through why he believes the space trade is entering a new phase.
Have a good evening,
Jeff Remsburg
Editor’s note: “4 Catalysts That Could Put Space Stocks Back in Orbit in 2026” was previously published in February 2026 with the title, “Orbital Compute and Space AI Stocks: The 2026 Breakout Setup.” It has since been updated to include the most relevant information available.
For years, the bull case for space stocks has rested on a very simple idea.
Make it dramatically cheaper and easier to operate in orbit, and humans will find dramatically more things to do there.
Communications. Earth observation. Defense. Manufacturing. Pharmaceuticals. Artificial intelligence. Eventually, perhaps, enormous orbital data centers.
Earlier this year, the setup looked mostly like a convergence of future catalysts: a new White House space policy, a potential SpaceX (SPCX) IPO and a still-speculative orbital-compute narrative. That framing is now stale. Several of those catalysts have already happened – and the evidence behind the broader thesis is stronger than it was six months ago.
The better question today is not which space stock has the best quarter. It is whether the industry itself is entering a new regime.
I think it may be. And there are four catalysts that matter most.
Catalyst 1: Washington Is Moving From Space Policy to Space Execution The policy catalyst is no longer just an executive order with a list of future deadlines.
On December 18, 2025, the White House issued the “Ensuring American Space Superiority” executive order. It set goals that included a U.S. return to the Moon by 2028, initial elements of a permanent lunar outpost by 2030, a commercial pathway to replace the International Space Station by 2030, greater use of commercial solutions in government procurement, space-security architecture reforms and development of space nuclear power.
Just as important, the order required NASA and the Commerce Department to reform space acquisitions within 180 days, with a first preference for commercial solutions and a general preference for faster contracting tools such as Other Transactions Authority and Space Act Agreements.
Those deadlines have now passed. And we are starting to see the implementation layer show up in the real world.
In March, the FAA completed the industry transition to its Part 450 licensing framework, which allows a single license to cover broader portfolios of launch and reentry operations and is designed to reduce administrative burden. On July 23, the Office of Space Commerce moved forward with a new “Space Commerce Certification” framework intended to streamline authorization for novel in-space activities such as satellite servicing, commercial stations and lunar manufacturing. On July 28, the FAA announced another initiative aimed at further streamlining commercial-space licensing and environmental review. On July 30, the Space Force said it had completed an initial acquisition-transformation plan that delegates more authority to portfolio executives and explicitly prioritizes minimum viable products, rapid iteration and commercial innovation. That is a meaningful change from the setup at the start of the year.
The investment thesis is no longer simply that Washington wants a bigger commercial space economy. It is that the regulatory and procurement machinery is being rewired to make that economy easier to build.
For public space companies, that can translate into faster licensing, shorter sales cycles, more fixed-price and “as-a-service” contracts, and a larger pool of government demand that can reach newer entrants instead of flowing almost exclusively through traditional primes.
That is the first catalyst: policy is becoming process.
Catalyst 2: SpaceX Has Become the Sector’s Public-Market Benchmark Back in February, the potential SpaceX IPO was the event investors were waiting for. That event has already happened.
SpaceX priced its IPO at $135 per share and closed the offering on June 15, generating roughly $85.7 billion in gross proceeds.
That alone mattered because it gave the space sector a benchmark asset with enough scale and liquidity to force generalist investors to pay attention.
But the bigger catalyst arrived in early August, when SpaceX reported its first quarter as a public company.
Revenue surged 92% year-over-year to $7.8 billion. Starlink subscribers doubled to 12 million. Connectivity revenue reached about $4.3 billion. Enterprise and government connectivity revenue jumped 108%. And the company disclosed more than $6 billion of multi-year U.S. government awards tied largely to Starshield communications and sensing constellations.
Those numbers are important because they put hard evidence behind several pillars of the space-economy thesis at once.
Satellite connectivity can scale to tens of millions of users and billions of dollars in quarterly revenue. Governments are willing to spend billions on commercial satellite architectures for communications, sensing and intelligence. A vertically integrated space company can capture economics across launch, satellites, services and AI rather than relying on a single revenue stream. That is a much stronger catalyst than the IPO itself.
The IPO created attention. The earnings report created validation.
And that validation can spill across the rest of the sector – especially into smaller companies exposed to launch, spacecraft systems, power, sensors, Earth observation, intelligence and defense infrastructure.
SpaceX is still both the rising tide and the shark swimming within it. Its scale creates real competitive risk for companies that go head-to-head with Starlink, Starshield or its launch business. But for suppliers, infrastructure companies and differentiated platforms, the bigger message is that the addressable market is becoming much more tangible.
Catalyst 3: Orbital Compute Is Becoming an Actual Product Roadmap The third catalyst is the one that sounded most absurd at the beginning of the year: data centers in space.
That idea is still early. The engineering challenges are real, including radiation, heat rejection, communications bandwidth, spacecraft lifetime and launch economics. But the narrative has moved materially closer to an investable technology roadmap.
In March, Nvidia (NVDA) formally launched its Space-1 Vera Rubin Module and other accelerated-computing platforms aimed at orbital data centers, geospatial intelligence and autonomous space operations. Nvidia said Aetherflux, Axiom Space, Kepler Communications, Planet Labs, Sophia Space and Starcloud were already using its computing platforms for next-generation space missions.
That matters because Nvidia is no longer merely profiling a startup experimenting with a GPU in orbit. It is now shipping a purpose-built space-computing platform into an ecosystem of customers and partners.
Google is also moving forward with Project Suncatcher, its research program exploring solar-powered machine-learning compute in orbit. Google and Planet Labs are targeting two prototype satellites for launch by early 2027.
And SpaceX has gone much further. Its Starmind roadmap now describes an AI1 satellite with roughly 120 kilowatts of average compute payload, laser links through Starlink and a planned Gigasat factory designed to support production of thousands of AI satellites beginning as soon as late 2027.
This does not mean orbital data centers are about to replace Northern Virginia or West Texas.
They do not need to.
The market only needs to believe that space-based compute is credible enough to justify prototypes, capex, launch demand and a new stack of enabling infrastructure.
And that stack is broad:
Large-scale launch and payload deployment; Space-grade solar power and energy storage; Radiation-tolerant compute and electronics; Thermal management and radiators; Laser communications and high-bandwidth networking; Autonomous spacecraft operations; In-space servicing, assembly and manufacturing. This is why orbital compute could matter to the space-stock trade long before it becomes a large revenue category. It creates another reason for capital to flow into the enabling stack.
Wall Street buys optionality first and waits for revenue later.
Catalyst 4: Starship Could Break the Space Cost Curve Again Everything above ultimately depends on one variable: economics.
The space economy gets much bigger when the cost of reaching orbit goes down.
We have already seen that movie once. Reusable Falcon rockets helped collapse launch costs relative to the Space Shuttle era and enabled huge constellations such as Starlink to exist in the first place.
Starship is an attempt to do it again on a much larger scale.
SpaceX describes Starship and Super Heavy as a fully reusable transportation system. The company flew the first V3 vehicle on May 22 and completed its thirteenth Starship flight test on July 24, continuing the rapid iteration toward greater payload capacity, flight rate and reusability.
The exact future cost per kilogram remains uncertain. That is the risk. But directionally, the importance is hard to overstate.
If launch becomes dramatically cheaper and cadence rises, the economics improve for almost every downstream space business at once.
Satellite operators can deploy larger constellations and refresh them more frequently. Earth-observation companies can put more sensors in orbit and shorten revisit times. Defense customers can build proliferated architectures with more redundancy and faster replacement cycles. In-space manufacturing can move from one-off experiments toward repeatable commercial missions. Orbital compute becomes less constrained by the mass of solar arrays, radiators, networking hardware and AI processors that must be launched. That is the underlying flywheel of the entire thesis: cheaper launch creates more missions; more missions create more infrastructure demand; more infrastructure creates new applications; and those applications create still more launch demand.
Why These Catalysts Matter More Than Any Single Stock This is the biggest change I would make to the space-stock thesis today.
At the beginning of 2026, it was tempting to frame the story as a list of individual winners: Rocket Lab for launch, Redwire for infrastructure, Planet Labs and BlackSky for Earth observation, AST SpaceMobile for direct-to-device connectivity.
Those company-specific stories still matter. But they are downstream of the more important question: is the space economy itself getting easier to finance, easier to regulate, cheaper to access and more useful?
Right now, the answer is increasingly yes.
Washington is making commercial activity easier to authorize and acquire. SpaceX has demonstrated commercial scale in connectivity and national-security demand. Nvidia, Google, and SpaceX are turning orbital AI into real hardware programs. And Starship is still attacking the launch-cost bottleneck that sits underneath the entire industry.
If those four trends continue moving in the same direction, the sector does not need one perfect stock pick to work. Capital can spread across multiple layers of the value chain.
The highest-beta beneficiaries will still be volatile. But that volatility is exactly why the catalyst framework matters: it gives us something more useful to watch than day-to-day stock prices.
The Updated 2026 Space Playbook: What to Track Next If these catalysts are real, the confirmation should show up in a handful of places over the next several months:
Commercial-space regulation: watch implementation of the Space Commerce Certification framework, FAA licensing reforms and any evidence that novel missions are reaching approval faster.
Government procurement: watch NASA, Space Force and intelligence-community contract velocity, especially fixed-price, commercial and “as-a-service” awards.
SpaceX quarters: the IPO is over; the new catalyst is whether SpaceX keeps proving that connectivity, government services and launch can scale economically as a public company.
Starship cadence and reusability: every successful flight that moves Starship closer to routine reuse improves the economic case for almost every downstream application.
Sector breadth: the healthiest signal would be rallies spreading beyond SpaceX into launch, infrastructure, Earth observation, defense and communications rather than one stock carrying the entire theme.
The Bottom Line The space-economy bull thesis looks different today than it did at the start of 2026.
The White House executive order is no longer just a promise; implementation is showing up in licensing and acquisition reform.
The SpaceX IPO is no longer a rumor; it is the largest public-market benchmark the industry has ever had, and its first earnings report put hard numbers behind the thesis.
Orbital compute is no longer just Elon Musk talking about data centers in space; Nvidia has launched space-computing hardware, Google has prototype satellites scheduled, and SpaceX has published a product and manufacturing roadmap for Starmind.
And the launch-cost curve is still moving in the direction that matters most.
Put those together and the 2026 setup is no longer “policy tailwind + speculative narrative + future IPO.”
It is now policy execution + proven commercial scale + funded AI infrastructure + a potentially collapsing cost curve.
That is a much stronger foundation for the next space-stock breakout – and a much better framework for understanding where capital could flow next.
And if you trace where that capital is flowing right now, you’ll notice the four catalysts in this piece share one thing in common. Every single one leads back to the same man.
The policy shift – he spent months in Washington laying its groundwork. The public benchmark – his company. The orbital compute roadmap – his product. The collapsing cost curve – his rocket.
That’s an unmistakable pattern. And I believe it’s building toward something far bigger than a strong quarter or a sector rally.
Elon Musk has been assembling this plan for nearly two decades. Now, insiders from his own biographer to the president of SpaceX expect it to reach its final form soon.
When it does, the biggest gains will come from the small, overlooked suppliers that story can’t happen without – including one trading for just $15 a share.
I’ve laid out the full picture – and your way in – right here.
Nvidia (NVDA -4.58%) has made its name in AI chips, and its dominance in that arena has made it the most valuable company in the world, with a market cap of $5.5 trillion.
However, along the way, Nvidia has established itself as a major investor in AI companies and something of a kingmaker as well.
Its recent 13-F filing showed that it owned eight stocks with a total market value of $63.4 billion at the end of the second quarter. Those stocks were the following, in order of market value:
Intel (214.8 million shares) Space Exploration Technologies (122.8 million shares) CoreWeave (47.2 million shares) Nebius (22.3 million shares) Coherent (7.8 million shares) Nokia (166.4 million shares) Synopsys (4.8 million shares) Generate Biomedicines (833.3 million shares) That portfolio gives Nvidia exposure to a wide range of AI companies.
Image source: Getty Images.
The eight stocks Nvidia owns Intel, which it bought when the stock was near its bottom, is a competitor to Nvidia in some ways, but Nvidia invested in Intel as part of a partnership to develop data center and personal computing products together. Intel is also the largest U.S.-based foundry, and the move comes as American semiconductor manufacturing has become a national priority.
SpaceX has become a close partner of Nvidia. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said his company would exclusively build on Nvidia architecture and called the new Vera Rubin platform the best AI system available. In turn, Nvidia strengthened the mutual relationship by taking a stake currently worth close to $20 billion in Nvidia. SpaceX is aiming to rapidly ramp up its AI compute capacity, with a goal of reaching 10GW by the end of 2027, which should favor Nvidia as well.
CoreWeave and Nebius both represent the leading neocloud stocks and are both close partners of Nvidia, as they essentially buy the company's chips and use them to rent out AI compute.
Coherent is a leading optics, photonics, and lasers company and plays a role in AI infrastructure by providing the optical connectivity that helps manage the power and heat generated in AI computing. Coherent is also a key supplier for Nvidia, and the investment helps secure that relationship.
Nvidia invested $1 billion in Nokia to lead the transition from 5G to 6G and to accelerate AI-radio access network (AI-RAN) technology, which integrates AI directly into mobile network base stations. The partnership will help build the AI-native wireless era.
Synopsys is an electronic design automation (EDA) software company which test microchips before manufacturing them. Nvidia's $2 billion investment in Synopsys and related partnership will accelerate Nvidia's chip design and its engineering simulations.
Finally, Nvidia took a small stake in Generate Biomedicines to gain exposure to the emerging field of generative biology, which includes AI-driven drug discovery and the design of proteins and medicines from scratch.
What's missing from the list Nvidia has cleverly assembled a portfolio of investments across a range of partners, including foundry, Neoclouds, optics, telecom, and EDA, as well as SpaceX, which is a unique company.
However, energy supply is a key concern for AI companies and is emerging as one of the biggest potential bottlenecks.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang recently said that AI needs "1,000 times more power than we currently have."
One fast-growing company that is meeting that need with an alternative fuel source is Bloom Energy (BE -3.24%), a hydrogen fuel-cell company that recently crossed $1 billion in quarterly revenue. Bloom also just signed a $25 billion AI infrastructure power partnership with Brookfield Asset Management, one of the world's largest real estate developers.
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Will Nvidia invest in Bloom Energy? Bloom's revenue jumped 166% in its most recent quarter, and the stock is up nearly 2,000% in the last two years, showing it has emerged as one of the big winners from the AI boom.
The company's technology is now used by every major U.S. hyperscaler and more than a dozen neoclouds, AI labs, and data center operators, showing it's gained broad adoption.
Nvidia isn't a direct partner of Bloom since the chipmaker doesn't operate data centers, but it makes sense for Nvidia as an investment, especially if Huang is confident in the future growth of AI and its expanding energy needs.
Predicting future acquisitions or investments is difficult, but it would make sense for Nvidia to partner with some kind of AI energy company. Bloom Energy looks like a great choice.
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Nvidia (NVDA -2.91%) CEO Jensen Huang is known for his ability to see the future, but a recent prediction he made may be one of his most important ever, at least from an investor perspective.
Huang told investors to buy the stock on June 8 at a conference in Seoul, South Korea, saying, "We're at the beginning of it, and whatever happened to the stock market, you should be very happy because now you can buy at a discount."
Nvidia had pulled back around 10% from its all-time high a few weeks earlier, but thus far, that prediction has not paid off as Nvidia is essentially flat since then.
However, that's not a reason to give up on Huang or the world's most valuable, but his comment does raise the question of whether a CEO should be trusted when they urge investors to buy their company's stock or when they buy it themselves.
Image source: Nvidia.
What history says about CEO predictions There's no strict data set that shows how stocks have performed after comments like Huang's above. However, there is some evidence that these kinds of predictions are correlated positively with outperformance over the long term.
According to one study, stocks that are heavily purchased by their own CEOs have outperformed the broad market by 4%-6% over the next 12 months.
Some of the most admired CEOs have also made insider purchases that have portended long-term gains in their stocks.
For example, Jamie Dimon bought 500,000 shares of JPMorgan Chase stock in early 2016 when bank stocks were falling due to a collapse in oil prices and weakness in China. The move helped spark a recovery in the financial sector, marked the bottom in JPMorgan Chase stock, and kicked off a sustained bull run in the stock. Since then, the stock is up roughly 500% and has returned nearly 700% on a total-return basis.
SoFi CEO Anthony Noto bought $5 million of his company's stock at under $5 share in late 2022 after it had plunged during the 2022 bear market. Though the stock didn't immediately respond to the purchase, it began climbing through 2023 and reached a peak above $30 late last year.
Finally, Elon Musk purchased $20 million of Tesla stock in late 2018 when he said the company was in "production hell." Tesla would slide through mid-2019, but then skyrocketed through 2020, jumping more than 1,000%.
However, not every CEO endorsement leads to success. Wirecard CEO Markus Braun purchased company stock to help defend the company against allegations of accounting fraud, but the ploy ultimately failed, and Wirecard went bankrupt.
More recently, The Trade Desk CEO Jeff Green bought $150 million worth of the stock in early March, though the adtech stock has continued to slide, falling nearly 50% since then.
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What it means for investors Of the CEOs above, two of them are among the most admired in business: Jamie Dimon and Elon Musk, and Jensen Huang fits into that category as well.
Nvidia has yet to report earnings this quarter, but it will release second-quarter results on Wednesday, and the stock looks ready for another leg up as the valuation looks cheap for its growth rate. Additionally, hyperscaler capex spending continues to move up, favoring Nvidia.
Analysts expect revenue to jump 97% to $92.2 billion and for adjusted earnings per share to double to $2.09.
Nvidia wasn't trading at a deep discount when Huang made his statement in June, but his past efforts to cheerlead the stock have paid off. This one looks like a good bet to do so as well.
SpaceXAI, the artificial intelligence arm of Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (NASDAQ:SPCX), is adopting Nvidia Corp.‘s (NASDAQ:NVDA) Vera CPUs as Elon Musk touts a more cost-effective, space-optimized Vera Rubin system for orbital AI.
Space-Optimized Vera RubinOn Monday, Musk took to the social media platform X, quoting a post by the chipmaker that revealed the Vera Rubin, touting it as “the first CPU built for agents is going to work at scale,” adding that SpaceX would be deploying the CPU.
Musk, in his post, said that SpaceX had “designed a space-optimized Vera Rubin NVL72 system for launch to orbit in Q4 next year, with significant scale in 2028.”
In the same thread, Musk outlined that SpaceX’s design was “significantly simpler, lower cost, denser and lighter than a traditional rack.”
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SpaceX’s 10,000 Launches Goal, Ukraine’s Starlink PushThe news comes as Musk had earlier touted that SpaceX would be targeting 10,000 launches of the company’s Starship rocket annually by the end of the decade. The comments came as President Donald Trump outlined an updated space policy, targeting 1,000 launches by 2030.
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Musk also predicted that SpaceX could perform the first-ever mid-air catch of an upper-stage rocket with Starship flight 14 in the coming months.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy urged Musk to reconsider his opposition to letting Ukraine use Starlink internet over Russian territory as the war between Russia and Ukraine looks poised to enter its fifth year.
NVIDIA EarningsNVIDIA is also going to host its second-quarter 2026 earnings call on Wednesday, with analysts expecting the chipmaker to report second-quarter revenue of $92.03 billion, which would be up nearly 100% from its $46.14 billion revenue the company reported in last year’s second quarter.
Price Action: SPCX shares were up 0.76% to $136.02 during overnight trading on Monday.
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Nvidia Corporation (NVDA -2.91%) said on Aug. 24 that Groq 3 LPX, its new low-latency artificial intelligence (AI) inference system, is in full production and will come online before the end of 2026. Nebius will be the first AI cloud to adopt it through the Nebius Token Factory platform.
The production announcement came exactly eight months after Nvidia signed a $20 billion licensing agreement with the chip designer, Groq Inc, on Dec. 24, 2025.
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Nvidia's $20 billion Groq deal closed on Dec. 24, 2025At the end of last year, Groq, a neocloud and semiconductor start-up focused on creating low-latency chips for AI inference, signed a non-exclusive licensing agreement with Nvidia.
At the same time, Nvidia hired Groq founder and CEO Jonathan Ross, president Sunny Madra, and much of the engineering staff. It held off on actually acquiring Groq as a company, however, and Groq remains an independent entity.
Nvidia reportedly paid $20 billion in cash for the assets.
Groq 3 LPX debuted at GTC with 256 LPUs and 35x efficiency gainsAccording to the company, the liquid-cooled Groq 3 rack contains 256 language processing units (LPUs) and is part of Nvidia's Vera Rubin platform. Nvidia's GPUs handle AI training and large-context "prefill" work, while LPX accelerates inference where speed is king.
Groq's design leans on on-chip memory and other design trade-offs that make it especially suited to inference, but bring limitations that make it less so for other tasks like training. Even with inference, however, they work best in conjunction with Nvidia's premier chips working alongside them, which is why the company is positioning LPX beside GPU racks rather than as a stand-alone replacement for them.
LPX can be paired with Nvidia’s new Vera Rubin chips without customers changing their CUDA workflows -- the software that dominates as the standard base layer across the AI industry. CUDA is a critical reason -- maybe the critical reason -- Nvidia has dominated for as long as it has.
The company says it estimates that a system that pairs the LPX and Vera Rubin would process inference workloads with as much as 35 times the throughput for each megawatt of power used. Given that access to electricity is one of the most pressing constraints in the industry at the moment -- and likely will be for some time -- efficiency is paramount.
Why the eight-month turnaround mattersNvidia moved extremely fast here -- from signing the deal to announcing full production in less than three quarters. In that time, it managed to merge the new hardware into its complex ecosystem, turning what could have been a threat to its dominance into an asset. That is an impressive turn of events.
Nvidia is making a critical move to get ahead of what could be a major shift in the industry. Training models is important and will undoubtedly continue to demand a massive amount of chips, but I think the focus across the market will shift more and more toward inference in the next few years. This is an extremely smart move by Nvidia in my mind.
According to Motley Fool Research, Nvidia's Data Center business generated $75.2 billion in revenue in its Q1. That number should be closer to $92 billion when Nvidia reports earnings on Wednesday, Aug. 26. Now, when the new LPX revenue starts to show up, I don't expect a massive bump upfront. But in the coming years, I think this could turn out to be a critical moment for Nvidia.
Nvidia (NVDA - Free Report) will step back into the earnings spotlight after the market closes on Wednesday, August 26, when the AI chip leader reports its much-anticipated Q2 results.
Expectations are understandably elevated, but the setup looks increasingly interesting as Nvidia’s valuation has compressed despite extraordinary earnings growth.
Beyond another potential top-and-bottom-line beat, Wall Street will be focused on the Vera Rubin product ramp, gross margins, and Nvidia’s growing role in financing the massive buildout of AI infrastructure.
Investors are certainly wondering if NVDA can gain momentum with shares up a somewhat subpar 12% year to date despite sitting on enormous gains of +800% in the last five years.
Image Source: Zacks Investment Research
Nvidia's Q2 ExpectationsThe Zacks Consensus Estimate calls for Nvidia to post Q2 revenue of $91.85 billion, representing a whopping 96% increase from $46.74 billion in the year-ago period. Adjusted earnings are projected at $2.09 per share, up 99% year over year.
Those projections are essentially in line with Nvidia's own guidance for $91 billion in revenue, plus or minus 2%, which notably assumes no Data Center compute revenue from China. Data Center sales remain the primary growth engine, with the Zacks Consensus calling for roughly $85.14 billion, or 107% YoY growth.
Is the Vera Rubin Ramp Taking Off?Perhaps more important than the headline Q2 numbers will be Nvidia's commentary surrounding its next-generation Vera Rubin platform, the company’s latest rack-scale AI supercomputer architecture designed to power the next era of agentic AI — systems that can reason, plan, and execute multi-step workflows at massive scale.
Nvidia announced in May that Vera Rubin was ramping into full production, with production shipments slated to begin this fall. More recently, the company said Rubin-based racks are already running at partners including CoreWeave (CRWV - Free Report) ), Alphabet’s (GOOGL - Free Report) ) Google Cloud, Microsoft’s (MSFT - Free Report) ) Azure, Oracle (ORCL - Free Report) ) Cloud Infrastructure, and Nebius (NBIS - Free Report) ).
Therefore, investors shouldn't necessarily expect Rubin to be a major Q2 revenue contributor. Instead, Wall Street will be looking for evidence that production remains on schedule, customer deployments are accelerating, and Rubin can provide another powerful growth leg as Nvidia's Blackwell series of AI chips matures. Any indication that Rubin is pulling forward orders could strengthen expectations for the second half of Nvidia's current fiscal 2027 and FY28.
Gross Margins Remain a Key CheckpointNvidia's profitability will also be closely scrutinized. Management guided for a 75% non-GAAP gross margin, plus or minus 50 basis points, essentially matching the 75% achieved during Q1.
That stability is important as investors assess higher memory and component costs associated with increasingly sophisticated AI systems. Some analysts expect modest pressure during the Rubin transition, but maintaining gross margins in the mid-70% range would reinforce Nvidia's enormous pricing power and help alleviate concerns that escalating hardware costs are eating into profitability.
Image Source: Zacks Investment Research
How Much of Nvidia's Balance Sheet Is Supporting the AI Boom?Another emerging concern is Nvidia's increasingly aggressive effort to help finance the infrastructure that ultimately purchases its chips.
Most notably, Nvidia has provided up to roughly $105 billion of financial backing tied to an OpenAI data-center project in Ohio and is investing another $1.5 billion in SB Energy to support those efforts. Importantly, the $105 billion figure is a contingent backstop involving certain lease, power, and residual-value obligations rather than an immediate $105 billion cash expenditure.
Nvidia has also teamed with major Wall Street firms on a framework intended to mobilize more than $500 billion of third-party capital for AI infrastructure, which could shift more of the financing burden away from Nvidia itself.
Still, investors have reason to monitor the exposure, even with Nvidia ending Q1 with nearly $80.6 billion in cash and equivalents, while generating an exceptional $50.3 billion of operating cash flow during the quarter.
The balance sheet remains extremely strong, but Wall Street will want greater clarity on how much capital Nvidia ultimately intends to put behind customers and AI infrastructure projects, especially if these commitments keep expanding.
Image Source: Zacks Investment Research
Nvidia's Valuation May Be More Attractive Than It LooksDespite Nvidia's massive market capitalization, its valuation no longer looks particularly excessive relative to its growth rate.
NVDA is trading at 24X forward earnings, near the low end of its five-year P/E valuation range. Furthermore, Nvidia’s PEG ratio is around 0.34 with the optimum level being less than 1.0, meaning investors are paying less than one unit of P/E multiple for each unit of expected earnings growth—a metric that can make Nvidia look surprisingly inexpensive on a growth-adjusted basis.
This valuation disconnect has caught Wall Street's attention. Bank of America (BAC - Free Report) ) has argued that Nvidia is significantly undervalued compared with other AI-compute names, while Cantor Fitzgerald has similarly suggested the market is failing to fully price in Nvidia's longer-term earnings power.
Of course, PEG ratios become less useful when growth rates are exceptionally high, but Nvidia's combination of nearly triple-digit Q2 earnings growth and a mid-20s forward P/E certainly makes its valuation harder to characterize as expensive.
Image Source: Zacks Investment Research
Bottom Line: Is NVDA Stock a Buy Before Earnings?Nvidia still has plenty to prove when it reports Wednesday. Investors will want another strong quarter, an encouraging Vera Rubin ramp, resilient gross margins, and reassurance that the company's expanding AI-financing ambitions won't create unnecessary balance-sheet risk.
That said, a 24X forward P/E looks increasingly compelling if Nvidia can sustain even a fraction of its current earnings growth rate. The long-term AI investment thesis remains strong, although elevated expectations could produce significant post-earnings volatility even if results exceed consensus estimates.
For now, NVDA lands a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold), suggesting investors may want to maintain existing positions while looking for Wednesday's report to provide the next catalyst for a more bullish stance.
Nvidia (NVDA -2.91%) is slated to announce critically important information for all stock market investors.
*Stock prices used were the afternoon prices of Aug. 22, 2026. The video was published on Aug.24, 2026.
Parkev Tatevosian, CFA has positions in Nvidia. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Nvidia. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. Parkev Tatevosian is an affiliate of The Motley Fool and may be compensated for promoting its services. If you choose to subscribe through his link, he will earn some extra money that supports his channel. His opinions remain his own and are unaffected by The Motley Fool.
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Nvidia has beaten Wall Street estimates for 14 consecutive quarters. Its stock still fell after six of the last eight reports, including each of the last four, per Yahoo Finance AlphaSpace analysis.
Max Weinbach previews expectations for Nvidia (NVDA) earnings and how it will navigate expanding bottlenecks. He says the Mag 7 giant "by far" has the biggest chipmaking capacity but faces headwinds in how it will allocate sales over energy and memory constraints.
Nvidia Corporation has been caught in an awkward position. It still powers the entire AI trade, but its stock has stopped acting like it. NVDA stock has performed in line with or below the SOX benchmark for over a year, and its valuation has revisited pre-AI boom lows. We see one last play on Nvidia's earnings this Wednesday, based on the Vera Rubin's ramp showing up positively in the Q3 guide and margins holding in the mid-70% level.
The 2026 Q2 earnings season is nearly over for S&P 500 members, with the reporting cycle notably positive. Earnings and revenue growth as a whole for the S&P 500 members that have reported remain robust, with a decent chunk of companies also providing favorable commentary and outlooks for upcoming periods.
But looming large this week is none other than AI-favorite NVIDIA (NVDA - Free Report) , whose results will wrap up the reporting cycle for the Magnificent Seven group as well. Let’s take a closer look at expectations.
NVIDIA Earnings LoomBoth EPS and revenue expectations for the upcoming release from NVIDIA have remained positive since mid-May, with earnings expected to climb nearly 100% YoY on 96% higher revenues. The sales growth rate actually reflects an acceleration compared to recent periods, reflecting just how strong the AI frenzy continues to be.
To little surprise, Data Center results will be the major focus, which have been the primary driving force behind its positivity over recent years. Unrelenting demand has led to huge growth, with everybody wanting the company’s critical AI infrastructure.
Below is a chart illustrating the company’s Data Center sales on a quarterly basis. Our consensus estimate for Data Center sales for the quarter to be reported stands at $85.1 billion, suggesting nearly 110% YoY growth.
Nvidia (NVDA -2.91%) is scheduled to report second-quarter earnings after market close on Aug. 26. As the biggest AI stock in the world, Nvidia's results will affect not only the company's share price but also valuations across the AI industry.
A new wrinkle will be revealed in Nvidia's upcoming earnings report. This revelation could have a sizable effect on Nvidia's stock price.
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This new detail could influence Nvidia's stock priceNvidia has become the largest AI company on the planet not by inventing AI technologies itself, but by selling its hardware to other AI businesses. The company's GPUs -- critical components that allow AI companies to train and execute their AI models -- are widely believed the be the best in the industry, with market share estimates typically at 85% or above.
Nvidia's future, therefore, relies on spending by the rest of the AI industry. But how much of this sales base consists of just a handful of hyperscalers?
Nvidia is already required to report material customers that account for more than 10% of total sales. But it isn't required to disclose the exact names of these customers. All we know is that last quarter, three customers accounted for 21%, 17%, and 16% of total revenue, respectively. It's not known, however, whether these customers are large AI companies or simply distribution intermediaries that, in turn, sell to a variety of AI customers.
Image source: Nvidia
Nvidia has warned investors of customer concentration in the past. "We have experienced periods where we receive a significant amount of our revenue from a limited number of customers, and this trend may continue," the company explained in the second quarter of last year, adding that "large cloud service providers" comprised around half of the company's data center revenue. Data center sales, meanwhile, accounted for 88% of Nvidia's overall revenue that quarter.
Analysts have long wanted more clarity into these numbers. Last quarter, Nvidia began breaking out "Hyperscaler" revenues versus "AI Clouds, Industrial & Enterprise" sales. This breakout essentially helps investors understand how much of Nvidia's sales are being driven by the AI market in general versus a handful of powerful customers, many of which are pursuing the development of their own GPUs.
Last quarter, data center revenue was remarkably balanced. Hyperscalers accounted for $37.9 billion in sales versus $37.4 billion in sales for other customers. That's pretty close to the breakdown the company alluded to this time last year.
Notably, however, hyperscaler revenues grew by just 12% versus 31% sequential growth for the rest of its customer base.
Investors should pay close attention to where these numbers head this quarter. If hyperscaler revenues spike, it could be a sign that Nvidia's chips remain in high demand among industry leaders. But it also increases Nvidia's reliance on a few customers. Last quarter, just three customers accounted for more than 50% of sales. But as mentioned, we cannot be sure if these customers are single entities or businesses that then sell to customers of their own.
Rising sales growth outside of the hyperscalers segment could also spell good or bad news. On one hand, it would lessen Nvidia's customer concentration. On the other hand, it could signal weakening demand among hyperscalers, which are desperate to reduce their own reliance on Nvidia.
What these numbers reveal, and how the market decides to interpret the data, should have an impact on Nvidia's share price after earnings are announced.
Nvidia (NVDA, Financials)-backed Hugging Face is reportedly seeking a deal that could value the AI business at $13 billion or more. The company has recruited an investment bank to evaluate buyer interest, according to Business Insider. The discussions are in their infancy and no prospective purchaser has been named in public.
"The valuation is what gets your attention." Hugging Face was worth $4.5 billion in its 2023 fundraising round, suggesting a $13 billion acquisition would value company at nearly three times that level.
Its business has also developed tremendously since then. Hugging Face just reached a $100 million annual revenue run rate as developers and corporations increasingly employ its AI models, tools and infrastructure.
The company already has backing from some of tech's biggest names, including Nvidia Corp. (NVDA, Financials), Amazon, Alphabet and Salesforce.
Nvidia's history with Hugging Face makes the potential sale even more interesting. The chipmaker reportedly made a $500 million investment offer earlier this year that would have valued Hugging Face at nearly $7 billion, but the business turned it down.
There is no certainty a transaction happens at $13 billion. Still, buyer interest at that price point would be another indicator that established AI platforms with real income are commanding increasingly expensive valuations.
"We still love Nvidia (NVDA)," says Jim Worden, who has expectations the stock will break out after the Mag 7 company reports earnings. He outlines his bullish case for the AI chipmaker ahead of Wednesday's report.
The artificial intelligence (AI) semiconductor landscape is an interconnected web in which no single company operates in isolation. As the primary architect of the accelerators that power AI training and inference, Nvidia (NVDA -2.91%) sits at the center of this web. The company's earnings report this week will inevitably draw intense focus on Wall Street, yet the real narrative will likely extend beyond the company's own numbers.
Memory and data storage companies have become critical enablers across the broader digital ecosystem. During this earnings season, Apple CEO Tim Cook, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, and Space Exploration Technologies CEO Elon Musk all highlighted the same pressure point: rising memory costs driven by soaring demand.
Investors monitoring Nvidia should keep a close eye on Micron Technology (MU -5.83%), Sandisk (SNDK -6.45%), and SK Hynix (SKHY -4.92%), as strong momentum in Nvidia's data center business will serve as an indicator of sustained demand for the specialized memory and storage components these companies produce.
Image source: Nvidia.
Nvidia's position in the AI chip value chain Nvidia doesn't manufacture chips in the traditional sense. It designs graphics processing units (GPUs) and other processors, then relies on an ecosystem of partners to bring those designs to life. In the data center segment, Nvidia's powerful parallel processors form the computational backbone of hyperscale chip clusters.
However, each processor is only as effective as the high bandwidth memory (HBM) that feeds it data to process and the storage systems that manage these enormous data sets. This interdependence puts Nvidia in a coordinator role within the broader AI chip value chain. This means that the company's design decisions directly influence the technical requirements and volume forecasts for upstream suppliers.
Smart investors understand that when Nvidia reports robust growth in its data center segment, it is quietly confirming that big tech and enterprise customers are expanding their AI infrastructure at a rapid pace. In turn, these build-outs do not stop at GPUs -- they expand outward to the memory components that must keep pace with an accelerator's appetite for data.
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The emerging theme across the AI semiconductor industry Recent commentary from Cook, Jassy, and Musk has made the memory shortage impossible to ignore. The gap between the amount of DRAM and NAND flash memory that the memory manufacturers can supply and the volume that data center operators want is wide, and the rising prices for both underscore the mismatch between the growth in enterprise AI workloads and the capital-intensive, multiyear process of expanding fabrication capacity.
Nvidia's newer Blackwell and Vera Rubin chip architectures incorporate more HBM per unit than earlier designs. Meanwhile, hyperscalers are deploying these systems in ever-larger clusters. As a result, any discussion of data center momentum during Nvidia's earnings call will almost certainly highlight the limited availability and rising cost of the memory that stitches these systems together.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has a reputation for providing candid color commentary about the state of the industry. The current memory environment offers him a natural opening to address ongoing supply dynamics. If he does, that would do more than restate what other executives have already said. Instead, it would better quantify the impact that the dynamics of the AI memory segment are having on the space from the perspective of the company whose products are driving the largest incremental demand.
Why Micron, Sandisk, and SK Hynix could respond to Nvidia's earnings Micron, Sandisk, and SK Hynix occupy complementary positions in the memory and storage hierarchy that supports Nvidia's ecosystem. SK Hynix has established itself as a leading supplier of advanced HBM stacks that Nvidia integrates into its flagship accelerators.
Amid this boom in AI infrastructure investment, Micron has rapidly expanded its own high-bandwidth offerings while maintaining a broad portfolio of DRAM and NAND products across cloud, mobile, and automotive environments. Sandisk focuses more narrowly on NAND flash -- providing the high-capacity storage solutions and enterprise solid-state drives (SSDs) that hold data sets and model weights flowing through these systems.
The theme here is that when Nvidia's data center business is growing, the signal is subtle, but powerful: It indicates that customers are not only buying more GPUs, but also configuring these chips with a full complement of memory and storage required for production workloads. With that in mind, investors should be on the lookout for any qualitative remarks from Nvidia's management about customer deployment timelines and the mix of memory technologies being adopted.
Positive indications on this front should verify ongoing volume and pricing improvements for memory specialists. In addition, any acknowledgment of bottleneck constraints would further highlight the pricing power that memory suppliers currently enjoy.
The takeaway here is straightforward: Nvidia's upcoming earnings report and accompanying commentary should function as leading indicators for the memory supercycle. The three companies most closely aligned with AI-driven memory demand stand to reflect these signals in their own subsequent reports and stock performances as the AI infrastructure era matures.
Nvidia shares are under pressure ahead of the company's fiscal second-quarter 2027 results on Wednesday, but one analyst argues investors may be viewing the artificial intelligence leader through the wrong lens.
The stock fell about 2.5% Monday and was on track for its seventh consecutive losing session, potentially its longest losing streak since September 2022, according to Dow Jones Market Data.
Despite the recent weakness, Nvidia has gained about 12% this year.
That performance looks modest compared with the 59% advance in the PHLX Semiconductor Index over the same period.
Cantor Fitzgerald analyst CJ Muse believes the disconnect creates an opportunity.
"It is time to close your eyes" and bet big on Nvidia's stock, Muse wrote in a Monday note to clients.
He said once momentum returns, the stock is expected to move rapidly.
"When this stock starts moving, we think it is going to move very, very fast," he said.
Muse's bullish case rests partly on Nvidia's potential earnings growth.
He pointed to estimates of $17 in earnings per share for calendar 2027 and $25 for calendar 2028.
Based on those projections, Nvidia is trading at roughly 14 times the 2027 estimate and 10 times the 2028 figure.
Muse has a $350 price target on Nvidia, about 67% above current levels.
The analyst believes investors are currently "underweight" Nvidia, suggesting the stock is less represented in portfolios than its broader market position might warrant.
The argument is not simply that Nvidia will continue selling more GPUs.
Instead, Muse believes the company is becoming increasingly embedded in the financing and infrastructure that supports the AI ecosystem.
Nvidia's growing use of what Muse describes as "financial engineering" has attracted criticism, particularly because the company has taken equity stakes in AI companies including OpenAI and Anthropic and entered revenue-sharing arrangements with neocloud providers such as CoreWeave and Nebius.
Muse, however, sees those arrangements as increasingly important to Nvidia's competitive position.
"This strategy is becoming increasingly critical and one that we believe will shine as we move further through today's robust AI infrastructure buildout," he said.
The logic is that Nvidia is not simply supplying chips to customers.
By helping finance AI infrastructure, providing computing capacity and participating financially in the companies building that infrastructure, it can create deeper relationships that are harder for competitors to disrupt.
Muse argues that Nvidia's equity investments, revenue-sharing agreements and plans to help raise as much as $500 billion for AI infrastructure are effectively turning its GPUs "into a financeable, increasingly fungible asset class."
That could make it harder for customers to replace Nvidia hardware with competing chips.
Cantor Fitzgerald identified five potential catalysts that could change the market's perception of Nvidia.
One is greater clarity around data-center revenue in 2027.
Other companies have begun providing specific targets for their future infrastructure spending, while Nvidia has yet to offer comparable visibility.
Another potential catalyst is additional information from Anthropic ahead of its expected fourth-quarter 2026 IPO.
Investors have recently focused on concerns surrounding the AI company's July annual recurring revenue.
The firm also sees greater visibility into hyperscaler capital expenditure plans for 2027 and 2028 as potentially supportive for Nvidia.
Sustained growth among neocloud providers is another factor, particularly if Nvidia continues using financing and revenue-sharing arrangements to support data-center expansion.
Finally, Muse believes GPUs could increasingly become standardized as a new asset class through financing agreements, potentially broadening Nvidia's role beyond traditional semiconductor sales.
Custom chips remain a risk, but Nvidia is broadening its moatThe biggest challenge to Nvidia's dominance is increasingly coming from the company's largest customers.
Major cloud companies are developing custom AI accelerators to reduce their dependence on Nvidia, raising concerns that the chipmaker's market share could eventually decline.
Muse believes its neocloud strategy offers some protection against that risk.
Revenue-sharing agreements with neocloud companies could prove "much more resilient" because Nvidia is helping enable data-center deployments beyond the largest hyperscalers.
The company is also expanding its customer base among enterprises and sovereign AI programs while moving toward selling complete AI systems that include racks, networking and other components.
That broader strategy could make Nvidia less vulnerable to losing a particular chip program to a competitor.
Wall Street remains bullish ahead of resultsOther analysts are also maintaining positive views ahead of Nvidia's earnings.
Rosenblatt Securities has retained a Buy rating and expects Nvidia's revenue and earnings to exceed consensus estimates.
Benchmark has likewise reiterated its Buy rating and set a $335 price target.
The firm expects Nvidia to report revenue of about $92 billion and earnings per share of $2.10.
The earnings report will therefore provide an important test of whether Nvidia's fundamental growth can overcome concerns about valuation, custom-chip competition and the sustainability of AI infrastructure spending.
For Muse, however, the bigger opportunity lies in recognizing that Nvidia's competitive advantage may no longer be limited to its semiconductor technology.
Its financing relationships, software ecosystem, infrastructure partnerships and stakes in AI companies could create a network around Nvidia that is increasingly difficult to displace.
That strategy remains controversial. But if AI infrastructure spending continues accelerating, the same financial moves that investors have questioned could ultimately help Nvidia retain its position at the center of the AI boom.
Nvidia customers are being warned of potential price increases of around 15% for Blackwell and Rubin-based AI systems as soaring memory costs ripple through the infrastructure buildout. Raymond James Analyst and Managing Director Simon Leopold explains why the increases aren't surprising and why older generations of GPUs can remain valuable even as newer chips enter production.
Tokenized versions of stocks like Nvidia Corp. (NVDA) are growing faster than other categories of real-world assets moving onto blockchains, according to a recent report from CoinShares and Token Terminal. The tokenized stock market itself remains small next to traditional stock exchanges.
Key Takeaways:
Tokenized stocks are growing faster than any other real-world asset category on-chain.
On-chain derivatives tied to real assets jumped to about a third of trading volume.
Retail investors are adopting tokenized stocks faster than institutional products.
Only about $2.2 billion in tokenized equities exists against a global stock market worth more than $100 trillion. The report compares that gap to where dollar-pegged stablecoins stood in 2019, shortly before that market expanded rapidly.
That backdrop frames the growth data: trading and derivatives activity tied to real-world assets kept climbing even as broader crypto markets cooled.
On-chain perpetual futures tied to real-world assets made up a negligible share of total trading volume a year ago. That share climbed to about a third in three quarters, per data in the report. Perpetual futures let traders gain leveraged exposure to an asset’s price without owning it directly, similar to a futures contract that never expires.
See more: CoinShares Report: The Significant Growth of Equities Issued on Blockchain
Oil, gold and silver contracts led that growth, alongside equity index products tracking the S&P 500 and Nasdaq-100. These markets trade on blockchains rather than traditional exchanges, so they operate continuously. That gives investors access outside the hours regular stock and commodity markets are open.
Retail Investors Drive Tokenized Stock Growth
Average wallet sizes highlight who is buying. Holders of NVDAx, a tokenized Nvidia stock issued through xStocks, carried an average balance of $519 in July 2026. That’s roughly the size of a single retail trade.
That compares with more than $25 million for BlackRock’s institutional BUIDL fund, according to the report. The gap reflects a broader pattern: retail investors trade in small increments, while institutions commit large sums per wallet.
NVDAx also added on-chain holders faster than any other tokenized asset over the past year. Lower investment minimums help explain that pattern, drawing a broader base of retail participants.
Trading volumes on tradeXYZ, an RWA-focused venue built on Hyperliquid, jumped roughly 20 times since launch. Broader crypto derivatives activity slowed over the same stretch.
Semiconductor maker SK Hynix Inc. is one example of that momentum. Its tokenized shares quickly became one of tradeXYZ’s largest markets after they began trading on the platform, according to the report.
For more news, information, and strategy, visit the CoinShares Crypto ETF Hub.
SummaryNVIDIA will report fiscal Q2 2026 results on Wednesday, August 26, 2026, after the market close. Here are the key numbers that we’re watching.According to Visible Alpha consensus, analysts expect Nvidia's total revenue to reach $92.2 billion in fiscal Q2 2027.Blackwell's revenue is expected to jump from around $86.4 billion last year to $135.7 billion this year but to drop -71% next year.Could the Q2 release and guidance provide the next positive catalyst for the stock, or are expectations largely priced in for now? JHVEPhoto/iStock Editorial via Getty Images
NVIDIA Corp. (NVDA) will report fiscal Q2 2026 results on Wednesday, August 26, 2026, after the market close. Here are the key numbers that we’re watching.
Nvidia Q2 earnings preview According to Visible Alpha
Nvidia Corp (NASDAQ:NVDA, XETRA:NVD) is expected to top its own guidance again on Wednesday even as supply constraints, not demand, increasingly define the story.
The first order of business is the number itself, and most signs point to another beat. Nvidia guided for second-quarter revenue of $91 billion, plus or minus 2%, with gross margins of about 75%, implying earnings per share of roughly $2.03. Consensus sits at $92 billion and $2.09.
Over the last three quarters, Nvidia has handily exceeded its own guidance. Most analysts expect a similar beat this time, with management likely to meet or top the consensus October guide of $103.9 billion.
Wedbush, which reiterated an Outperform rating and $330 price target, argues component and material access, not end demand, now limits shipments. The firm called Nvidia's supply position the best in the industry: the company exited its first fiscal quarter with supply chain commitments of $119 billion, up from $95.2 billion, and total supply of $145 billion.
Vera Rubin entered full production following GTC Taipei, with the revenue ramp starting in the third fiscal quarter, and management has signaled the platform will likely stay supply constrained for its entire life. Memory pricing, a risk flagged into the last print, looks less worrying now too.
Wedbush cited feedback that Nvidia negotiated favorable HBM pricing for 2027, and that the 17% price increases reported for 2027 deliveries should let the company hold absolute, if not percentage, margins.
UBS backs the supply story with its own numbers, pointing to rising TSMC and industry-wide CoWoS packaging capacity and ample HBM supply. The firm raised its GPU unit estimates to about 8.8 million chips in calendar 2026 and 10.8 million in calendar 2027, lifting revenue estimates to roughly $418 billion and $681 billion for those years.
The group models gross margin in the mid-70% range through 2027, free cash flow of $211 billion and $360 billion over the period, and reiterated a Buy rating with a $280 price target based on 14 times its 2028 EPS estimate of about $20.
Demand isn't the worry either. All four of the largest US hyperscalers raised their 2026 capital spending plans again on their June-quarter calls, putting the group's combined spending at roughly $725 billion for the year, up from about $410 billion in 2025, per Wedbush. Neocloud, model builder and sovereign programs are growing even faster than hyperscale spending, and smaller neoclouds are reporting payback periods of just two to three years on AI hardware builds.
Nvidia's push to secure every input, chip supply, land, power, for customers like frontier labs and neoclouds is reshaping how analysts think about the company. Bank of America pointed to Nvidia's recently announced $105 billion in OpenAI-related commitments and said it expects more disclosure around off-balance-sheet commitments on the earnings call. The firm sees the strategy as securing demand durability but warns it also raises risk: a slowdown in AI demand could pressure both growth and the balance sheet.
XTB research director Kathleen Brooks went further, describing Nvidia as functioning almost like "a central bank to the tech industry," a reference to its role organizing a $500 billion third-party compute financing platform with KKR, BlackRock and other institutions.
The valuation gap
Bank of America argues the market is underpricing Nvidia for the risk it's actually taking. Using a sum-of-parts approach that applies peer multiples to the roughly 50% of free cash flow returned to shareholders and a discount to the remainder, the firm estimates Nvidia should trade at a blended 36 times and 22.5 times calendar 2027 and 2028 EV/FCF compared to 18 times and 15 times, a 50% and 34% discount.
Bank of America suggests boosting the share of free cash flow devoted to buybacks, currently below peers like AMD and Marvell at 75-100%, could help close that gap.
Shares of Nvidia are down 2.5% on Monday but have gained over 12% year to date.
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Seema Shah, chief global strategist at Principal Asset Management, told CNBC on Monday that NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA | NVDA Price Prediction) sits at the center of this week’s market setup, with its upcoming quarterly report positioned as the critical test of whether the AI capital-spending cycle can start showing profitable returns. Nvidia reports fiscal Q2 2027 results on Wednesday, August 26, 2026, after the market closes.
Shah told CNBC that “Both Nvidia earnings and what we’re likely to hear from Chair Powell at Jackson Hole are really key to how the market is going to be moving. But Chair Powell is unlikely to provide any kind of forward guidance on what they’re planning for the September meeting.” That means Nvidia’s guidance could be the market’s biggest catalyst this week.
The AI Trade Has Entered Its “Prove-It” Phase Shah’s core argument is that investor psychology around AI has shifted. “This is the AI cycle which is maturing. Investors are saying, look, we know what the capex plans are at this stage, but we want to know that that’s actually going to be monetized, that there’s going to be some kind of return on investment.“
She added that “Nvidia is still going to be the foundation for a lot of this AI capex trade. So if we were to see any wobbles there, then unfortunately that could be bad news for the broader market.”
The AI story has also broadened geographically: “This is becoming more of a global story. It’s very interesting, but it’s no longer the one-way trade that it once was.” Shah cited US tech, Asian chip makers, Latin American resources, and European end-use adoption as the widening surface area of the trade.
Nvidia Must Clear a Staggering $91 Billion Bar Nvidia’s fiscal Q1 2027 earnings report in May saw revenue reach $82 billion, up 85% year-over-year and 20% sequentially, with data center revenue of $75 billion, up 92% year-over-year. Free cash flow was $49 billion, and management pointed to $1 trillion in Blackwell and Rubin revenue from 2025 through calendar 2027.
Guidance for the coming report calls for revenue of $91 billion +/- 2% and non-GAAP gross margin of 75% plus or minus 50 basis points, with no China data center compute revenue included in the outlook. CEO Jensen Huang has argued that “Compute is revenues. Compute is profit” and that “Tokens are now profitable,” positioning Nvidia’s platform as the monetization proof point Shah says investors now demand.
Why Nvidia’s Earnings Could Be the Biggest Event of the Week Shah noted that rising Treasury yields have not deterred major tech companies from aggressive AI capex plans. The 10-year Treasury yield stood at 4.69% on August 20, 2026, near the period high of 4.75% on July 31, 2026.
Nvidia’s stock reflected some hesitation, trading below $210 and slipping 6.94% over the past week, though shares are still up 12.28% year-to-date.
Prediction Markets Expect a Beat Prediction markets are pricing high odds of a headline beat. Polymarket assigns a 96.4% probability to Nvidia beating quarterly earnings, 93.5% to non-GAAP gross margin landing between 74% and 76%, and 78.5% to Q2 data center revenue above $85 billion.
Analyst sentiment remains constructive, with an average price target of $304.73 and a forward P/E of 25. Investors want to know the company’s gross margin durability, China commentary, and Rubin timing for evidence that the AI factory buildout is throwing off returns commensurate with the capex Nvidia’s customers have committed. If those signals wobble, the pain could hit the entire market.
Contact [email protected] for any questions or corrections.
Americké akciové indexy vykazují v pondělní seanci smíšenou bilanci, když tradiční index Dow Jones zpevňuje lehce přes 0,2 %, zatímco širší index S&P500 ztrácí 0,2 % a technologický Nasdaq téměř 0,5 %.
Poklesům dominují polovodiče. Referenční Philadelphia SE Semiconductor Index oslabuje o 2,6 % na nejnižší úroveň za poslední 3 měsíce v „předvečer“ ostře sledovaných výsledků hlavního hráče na poli výkonných čipů, spol. NVidia (NVDA -2,2 %). Ty společnost představí ve středu po skončení trhu. S ohledem na tučné růsty klíčových dodavatelů AI infrastruktury tak kvartální čísla nesmí zklamat a pro celý sektor budou důležitým semaforem dalšího vývoje. Trhy ale netrpělivě vyhlíží i blížící se tradiční sympozium centrálních bankéřů v Jackson Hole, na kterém v pátek odpoledne vystoupí i nový šéf Fedu, Kevin Warsh, s možnou indikací ohledně dalšího směřování měnové politiky. Nutno podotknout v prostředí nadále zvýšených inflačních tlaků, zejména v důsledku vysokých cen energií. Ve středu sledovaný jádrový PCE deflátor napoví více.
Na dluhopisovém trhu dnes nicméně dochází k mírnému uklidnění, když u delších splatností vidíme pokles výnosů. Na 30letém vládním bondu na 5,23 % (vs. 5,28 % v pátek), na 10letém bondu pak 4,7 % (vs. 4,74 % v pátek). K tomu přispěla i zpráva CNBC, která s odkazem na dva vysoce postavené představitele amerického ministerstva financí uvedla, že k minulý týden oznámeným zpětným odkupům dlouhodobých státních dluhopisů může být využita i část téměř bilionového hotovostního polštáře ministerstva financí u Fedu.
Smíšený vývoj vykazují dnes drahé kovy. Zlato pokračuje v růstu, když přidává 0,7 % na 4634 USD/oz, stříbro o stejné síle oslabuje s posunem na 68,5 USD/oz. Na energetickém trhu se nedaří ropě, která odepisuje přes 2,2 % na 85,12 USD/barel, zemní plyn (+0,2 %) naopak mírně posiluje na 2,78 USD/mmbtu.
Na sektorové úrovni nejhorší výkonnost zaznamenávají informační technologie (-1,2 %) a energetický sektor spolu s průmyslovými společnostmi (-1 %), přes 1 % naopak přidává segment zbytných statků (+1,4 %) a komunikace (+1,2 %) při růstu Mety Platforms (META) o 2 %.
Mezi korporacemi S&P500 konstituentů nejvíce ztrácí výrobci paměťových čipů v čele se Sandiskem (SNDK -6,2 %), jemuž sekunduje Seagate (STX -5,9 %) a Micron (MU -5,3 %). Na růstové straně vidíme povýsledkové dozvuky u online cestovního zprostředkovatele Expedia (EXPE +3,9 %), těžící z postupně zvyšujících se analytických cílů. Dnes od Evercore ISI s posunem cílovky na 430 USD z předchozích 375 USD. Titul dnešním pohybem pokořuje historická maxima.
Nejsilnější sektory S&P Změna Nejslabší sektory S&P Změna Zbytná spotřeba +1,4 % Informační technologie -1,2 % Sektor komunikací +1,2 % Energie -1 % Finanční sektor +1 % Průmysl -1 % Nejsilnější akcie S &P Změna Nejslabší akcie S&P Změna Expedia Group (EXPE) +3,9 % SANDISK CORP O (SNDK) -6,2 % GODADDY I (GDDY) +3,3 % Seagate Technology Holdings (STX) -5,9 % Ulta Beauty (ULTA) +3,2 % Micron Technology (MU) -5,3 % VeriSign (VRSN) +3,2 % JB Hunt Transport Services (JBHT) -5,1 % Church & Dwight (CHD) +3,1 % CIENA CORPRATI (CIEN) -5 % Zdroj: Reuters
