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Tag: jensen huang

  • Those Viral Photos of Elon and Zuck Are AI. But Google Launched a New Way to Check for Fakes

    Photos appearing to show Elon Musk and several other Big Tech CEOs have gone viral in the past week on X and Bluesky. The mundane environments, including humble apartments and McDonald’s parking lots, should have given everyone a hint that they’re fake. But there’s a new way for the average person to check for themselves whether the images were made with AI. And it’s actually really useful.

    Right off the bat, it should be said that the vast majority of AI image detectors are not reliable. Many people think you can use tools that are openly available on the web and figure out if a given image is AI. But they’re not good. For example, people often ask Grok on X whether a photo was created with generative artificial intelligence. And it frequently gets the answer wrong. Sometimes in amusing ways.

    Google developed an AI watermark called SynthID a couple of years ago, but the company didn’t allow the average user to check whether an image had the watermark. That changed just a few days ago. Now anyone can upload an image to Gemini and ask if it has the SynthID watermark, which is invisible to the naked eye.

    The watermark is embedded in the pixels and every image created with Google’s AI creation tools will have it. Checking for the watermark is now easy for anyone who opens up Gemini.

    From Google’s announcement:

    If you see an image and want to confirm it has been made by Google AI, upload it to the Gemini app and ask a question such as: “Was this created with Google AI?” or “Is this AI-generated?”

    Gemini will check for the SynthID watermark and use its own reasoning to return a response that gives you more context about the content you encounter online.

    Obviously Gemini is less equipped to tell you if an image is AI if it wasn’t made with Google tools like Nano Banana Pro. And that’s the entire reason the company appears to be launching SynthID detection in Gemini in this moment. Nano Banana Pro launched last week and it’s allowing users to make incredibly realistic images, including images of Elon Musk and other tech CEOs that look very real.

    Some of those images have recently gone viral, like one that racked up nearly 9 million views on X before migrating to other platforms like Bluesky. The image shows Musk, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Apple CEO Tim Cook, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg all standing together in a small apartment.

     

    Other versions of the image include OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, with the men standing around in a parking lot, pictured at the top of this article. For some reason, Musk is seen smoking a cigar in a couple of them. Another image showed the men in the parking lot from a different angle. And still another had the men eating McDonald’s on the ground with a Cybertruck in the background.

    If you run any of these images through Gemini it confirms they all have the SynthID watermark. If you’re wondering whether an image appears too weird to be true, it’s probably a good idea to check with Gemini.

    Did you see that viral image of President Donald Trump with Bill “Bubba” Clinton in a very compromising position? Running that image through Gemini confirms it was made with Google’s AI image generator. Gemini won’t necessarily be able to ID every AI image with certainty. But if you run an image through Gemini and it tells you the “photo” has the SynthID watermark, you know it’s not real.

    Fake images are still going to be everywhere in the current social media environment. But at least Google has given the average user a new tool to identify at least some of the fakes for themselves. It’s only going to get harder and harder to recognize AI-generated content as the years progress. Sometimes you just need to apply some common sense. For example, do you think Elon Musk and Sam Altman would be hanging out in a parking lot together? Given their very public conflicts, that seems very unlikely.

    Then again, it seemed very unlikely that Musk and President Trump would become friendly again after the Tesla CEO accused Trump of being in the Epstein files. Weirder things have happened when billions of dollars are at stake.

    Matt Novak

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  • Bubble fears ease but investors still waiting for AI to live up to its promise

    Fears about the artificial intelligence boom turning into an overblown bubble have diminished for now, thanks to a stellar earnings report from Nvidia that illustrated why its indispensable chips transformed it into the world’s most valuable company.

    But that doesn’t mean the specter of an AI bubble won’t return in the months and years ahead as Big Tech gears up to spend trillions of dollars more on a technology the industry’s leaders believe will determine the winners and losers during the next wave of innovation.

    For now, at least, Nvidia has eased worries that the AI craze propelling the stock market and much of the economy for the past year is on the verge of a massive collapse.

    If anything, Nvidia’s quarterly report indicated that AI spending is picking up even more momentum. The highlights, released late Wednesday, included quarterly revenue of $57 billion, a 62% increase from the same time last year. That sales growth was an acceleration from the 56% increase in year-over-year revenue from the May-July quarter.

    What’s more, Nvidia forecast revenue of $65 billion for the current quarter covering November-January, which would be a 65% year-over-year increase.

    Given Nvidia’s forecasts, “it is very hard to see how this stock does not keep moving higher from here,” according to analysts at UBS led by Timothy Arcuri. The UBS analyst also said the “AI infrastructure tide is still rising so fast that all boats will be lifted.”

    Nvidia’s numbers are viewed through a window that extends far beyond the Santa Clara, California, company’s headquarters because its products are needed by a wide range of companies — including Big Tech peers like Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet and Meta Platforms — to build data centers that are becoming known as AI factories.

    “AI spending isn’t just holding up, it’s accelerating. That’s exactly what the market needed to see,” said Jake Behan, head of capital markets for investment firm Direxion.

    The numbers initially lifted Nvidia’s stock price by as much as 5% in Thursday’s trading, while other tech stocks tied to the AI spending frenzy also got a boost. But Nvidia’s shares and other tech stocks reversed course later in the session as investors found other issues besides AI, such as the government’s latest jobs report and the future direction of interest rates.

    Even with a 3% drop in its stock price amid the broader market decline, Nvidia remains valued at $4.4 trillion, more than 10 times its valuation three years ago when OpenAI released its ChatGPT chatbot, triggering the biggest technological shift since Apple released the iPhone in 2007.

    Nvidia’s rapid rise has turned its CEO Jensen Huang into the chief evangelist for the AI revolution and he sought to use his bully pulpit during a late Wednesday conference call with industry analysts to make a case that the spending to make technology with humanlike intelligence is just beginning.

    “There’s been a lot of talk about an AI bubble. From our vantage point, we see something very different,” Huang insisted while celebrating “depth and breadth” of Nvidia’s growth.

    Huang is hardly a lone voice in the wilderness. A recent report from Gartner Inc. estimates that worldwide spending on AI will rise to more than $2 trillion next year, a 37% increase from the nearly $1.5 trillion that the research firm expects to be spent this year.

    But it remains to be seen if all that money pouring into AI will actually produce all the profits and productivity that proponents have been promising. That leaves the question unanswered if all the real spending that’s happening will be worth it.

    The most recent survey of global fund managers by Bank of America showed a record percentage of investors saying companies are “overinvesting.”

    Big Tech is already so profitable that many of the most successful finance their spending sprees with their ongoing stream of revenue and cash hoards in their bank accounts. But some companies, such as Meta Platforms and Oracle, are relying more heavily on debt to fund their AI ambitions — a strategy that has raised enough alarms among investors that their stock prices have plunged more dramatically than their peers in recent weeks.

    Both Meta and Oracle have suffered more than 20% declines in their stock prices since late October.

    But other Big Tech powerhouses leading the way in AI remain just behind Nvidia and iPhone maker Apple in the rankings of the most valuable companies. Alphabet, Microsoft and Amazon boast market values currently ranging from $2.3 trillion to $3.6 trillion.

    “It is true that valuations are high and that there is some froth in the market, however, the spending on AI is real,” said Chris Zaccarelli, chief investment officer for money manager Northlight Asset Management. “Whether or not the spending turns out to be overdone won’t be known for many years.”

    —

    AP Business Writer Stan Choe in New York contributed to this story.

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  • Elon Musk Said Work Will Be Optional in 10 Years. Jensen Huang Responded

    Elon Musk said this week that in 10 to 20 years, work will be optional. He was sitting onstage at the U.S.-Saudi Arabia Investment Forum in Washington, D.C., along with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.  

    Since the Tesla CEO was awarded a $1 trillion pay package in November, he’s remained in the news as he continues to make big claims about the future of AI and robots. 

    “It will be like playing sports or a video game or something like that,” Musk said of work in the long term. “The same way you can go to the store and just buy some vegetables or you could grow vegetables in your backyard. It’s much harder to grow vegetables in your backyard, but some people still do it because they like growing vegetables. That will be what work is like. Optional.”

    The comment comes amid large-scale layoffs being attributed to AI and growing concerns that the technology is taking jobs.

    Musk admitted that there’s much to be done before working could become optional. But he pointed to Iain Banks’s science fiction Culture series as a predictor of what life could be like.

    “Interestingly in those books, money is no longer … it doesn’t exist,” Musk said. “And my guess is if you go out long enough, assuming there’s a continued improvement in AI and robotics, money will stop being relevant at some point in the future.”

    When asked for comment, Nvidia’s Huang didn’t directly touch the claim. The two joked about Musk’s prediction dropping right before the Nvidia earnings call on Wednesday.

    While he didn’t offer a comment on the potential that currency will become irrelevant, Huang agreed that all jobs will be different.   

    “A lot of the things that we do mundanely or arduously or very difficultly are going to be done very simply, and so we’re going to be more productive from that sense,” he said. 

    But to Huang, increased productivity translates to having extra time to get things done. 

    “In the near term, I would say that there is every evidence that we will be more productive and yet still be busier, because we have so many ideas,” he said.

    The final deadline for the 2026 Inc. Regionals Awards is Friday, December 12, at 11:59 p.m. PT. Apply now.

    Ava Levinson

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  • Nvidia earnings clear lofty hurdle set by analysts amid fears about an AI bubble

    SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Nvidia’s sales of the computing chips powering the artificial intelligence craze surged beyond the lofty bar set by stock market analysts in a performance that may ease recent jitters about a Big Tech boom turning into a bust that topples the world’s most valuable company.

    The results announced late Wednesday provided a pulse check on the frenzied spending on AI technology that has been fueling both the stock market and much of the overall economy since OpenAI released its ChatGPT three years ago.

    Nvidia has been by far the biggest beneficiary of the run-up because its processors have become indispensable for building the AI factories that are needed to enable what’s supposed to be the most dramatic shift in technology since Apple released the iPhone in 2007.

    ARCHIVO – Varias personas miran los nuevos productos de Nvidia en la exhibición Computex 2025 en Taipéi, Taiwán, el miércoles 21 de mayo de 2025. (AP Foto/Chiang Ying-ying, Archivo)

    But in the past few weeks, there has been a rising tide of sentiment that the high expectations for AI may have become far too frothy, setting the stage for a jarring comedown that could be just as dramatic as the ascent that transformed Nvidia from a company worth less than $400 billion three years ago to one worth $4.5 trillion at the end of Wednesday’s trading.

    Nvidia’s report for its fiscal third quarter covering the August-October period elicited a sigh of relief among those fretting about a worst-case scenario and could help reverse the recent downturn in the stock market.

    “The market should belt out a heavy sigh, given the skittishness we have been experiencing,” said Sean O’Hara, president of the investment firm Pacer ETFs.

    The company’s stock price gained more than 5% in Wednesday’s extended trading after the numbers came out. If the shares trade similarly Thursday, it could result in a one-day gain of about $230 billion in stockholder wealth.

    Nvidia earned $31.9 billion, or $1.30 per share, a 65% increase from the same time last year, while revenue climbed 62% to $57 billion. Analysts polled by FactSet Research had forecast earnings of $1.26 per share on revenue of $54.9 billion. What’s more, the Santa Clara, California, company predicted its revenue for the current quarter covering November-January will come in at about $65 billion, nearly $3 billion above analysts’ projections, in an indication that demand for its AI chips remains feverish.

    Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang speaks during a press conference at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) CEO summit in Gyeongju, South Korea, Friday, Oct.31, 2025 (AP Photo/Lee Jin-man)

    Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang speaks during a press conference at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) CEO summit in Gyeongju, South Korea, Friday, Oct.31, 2025 (AP Photo/Lee Jin-man)

    The incoming orders for Nvidia’s top-of-the-line Blackwell chip are “off the charts,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in a prepared statement that described the current market conditions as “a virtuous cycle.” In a conference call, Nvidia Chief Financial Officer Collette Kress said that by the end of next year the company will have sold about $500 billion in chips designed for AI factories within a 24-month span Kress also predicts trillions of dollars more will be spent by the end of the 2020s.

    In a conference call preamble that has become like a State of the AI Market address, Huang seized the moment to push back against the skeptics who doubt his thesis that technology is at tipping point that will transform the world. “There’s been a lot of talk about an AI bubble. From our vantage point, we see something very different,” Huang insisted while celebrating “depth and breadth” of Nvidia’s growth.

    The upbeat results, optimistic commentary and ensuring reaction reflects the pivotal role that Nvidia is playing in the future direction of the economy — a position that Huang has leveraged to forge close ties with President Donald Trump, even as the White House wages a trade war that has inhibited the company’s ability to sell its chips in China’s fertile market.

    Trump is increasingly counting on the tech sector and the development of artificial intelligence to deliver on his economic agenda. For all of Trump’s claims that his tariffs are generating new investments, much of that foreign capital is going to data centers for AI’s computing demands or the power facilities needed to run those data centers.

    “Saying this is the most important stock in the world is an understatement,” Jay Woods, chief market strategist of investment bank Freedom Capital Markets, said of Nvidia.

    The boom has been a boon for more than just Nvidia, which became the first company to eclipse a market value of $5 trillion a few weeks ago, before the recent bubble worries resulted in a more than 10% decline. As OpenAI and other Big Tech powerhouses snap up Nvidia’s chips to build their AI factories and invest in other services connected to the technology, their fortunes have also been soaring. Apple, Microsoft, Google parent Alphabet Inc. and Amazon all boast market values in the $2 trillion to $4 trillion range.

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  • Nvidia’s earnings attest to its leadership in the AI race. By the numbers

    Nvidia reported more eye-catching numbers for its fiscal third quarter Wednesday, with net income jumping 65% and revenue increasing 62% from a year earlier.

    Last month, Nvidia became the first public company to reach a market capitalization of $5 trillion.

    The ravenous appetite for the Silicon Valley company’s chips is the main reason that the company’s stock price has increased so rapidly since early 2023.

    Nvidia carved out an early lead in tailoring its chipsets known as graphics processing units, or GPUs, from use in powering video games to helping to train powerful AI systems, like the technology behind ChatGPT and image generators. Demand skyrocketed as more people began using AI chatbots. Tech companies scrambled for more chips to build and run them.

    Nvidia’s journey to be one of the world’s most prominent companies has produced some extraordinary numbers. Here’s a look.

    $31.9 billion

    Nvidia’s net income for the third quarter, up from $19.3 billion a year ago.

    38.9%

    Nvidia stock’s gain for the year, as of the close of trading Wednesday. That follows gains of 171% in 2024 and 239% in 2023.

    $4.53 trillion

    Nvidia’s total market capitalization as of the close of trading Wednesday, tops in the S&P 500.

    Apple at $3.98 trillion and Microsoft at $3.62 trillion were next among the most valuable companies in the S&P 500. In all, nine companies in the index have market cap’s above $1 trillion.

    $4.28 trillion

    The gross domestic product of Japan, the world’s fourth largest economy, according to the International Monetary Fund.

    79

    The number of trading days it took for Nvidia’s market cap to grow from $4 trillion to $5 trillion earlier this year. The market cap had jumped from $3 trillion on May 13, to $4 trillion on July 9 (41 trading days), although Nvidia had crossed and fallen back below the $3 trillion threshold a number of times between June 2024 and May 2025 before making the run to $4 trillion.

    19.8%

    The company’s contribution to the gain in the S&:P 500 this year as of Oct. 31, according to S&P Dow Jones Indices.

    $162 billion

    The net worth of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, according to Forbes, putting him eighth on its Real-Time Billionaires List. Elon Musk is No. 1 at $467.7 billion.

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  • Does Jensen Huang See a Bubble? No. He Sees ‘Something Very Different’

    Investors losing sleep over Nvidia’s earnings can resume breathing normally. All the news from CEO Jensen Huang was reassuring for stakeholders in the world’s largest publicly traded company.

    “There’s been a lot of talk about an AI bubble. From our vantage point, we see something very different,” Huang said on the company’s investor call.

    That “something very different” seems to be tons and tons of money pouring in. The company posted a record $57.01 billion in revenue during its fiscal third quarter. That was well above market expectations of $54.92 billion, as reported by CNBC. Earnings per share also beat expectations at $1.30 versus $1.25.

    Nvidia’s bread and butter, the data center business, also brought in record revenue at $51.2 billion, which was up 66% from this time last year.

    The tech giant is expecting that record demand to continue, as Huang said in the earnings press release that “Blackwell sales are off the charts, and cloud GPUs are sold out.” Revenue expectations for the upcoming quarter were $65 billion, above market expectations of $61.66 billion.

    “We currently have visibility to a half a trillion dollars in Blackwell and Rubin [chips] revenue from the start of this year through the end of calendar year 2026,” Nvidia CFO Colette Kress said in the company’s investor call on Wednesday.

    The AI industry had been biting its nails in anticipation of this specific report for some time now.

    As Nvidia was busy hitting records over the quarter as the first company to ever hit $5 trillion market cap, worries over an AI bubble ballooned steadily. At the heart of every concern was Nvidia, which is considered central to the AI trade as the biggest global supplier of chips.

    A growing chorus of experts, from famous investors to economists, central banks and even top tech CEOs themselves, have raised concerns about an overvaluation of AI stocks in recent months.

    Then, on top of all that, two major investors, Japan’s SoftBank and Peter Thiel’s hedge fund Thiel Macro, offloaded their entire stake in the company back-to-back over the past two weeks.

    Investors were looking to Wednesday’s report to see if Nvidia could back up its meteoric valuations and quell those worries of an impending bubble burst. The shares rose more than 5% in response to the report, so it seems they might be satisfied so far with what they have seen.

    Nvidia has had a whirlwind quarter. The tech giant announced a flurry of high profile partnerships, including its first ever with OpenAI competitor Anthropic.

    The partnerships added fuel to the AI bubble fire, as experts opined that this infinitely expanding and tangled web of multibillion dollar investments made amongst a handful of giant tech companies with overlapping interests was “circular dealmaking.”

    The SEC filing had potentially interesting revelations about one of these partnerships. Though the company characterizes its commitment to invest up to $10 billion in Anthropic as a clear “agreement,” the tech giant’s whopping $100 billion investment into OpenAI is characterized as “a letter of intent with an opportunity to invest.” The first to point that out was journalist Ed Zitron on X. Nvidia hasn’t yet responded to a Gizmodo request for comment.

    Also this past quarter, the company hosted its first GPU Technology Conference in Washington D.C. as CEO Jensen Huang continued cozying up to the Trump administration in hopes of a desirable resolution to the on-again-off-again China chips sales ban saga.

    “Sizable purchase orders never materialized” this past quarter due to that political uncertainty, Kress said.

    “While we were disappointed in the current state that prevents us from shipping more competitive data center compute products to China, we are committed to continued engagement with the U.S. and China governments,” she added.

    But Huang’s efforts may be bearing some fruit. Axios reported earlier on Wednesday that White House officials were asking lawmakers to dump the GAIN AI Act that would heavily restrict Nvidia’s ability to sell chips to China if it passes as part of the upcoming annual defense bill.

    Ece Yildirim

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  • Elon Musk Claims Money Won’t Exist in the Future (and Jensen Huang Would Like a Heads Up)

    Elon Musk made some wild claims at the US-Saudi Investment Forum at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday, insisting that his Optimus robot would fix poverty, people wouldn’t have to work in the future, and money would eventually become irrelevant. Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, was also on stage and joked that he’d like Musk to give him a heads up just before currency no longer becomes a thing.

    “AI and humanoid robots will actually eliminate poverty,” Musk claimed on Wednesday. “And Tesla won’t be the only one that makes them. I think Tesla will pioneer this, but there will be many other companies that make humanoid robots. But there is only basically one way to make everyone wealthy, and that is AI and robotics.”

    The Tesla CEO has frequently insisted in recent months that his robots will deliver a kind of post-scarcity future where nobody has to work. The billionaire said it explicitly on Wednesday when asked about what he thinks the future holds for those who are concerned about AI and robots replacing jobs.

    “My prediction is that work will be optional,” Musk said, noting that he was talking about 10-20 years from now.

    The billionaire went on to take his now-common prediction even further, claiming that in such a world where robots are doing all the labor, money won’t exist anymore.

    “I’d always recommend people read Iain Banks’ Culture books to get a sense for what a probable positive AI future is like. And interestingly, in those books, money is no longer… doesn’t exist. It’s kind of interesting,” Musk said.

    “My guess is, if you go out long enough, assuming there’s a continued improvement in AI and robotics, which seems likely, the money will stop being relevant at some point in the future,” Musk continued.

    The moderator of the discussion asked, “Jensen, any thoughts?” as the crowd laughed. “By the way, the Nvidia earnings call is later today,” Musk said, joining the laughter.

    Huang shifted uncomfortably in his seat and laughed to himself with a kind of bewildered look. “And by the way, since currency is irrelevant…” Huang joked, trailing off. “Elon just wants to share with you breaking news.”

    After a good laugh, Huang got serious again and sort of hedged on what Musk was saying. Huang has previously taken the opposite view of the crowd that insists there won’t be any work in the future. Back in August, Huang said that AI and automation will actually make everyone busier. Huang acknowledged that things would be different, including things like how students learn and how people do their work. But he stuck to his guns in predicting that people will actually just be busier because they can accomplish more of their goals.

    “It is my guess that Elon will be busier as a result of AI. I’m gonna be busier as a result of AI,” said Huang. “And the reason for that is because we have so many ideas we wanna pursue, so many things that we still have in our backlog inside our company that we can go pursue. If we were more productive, we can get to those things faster, and so in the near term, I would say that there’s every evidence that we will be more productive and yet still be busier because we have so many ideas.”

    Huang then joked that since he texts with Musk often, he hopes the Tesla CEO will give him a heads up before currency is no longer relevant. Musk said, “You’ll see it coming.”

    Musk is constantly talking about how the robots he’s developing at Tesla, known as Optimus, are the key to eliminating poverty. But, as we’ve written before, this is probably his most ridiculous lie. Improving efficiency doesn’t redistribute wealth. Musk never addresses who will be paying Americans to just sit around and do nothing while billions of robots actually perform the labor. Is it the government? Because that would require a massive change in political and economic structures.

    And why should we believe Musk, of all people, wants to pay people for sitting around? This is the man who stormed into the federal government earlier this year with his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and decided that too many people were taking advantage of government benefits. He’s also the guy who has called the word homeless a “propaganda word” for “violent drug addicts.”

    Musk frequently tries to suggest that people experiencing homelessness don’t have jobs, even though somewhere between 40 and 60% of people who don’t have housing are employed, according to government estimates. He does not give a fuck about poverty. He cares about making more money and is on track to become the world’s first trillionaire. And he never talks about the mechanism by which his utopian idea for a leisure society would actually work.

    The ideas Musk promotes were extremely common in 20th-century futurism. And it’s clear that’s where he’s drawing his inspiration, even citing Iain Banks and his utopian Culture series of books on Wednesday. But none of it makes sense unless you establish some kind of radical socialist or communist entity at the heart of this vision to distribute the necessities to live.

    Musk wants to sell you his robots, and that makes sense in our current economic system. But after he sells you a robot, it doesn’t follow that the person who owns that robot would no longer have to work. It’s a bit like imagining that all of the appliances in your home right now are somehow paying for themselves. They’re not. They may improve your life, but they don’t institute a political or economic system whereby people no longer have to work. If all wealth is derived from robots in this imaginary system Musk creates, he would have to be the one redistributing his wealth to pay for everyone else not working.

    The end of the discussion with Musk and Huang was a good reminder of where we’re actually situated here in 2025. The Saudi moderator said “my boss and your bosses is going to talk next,” referring to Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) and President Donald Trump. The two tech executives didn’t vocally object to Donald Trump being called their “boss.” But it stripped away the fantasy Musk seemed to be engaged in about robotics and AI delivering utopia anytime soon.

    Trump and MBS have no plans to let people sit around and get paid for doing nothing. And they’re building a future where that could never conceivably happen.

    Matt Novak

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  • Microsoft partners with Anthropic and Nvidia in cloud infrastructure deal

    Microsoft said Tuesday it is partnering with artificial intelligence company Anthropic and chipmaker Nvidia as part of an AI infrastructure deal that moves the software giant further away from its longtime alliance with OpenAI.

    Anthropic, maker of the chatbot Claude that competes with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, said it is committed to buying $30 billion in computing capacity from Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform.

    As part of the partnership, Nvidia will also invest up to $10 billion in Anthropic, and Microsoft will invest up to $5 billion in the San Francisco-based startup.

    The joint announcements by CEOs Dario Amodei of Anthropic, Satya Nadella of Microsoft, and Jensen Huang of Nvidia came just ahead of the opening of Microsoft’s annual Ignite developer conference.

    “This is all about deepening our commitment to bringing the best infrastructure, model choice and applications to our customers,” Nadella said on a video call with the other two executives, adding that it builds on the “critical” partnership Microsoft still has with OpenAI.

    Microsoft was, until earlier this year, the exclusive cloud provider for OpenAI and made the technology behind ChatGPT the foundation for its own AI assistant, Copilot. But the two companies moved farther apart and their business agreements were amended as OpenAI increasingly sought to secure its own cloud capacity through big deals with Oracle, SoftBank and other data center developers and chipmakers.

    Asked in September if OpenAI could do more with those new computing partnerships than it could with Microsoft, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told The Associated Press his company was “severely limited for the value we can offer to people.”

    At the same time, Microsoft holds a roughly 27% stake in the new for-profit corporation that OpenAI, founded as a nonprofit, is forming to advance its commercial ambitions as the world’s most valuable startup.

    Anthropic, founded by ex-OpenAI leaders in 2021, said Claude will now be the “only frontier model” available to customers of the three biggest cloud computing providers: Amazon, which remains Anthropic’s primary cloud provider, and Google and Microsoft.

    AI products like Claude, ChatGPT, Copilotand Google’s Gemini are reshaping how many people work but take huge amounts of energy and computing power to build and operate. Neither OpenAI nor Anthropic has yet reported turning a profit, amplifying concerns about an AI bubble if their products don’t meet investors’ high expectations and justify the expenditures. As part of the deal, Nvidia said Anthropic will have access to up to a gigawatt of capacity from its specialized AI chips.

    Huang said he’s “admired the work of Anthropic and Dario for a long time, and this is the first time we are going to deeply partner with Anthropic to accelerate Claude.”

    At Microsoft’s Ignite conference, a showcase of its latest AI technology which opened Tuesday in San Francisco, Anthropic’s chief product officer Mike Krieger highlighted the budding partnership during an on-stage appearance.

    “From the beginning, it has seemed there has been a lot of shared DNA between our companies,” said Krieger, who was also the co-founder of Instagram.

    ——

    AP Technology Writer Michael Liedtke in San Francisco contributed to this report.

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  • NVIDIA (NVDA) Has The AI Orders, Says Jim Cramer

    We recently published 11 Stocks on Jim Cramer’s Radar. NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) is one of the stocks Jim Cramer recently discussed.

    NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA)’s AI GPUs rule the AI industry. In this appearance, Cramer discussed the orders for these chips. The orders are crucial for NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA)’s valuation, and the CNBC TV host believes that there is more than enough demand for the chips:

    NVIDIA (NVDA) Has The AI Orders, Says Jim Cramer

    “I do think that they have the orders, so does Jensen, Jensen Huang has the orders. You need the orders in order to be able to get to where we’re gonna go here. It’s just that we need the orders to be paid for. . .I know that Jensen Huang has a list of clients who’re willing to pay for anything, anything that was meant for China. And I think, I think you own NVIDIA, don’t trade it.”

    While we acknowledge the potential of NVDA as an investment, our conviction lies in the belief that some AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns and have limited downside risk. If you are looking for an extremely cheap AI stock that is also a major beneficiary of Trump tariffs and onshoring, see our free report on the best short-term AI stock.

    READ NEXT: 30 Stocks That Should Double in 3 Years and 11 Hidden AI Stocks to Buy Right Now.

    Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.

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  • These are the 37 donors helping pay for Trump’s $300 million White House ballroom

    WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump says his $300 million White House ballroom will be paid for “100% by me and some friends of mine.”

    The White House released a list of 37 donors, including crypto billionaires, charitable organizations, sports team owners, powerful financiers, tech and tobacco giants, media companies, longtime supporters of Republican causes and several of the president’s neighbors in Palm Beach, Florida.

    It’s incomplete. Among others, the list doesn’t include Carrier Group, which offered to donate an HVAC system for the ballroom, and artificial intelligence chipmaker Nvidia, whose CEO, Jensen Huang, publicly discussed its donation.

    The White House hasn’t said how much each donor is giving, and almost none was willing to divulge that. Very few commented on their contributions when contacted by The Associated Press.

    A senior White House official said the list has grown since it was first released in October, but some companies don’t want to be publicly named until required to do so by financial disclosure regulations. No foreign individuals or entities were among the donors, according to the official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss details that haven’t been made public.

    Here’s a look at the divulged donors:

    Tech giants (8):

    Amazon Background: Trump was once highly critical of company founder Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post, but has been much less so lately. Amazon donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration, an event attended by Bezos. Its video streaming service paid $40 million to license a documentary about first lady Melania Trump. Its cloud-based computing operation, Amazon Web Services, is a major government contractor.

    Apple Background: After an up-and-down relationship during Trump’s first term, CEO Tim Cook has sought to improve his standing with the president this time. Before returning to the White House, Trump hosted Cook at his Palm Beach estate, Mar-a-Lago, and said he had spoken with Cook about the company’s long-running tax battles with the European Union. Cook also donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund. In the spring, Trump threatened the computing giant with tariffs after Apple announced plans to build manufacturing facilities in India. In August, Cook presented the president with a customized glass plaque with a gold base as the CEO announced plans to bring Apple’s total investment commitment in U.S. manufacturing over four years to $600 billion.

    Google Background: During his first term, Trump’s administration sued Google for antitrust violations. While a candidate last year, Trump suggested he might seek to break up the search engine behemoth. Once Trump won the election, Google donated $1 million to his inauguration, and its CEO, Sundar Pichai, joined other major tech executives in attending the ceremony. Google’s subsidiary, YouTube, agreed in September to pay $24.5 million to settle a lawsuit with Trump after it suspended his account following the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. According to court filings, $22 million of that went to the Trust for the National Mall, which can help pay for ballroom construction.

    HP Background: An original Silicon Valley stalwart, the company donated to Trump’s inaugural fund. HP ‘s CEO, Enrique Lores, participated in a White House roundtable event in September. Lores also previously met with President Joe Biden at the White House on multiple occasions as top CEOs endorsed that administration’s economic plans.

    Meta Background: Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg had been critical of Trump going back to 2016, and Facebook suspended Trump for years after the Jan. 6 insurrection. This time around, Meta contributed $1 million to Trump’s inauguration, and Zuckerberg attended.

    Micron Technology Background: The producer of advanced memory computer chips announced an April 2024 agreement with the Biden administration to provide $6.1 billion in government support for Micron to make chips domestically. Then, in June, Micron pledged $200 billion for U.S. memory chip manufacturing expansion under Trump. But at least $120 billion of that involved holdovers first announced during Biden’s administration.

    Microsoft Background: The company donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration, twice what it spent for Biden’s or for Trump’s first inauguration. CEO Satya Nadella has also met with Trump numerous times, as Microsoft has supported the administration’s relaxation of regulations on artificial intelligence. He met previously with Biden, too. Trump has called for Microsoft’s president of global affairs, Lisa Monaco, to be fired because she was a deputy attorney general under Biden when the Justice Department led several investigations against Trump.

    Palantir Technologies Background: Co-founded by billionaire libertarian Peter Thiel, the firm concentrates on artificial intelligence and machine learning. It has seen profits soar thanks to lucrative defense and other federal contracts.

    Crypto (5):

    Coinbase Background: The major cryptocurrency exchange was founded by Brian Armstrong, a top donor to a political action committee that helped Trump and other pro-crypto candidates in 2024. Armstrong attended the first crypto summit at the White House in March. Coinbase also hired Trump’s co-campaign manager, Chris LaCivita, to its Global Advisory Council.

    Ripple Background: In March, the Securities and Exchange Commission dropped a lawsuit filed during Trump’s first term, which accused the company of violating securities laws by selling XRP crypto coins without a securities registration. In his second term, Trump has eased regulations on digital assets, repealing an SEC accounting rule and a previous presidential executive order mandating more federal study and proposed changes to crypto regulations.

    Tether Background: A cryptocurrency company and major stablecoin issuer, Tether paid fines for misleading investors. CEO Paolo Ardoino has been to Trump’s White House, and, in April, the company hired former Trump administration crypto policy official Bo Hines to lead its domestic expansion efforts.

    Cameron Winklevoss and Tyler Winklevoss Background: Each Winklevoss twin is listed as a separate donor. Best known as Zuckerberg’s chief antagonists in “The Social Network,” the brothers founded the Gemini cryptocurrency exchange. Biden’s SEC sued Gemini for selling unregistered securities, but the case has been paused under Trump.

    Energy and industrial (4):

    Caterpillar Background: The equipment maker ‘s PAC has donated to candidates from both parties, but given more to Republicans. It has also said publicly that Trump’s tariffs, some of which the administration has now eased, could increase its costs and hurt earnings.

    NextEra Energy Background: NextEra is the world’s largest electric utility holding company. Trump says he’ll work to ensure tech giants can secure their own sources of electricity to power data centers, especially as they expand energy-hogging artificial intelligence operations. Google recently entered into an agreement to buy power from a shuttered nuclear power plant in Iowa owned by NextEra, which the company plans to bring back online in 2029.

    Paolo Tiramani Background: An American industrial designer who has donated to Trump’s political campaigns. Tiramani, with his son, runs BOXABL, a firm specializing in modular, prefabricated homes.

    Union Pacific Background: Trump has endorsed the company’s proposed $85 billion acquisition of Norfolk Southern, which would be the largest-ever rail merger. It also will be up to the president to appoint two more Republican members of the Surface Transportation Board, who will ultimately decide whether to approve the merger. In August, Trump fired one of the two Democratic members of the board.

    Philanthropy (3):

    Adelson Family Foundation Background: Founded to strengthen the state of Israel and the Jewish people, the foundation was created by Miriam Adelson, the majority owner of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks, close Trump ally and longtime GOP megadonor. She’s also the widow of Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire founder and owner of Las Vegas Sands.

    Betty Wold Johnson Foundation Background: Based in Palm Beach, the foundation supports health, arts and culture initiatives, as well as environmental and educational programs. It’s named in honor of the mother of New York Jets owner Woody Johnson, who served as Trump’s ambassador to the United Kingdom during his first term.

    Laura & Isaac Perlmutter Foundation Background: The nonprofit based in Lake Worth Beach, near Palm Beach, focuses on promoting health care, social justice, the arts and community initiatives. Isaac is an Israeli American businessman and financier and former chair of Marvel Entertainment. He and his wife have donated to Trump’s presidential campaigns and affiliated PACs.

    Trump administration officials (3):

    Benjamin Leon Jr. Background: The Cuban American founder of Miami-based Leon Medical Centers is Trump’s nominee for U.S. ambassador to Spain.

    Kelly Loeffler and Jeffrey Sprecher Background: A former Republican senator from Georgia, Loeffler heads Trump’s Small Business Administration. Her husband is CEO of the energy market Intercontinental Exchange Inc. and chairs the New York Stock Exchange. The couple faced scrutiny in 2020 for dumping substantial portions of their portfolio and purchasing new stocks, including in firms making protective equipment, after Congress received briefings on the severity of the coming coronavirus pandemic.

    Lutnick Family Background: Howard Lutnick is Trump’s commerce secretary. A crypto enthusiast, he once headed the brokerage and investment bank Cantor Fitzgerald.

    Communications/entertainment (3):

    Comcast Background: The mass media and telecom conglomerate has often been criticized by Trump, including in April, when the president posted that Comcast was a “disgrace to the integrity of broadcasting.” The company owns NBC and is spinning off MSNBC. It could be interested in acquiring Warner Bros. Discover, and that would leave Comcast looking for government approval.

    Hard Rock International Background: A Florida-based gaming and tourism concern owned by the Seminole Tribe, the company operates a number of casinos, including the former Trump Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Trump has for decades criticized federal exemptions allowing tribes to operate casinos.

    T-Mobile Background: The wireless carrier is indirectly linked to Trump Mobile, which the president’s family controls and offers gold phones and cell service in a licensing deal. Trump Mobile uses Liberty Mobile Wireless, a small, Florida-based network that T-Mobile says runs its operations on T-Mobile’s network. T-Mobile says that is unrelated to its decision to donate to Trump’s ballroom, which it says is meant to “restore and enrich the historic landmarks that define our nation’s capital.”

    Big Tobacco (2):

    Altria Group Background: The tobacco giant controls Philip Morris USA, maker of Marlboro. It has pressed for federal crackdowns on counterfeit and illegal vaping products. The company donated $50,000 to Trump’s inauguration.

    Reynolds American Background: With brands including Lucky Strike and Camel, the company has been active in lobbying to steer the Trump administration away from a Biden-proposed ban on menthol cigarettes.

    Defense/national security (2):

    Booz Allen Hamilton Background: A major defense and national security technology firm with extensive government contracts, it paid fines to settle lawsuits with the Justice Department under Biden. Booz Allen Hamilton agreed to pay more than $377 million in 2023 to settle allegations that it improperly billing costs to its government contracts. In January, it paid nearly $16 million to settle allegations that it submitted fraudulent claims in connection with government contracts.

    Lockheed Martin Corporation Background: The massive defense contractor has huge government contracts. It said in a statement that it “is grateful for the opportunity to help bring the President’s vision to reality and make this addition to the People’s House.”

    Individuals (7):

    Stefan E. Brodie Background: A biotech entrepreneur and co-founder of the chemical manufacturing company Purolite, Brodie and his family donated to Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign and affiliated committees. Brodie and his brother, Donald, were convicted in 2002 of circumventing U.S. sanctions on Cuba.

    Charles and Marissa Cascarilla Background: Charles Cascarilla is co‑founder of the blockchain firm Paxos. He and his wife are philanthropists who have advocated for financial technology sector deregulation.

    J. Pepe and Emilia Fanjul Background: Longtime Republican donors and Palm Beach residents, the couple controls U.S. sugar refining interests that includes the Domino brand.

    Edward and Shari Glazer Background: Members of the family that owns the NFL’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers and has a controlling stake in the Manchester United football club, the couple donated to Trump’s campaign. Edward is the founder and CEO of US Property Trust, which operates shopping centers, and the car dealership company US Auto Trust.

    Harold Hamm Background: The billionaire oil tycoon and pioneer of hydraulic fracturing heads the oil producer Continental Resources. He’s praised the Trump administration for aggressively moving to purchase oil to replenish the Strategic Petroleum Reserve stockpile.

    Stephen A. Schwarzman Background: A Palm Beach resident and chair and CEO of the Blackstone Group, a global private equity firm he helped establish in 1985. Schwarzman has donated to Trump and his PACs previously and led his first-term President’s Strategic and Policy Forum.

    Konstantin Sokolov Background: Born in Russia, he immigrated to the U.S. and now heads the Chicago-based private equity firm IJS Investments. Sokolov has donated to many educational and charitable causes in the past, and to Trump’s political campaigns.

    ___

    Associated Press writer Darlene Superville contributed to this report.

    ___

    This story has been updated to correct the first name of an individual who donated to the White House ballroom. He is Harold Hamm, not Howard Hamm.

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  • Exclusive | Trump Officials Torpedoed Nvidia’s Push to Export AI Chips to China

    Shortly before President Trump met Chinese leader Xi Jinping in South Korea, an urgent issue emerged. Trump wanted to discuss a request by Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang to allow sales of a new generation of artificial-intelligence chips to China, current and former administration officials said.

    Greenlighting the export of Nvidia’s Blackwell chips would be a seismic policy shift potentially giving China, the U.S.’s biggest geopolitical competitor, a technological accelerant. Huang—who speaks to Trump often—has lobbied relentlessly to maintain access to the Chinese market.

    Copyright ©2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

    Lingling Wei

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  • Jim Cramer Says Meta (META) CEO Zuckerberg Wants To “Win No Matter What”

    We recently published 10 Stocks on Jim Cramer’s Radar. Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ:META) is one of the stocks Jim Cramer recently discussed.

    After social media giant Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ:META)’s shares fell following its latest earnings report, Cramer took the contrarian view and defended the firm’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. The CNBC TV host did not hold back when discussing the firm:

    Photo by austin-distel on Unsplash

    “[After David Faber commented that Cramer was frustrated with the conference call despite Meta’s sizable user base] I thought that the revenues were terrific. The reaction to the conference call is that, finally we’re at the point where people are spending too much. And he is spending too much. People did not like Mark Zuckerberg’s assurance that you have to spend.

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  • Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang Makes His Case for China Trade

    Nvidia’s first ever GTC to be hosted in Washington D.C.—a conference that’s been deemed the “Super Bowl of AI”—was a rare occasion that brought together both government officials and the tech industry under one roof.

    It was an opportunity for the tech executives in attendance to advocate for industry friendly policies straight to the government. Unsurprisingly, CEO Jensen Huang was first to take advantage of that opportunity to the fullest.

    “America needs to be the most aggressive in adopting AI technology of any country in the world, bar none, and that is an imperative. We can’t regulate our way out of this, we can’t fear-monger our way out of this,” Huang said in a press and industry briefing. “We have to encourage every single company, every single student, to use AI.”

    The leather jacket-clad executive spent most of his crowd-facing time repeating Trump administration talking points on bringing back manufacturing or lauding the President. He also spent time trying to make the case for the normalization of trade ties with China.

    “As it turns out, the best benefit to United States is for American technology to be available in China to win the hearts and minds of their developers,” Huang said. “A policy that causes America to lose half of the world’s AI developers is not beneficial long term, it hurts us more. It hurts America more than it hurts them.”

    Huang also argued that because China is a huge creator of open source software, if Americans retreat completely from China they might risk being “ill-prepared” for when Chinese software “permeates the world.”

    The U.S.-China trade war has impacted so many parts of the global economy, but the tech industry has been at the forefront, with Nvidia right in the bullseye.

    The Biden administration was first to enforce export restrictions on Nvidia’s chips sales to China, due to national security concerns and competitive fears. The restrictions got even stricter under Trump after Beijing landed a big blow to American AI confidence earlier this year with DeepSeek’s R1, a model that rivaled some of the best American AI offerings despite using lower cost chips. It showed the U.S. that Chinese developers did not need access to the highest tech Nvidia chips to make models that outperform expectations.

    The few months of the Trump imposed blanket exports ban was a big hit to Nvidia: executives shared in a May earnings call that they were revising revenue expectations for the quarter down by about $8 billion because of it.

    After a months-long noteworthy lobbying effort by Huang, Trump decided to relax the rule in July, but then demanded a 15% cut from China sales in return.

    Now, Huang reveals there’s not yet a signed document for that arrangement.

    “The administration is working on that, and until then, we don’t really have to confront it, because, you know, obviously China hasn’t decided to allow our chips to go back to China,” Huang said.

    After Trump okayed the sale of Nvidia’s chips to China, it was now Beijing’s turn to take a hard stance on the chipmaker.

    Chinese authorities have started discouraging local industry titans from purchasing Nvidia chips.

    The reason for that could be because Beijing has decided to decouple its AI industry from American tech.

    Chinese AI industry is currently dependent on American chipmakers like Nvidia, and that gives Americans an edge, especially when the only chips they allow in are lower-model ones. In the absence of Nvidia chips, China will have to develop their own high-tech chips that can rival, and perhaps even surpass, the quality of Nvidia chips. If that happens, the United States can be at jeopardy to lose its hold on the global chips market to China.

    After Trump’s blanket ban earlier this year choked off flow of Nvidia chips, Chinese chip development ramped up. China chip stocks are now experiencing a major boom, so big that Cambricon had to warn investors recently that things might be getting a little too hot.

    In its latest earnings call, Nvidia executives conceded that they were facing disappointing numbers from the region still because H20 chip shipments were yet to begin. Now, Huang is working hard to turn those numbers back up.

    Huang took to the stage at the press briefing with secretary of energy Chris Wright, in light of the tech giant’s announcement that it would be building seven giant AI supercomputers for the Department of Energy. Wright shared that he is optimistic that the two global superpowers would soon have a trade agreement.

    “China is an economic, scientific powerhouse, so we have some differences across the nations, but we have a lot of common ground,” Wright said.

    Trump is currently in South Korea, where he is scheduled to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping in a couple of hours. Huang said on Tuesday that he was flying out very soon to meet the President in South Korea, and he was notably missing from GTC on Wednesday.

    While Huang refused to answer questions on whether or not he would be joining the meeting between Trump and Xi Jinping, he did say that he had “a lot of announcements to make there.”

    While aboard Air Force One to South Korea, Trump told reporters that he might talk about the sale of Nvidia’s Blackwell model chips to China in his meeting with the President. He called the chips “super-duper.”

    Ece Yildirim

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  • Nvidia Bets the Future on a Robot Workforce

    Nvidia is betting on an AI-driven robot workforce to shape the future of the country.

    “It is very likely that you might know robots, and my friend Elon is also working on this, [are] likely going to be one of the largest new consumer electronics markets, and surely one of the largest industrial equipment markets,” CEO Jensen Huang said at his keynote speech at Nvidia’s first-ever Washington D.C. edition of the GTC AI conference.

    Huang’s “friend” Elon Musk is working to build a “robot army” for Tesla, but one that he supposedly only feels comfortable to build if he is granted an unprecedented $1 trillion pay package in an upcoming vote next week. In an earnings call last week, Musk also made some bold claims about the potential of a robot workforce, claiming that Tesla’s Optimus robots could achieve “probably 5x the productivity of a person per year.”

    Nvidia executives see a robot workforce as a core part of America’s re-industrialization, something that has also been a part of the Trump administration‘s talking points. Nvidia’s vice president of Omniverse and simulation technology Rev Lebaredian thinks robots could account for over half a million open manufacturing jobs.

    “We have this standing problem pretty much in every country and in many different sectors and industries where there are jobs that are open but nobody wants to fill them, and they tend to be jobs that have one or more of the three D’s: dull, dirty, or dangerous jobs,” Lebaredian told Gizmodo. One example he gives is mining.

    When you combine that with a population that is gradually getting older, Lebaredian claims, “the only real solution” to continue global production at its current scale “is to shift some of that labor over to automation and robotics.”

    “We’re hard at work trying to build a good robot brain. Once we build a good robot brain, combined with the advancements we’re making in robot bodies that you’re seeing across the world, pretty soon, we’re going to have a  robotic workforce that could fill those job openings I was talking about,” Lebaredian said.

    That raises numerous questions on where humans would stand in this system ran by robots. The Nvidia executive thinks humans will still be involved in the managerial and creative level while those whose jobs get automated would be shifted over to new work.

    “Throughout human history, there’s always been this fear that if you increase the population, that you’re going to run out of jobs and there will be less work to go around. But we’ve always figured out how to create more work for ourselves,” he said.

    Nvidia made numerous partnership announcements on Tuesday to build out this vision.

    The tech giant says it will automate warehouses with Agility, while building hospital logistics and delivery robots with Diligent Robotics, surgical robots with Johnson & Johnson, and a large-scale, advanced humanoid robot fleet with Figure AI that is supposed to help with everything from industrial support to household chores.

    In this mission to scale the robot workforce, Nvidia also announced expansions to the Omniverse Blueprint, which helps companies train and test robot fleets with real-world simulations, via a technology called digital twins.

    “Largely, the AI we’ve been building for the past 10 years or so has been restricted to the knowledge world,” Lebaredian said, but with AI going into the physical world, the industry needs to give AI “a body, like a robot, a humanoid, or a self-driving car.” To do that, you need to train and test these robots, but doing so in real world settings is not feasible and often dangerous.

    Instead of risking real life testing debacles, Lebaredian says that digital twins can generate data to be fed into these robots’ AI brains. The simulations can also be a place to train and test robots safely, for example by having surgical robots conduct millions of hours of surgery in-simulation rather than in real life.

    Siemens is currently beta testing this technology to help engineers design and operate digital twins of factories, chief technology officer Peter Koerte told Gizmodo.

    Although AI chips are still Nvidia’s bread and butter, the tech giant’s big bet on robotics has been noticeably growing recently.

    In the company’s annual shareholder meeting earlier this year, Huang said that he expects robotics and AI to provide the largest growth for the company, and that the two represent a “multi-trillion-dollar growth opportunity.”

    Humanoid robots are advancing, but the technology (at least what the public has seen so far) is still showing significant limitations in its capabilities, as well as bottlenecks to widespread adoption like the intensive energy demand.

    First came ‘Agentic AI’

    According to Nvidia’s vice president of generative AI software for enterprise Kari Briski, physical AI is what comes after agentic AI.

    Although Nvidia is already looking ahead to the next stage, the jury is still out on whether agentic AI truly works or can work or will ever realize executive’s lofty productivity promises on a larger scale.

    Companies around the world are scaling AI in their operations but a viral report from MIT researchers found that fewer than one in ten AI pilot programs in the corporate world have generated real revenue gains. A group of researchers from BetterUp Labs and Stanford think the reason behind this is “workslop,” aka low-quality, AI-generated work documents. And in a high profile case earlier this year, Replit’s AI agent went rogue during a vibecoding session and wiped out the company’s codebase.

    Underlying all of this is also industry fears that improvements in AI capabilities are plateauing. Those fears were sparked after OpenAI’s highly anticipated GPT-5 announcement earlier this year was considered to largely be a letdown for fans. But the investments continue to flow, and AI companies are betting on a new leap to physical AI to reinvigorate any downturning sentiment in the industry.

    Ece Yildirim

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  • Should a Leader Delegate More, or Go Full Founder Mode?

    Satya Nadella just stepped back from running Microsoft’s sales operation. Jensen Huang of Nvidia still codes. Both run trillion-dollar companies in the same industry. One leaders wins by delegating and doing less. One leader wins by doing everything. How?

    The truth is this: In the world of business, we’ve been sold a myth that great leaders must pick one mode: either delegate everything and focus, or stay hands-on across the business.

    But Nadella and Huang prove that’s wrong.

    Earlier this month, Nadella handed Microsoft’s entire commercial operation to Judson Althoff. After a decade of sales calls and customer pitches, he’s now focusing exclusively on what he calls “our highest ambition technical work”—that is, AI research, data centers, and systems architecture.

    Huang operates the opposite way. He runs product launches, meets heads of state, designs chips, and coaches startups. His goal is to create conditions where “amazing people come to do their life’s work.”

    For him, that means weaving engineering, business, and evangelism together himself. It’s the same industry and same moment, but opposite approaches. And they’re both winning.

    Because the real question isn’t “should I focus or integrate?” Instead, leaders should ask themselves, “What does my wiring demand, and what does this moment require?”

    How to Choose the Right Leadership Mode

    Here’s how to figure out which mode you need:

    If you’re drained and your company needs specialized depth: Focus like Nadella. Delegate everything except the one thing only you can push forward.

    If you’re energized connecting dots across functions and your company needs integrated vision: Stay broad like Huang.

    If you’re drained and nothing’s getting attention: You’re in the wrong role or need to restructure.

    If you’re energized but your company keeps stalling: Your integration might be the bottleneck. Bring in someone who can own a major function.

    So tomorrow, open your calendar. Look at last week. Which work sessions energized you? Which drained you but could be owned by someone else? What critical work are you avoiding that only you can do? Then match that against what your company needs right now.

    The trap is copying someone else’s operating system because it worked for them. What matters is building a rhythm that fits your wiring and your company’s moment—then running it without apology.

    The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.

    Howard Yu

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  • Top analyst on concerns about Nvidia fueling an AI bubble: ‘We’ve seen this movie before. It was called Enron, Tyco’ | Fortune

    A top Wall Street analyst has sounded an alarm over the U.S. equity bull market, warning that its remarkable run is built on a precariously narrow foundation: a surge in spending on, and optimistic assumptions about, infrastructure for artificial intelligence (AI). This spending has fueled a boom in the shares of most of the so-called Magnificent 7 and a few dozen related businesses, which have now come to account for roughly 75% of the S&P 500’s returns since the rally of the last few years began.

    The commentary on September 29 by Morgan Stanley Wealth Management’s chief investment officer, Lisa Shalett, frames the current market boom as a “one-note narrative” almost entirely dependent on massive capital expenditures in generative AI, raising questions about its durability as economic and competitive risks start to mount. Shalett’s critique came squarely in the middle of some people in the AI field — and many financial commentators around Wall Street —fretting at market exuberance and beginning to talk openly about a bubble.

    In an interview with Fortune, Shalett said she was “very concerned” about this theme in markets, saying her office had broadened from a belief that the market would only bid up seven or 10 stocks to roughly 40. “At the end of the day … this is not going to be pretty” if and when the generative AI capital expenditure story falters, she said.

    Shalett said she’s worried about a “Cisco moment” like when the dotcom bubble burst in 2000, referring to the company that was briefly the most valuable company in the world before an 80% stock plunge. [By “Cisco moment” did she mean a whole bunch of circular financing coming back to bite the company? If so, that would be worth adding/briefly explaining.] When asked how close we are to such a moment, Shalett said probably not in the next nine months, but very possibly in the next 24. When you look at the actual spending and the amount of capital coming into the space, “we’re a lot closer to the seventh inning than the first or second inning,” she said.

    ‘Starting to do what all ultimate bad actors do’

    Shalett’s comments centered on several recent multibillion-dollar deals to scale up data-center infrastructure. As notable substacker and former Atlantic writer Derek Thompson recently noted in a post titled “This is how the AI bubble will pop,” so much money is being spent to support AI’s energy-consumption needs that it’s the equivalent of a new Apollo space mission every 10 months. (Tech companies are spending roughly $400 billion this year alone on data-center infrastructure, while the Apollo program allocated about $300 billion in today’s dollars to get to the moon from the 1960s to the ’70s.)

    What’s more than a little concerning to Shalett is that one company alone, Nvidia—the most valuable company in the history of the world, with an over $4.5 trillion market cap—is at the center of a significant number of these deals. In September alone, Nvidia invested $100 billion in OpenAI in a massive deal, just days after pledging $5 billion to Intel (the Intel agreement was tied to chips, not data-center infrastructure, per se).

    Fortune‘s Jeremy Kahn reported in late September on significant concerns about “circular” financing, or Nvidia’s cash essentially being recycled throughout the AI industry. Shalett sees this as a major concern and a major sign that the business cycle is headed toward some kind of endgame. “The guy at the epicenter, Nvidia, is basically starting to do what all ultimate bad actors do in the final inning, which is extending financing, they’re buying their investors.”

    Shalett expanded on her concerns by saying that companies around Nvidia “are starting to become interwoven.” She noted that OpenAI is partially owned by Microsoft, but now Nvidia has also made an investment in the startup, while Oracle and AMD each have their own purchasing agreements with OpenAI. But OpenAI also has a data-center deal with tech giant Oracle, with the “bad news,” Shalett notes, that this deal is “totally debt-financed.” OpenAI also struck a deal in October with chip-maker AMD that allows OpenAI to buy up to 10% of AMD. “Essentially, Nvidia’s main competitor is going to be partially owned by OpenAI, which is partially owned by Nvidia. So, Nvidia can ‘own’ a piece of its largest competitor. It is totally circular and increases systemic risk.”

    When reached for comment, a spokesperson for Nvidia said, “We do not require any of the companies we invest in to use Nvidia technology.”

    Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang discussed the OpenAI investment in an appearance on the Bg2 podcast with Brad Gerstner and Clark Tang on September 25, calling it an “opportunity to invest” and part of a partnership geared toward helping OpenAI build their own AI infrastructure. When asked about the allegation of circular financing in general and the Cisco precedent in particular, Huang talked about how OpenAI will fund the deal, arguing that it will have to be funded by OpenAI’s future revenues, or “offtake,” which he pointed out are “growing exponentially,” and by its future capital, whether it’s raised by a sale of equity or debt. That will depends on investors’ confidence in OpenAI, he said, and beyond that, it’s “their company, it’s not my business. And of course, we have to stay very close to them to make sure that we build in support of their continued growth.”

    Shalett said that she and her team were “starting to watch” for signs of a bubble popping, highlighting the deal announced roughly a week before OpenAI struck its $100 billion data-center deal with Nvidia, when it struck another with Oracle worth $300 billion. Analysts at KeyBanc Capital Markets estimated that Oracle will have to borrow $100 billion of that amount—$25 billion a year for the next four years.

    “Every morning the opening screen on my Bloomberg is what’s going on with CDS spreads on Oracle debt,” Shalett said, referring to credit default swaps, the financial instrument that was obscure before the Great Financial Crisis, but infamous for the role it played in a global market meltdown. CDSs essentially serve as insurance to investors in case of insolvency by a market entity. “If people start getting worried about Oracle’s ability to pay,” Shalett said, “that’s gonna be an early indication to us that people are getting nervous.” She added that all the indications to her speak of the end of a cycle and history is littered with cautionary tales from such times.

    Oracle did not respond to requests for comment.

    90% growth since the last bear market

    Since the October 2022 bear market bottom and the launch of ChatGPT, according to Shalett’s calculations, the S&P 500 has soared 90%, but most of these gains have come from a small group of stocks. The so-called “Magnificent Seven”—including high-profile names like Nvidia and Microsoft—plus another 34 AI data-center ecosystem companies, are responsible for, as cited by Shalett and separately by JP Morgan Asset Management’s Michael Cembalest, about three-quarters of overall market returns, 80% of earnings growth, and a staggering 90% of capital spending growth in the index. Comparatively, the other 493 names in the S&P 500 are up just 25%—showing just how concentrated the rally has become.

    The so-called “hyperscaler” companies alone are now spending close to $400 billion annually on capex supporting AI infrastructure, Morgan Stanley Wealth Management calculated. The economic influence of AI capex is now immense, contributing an estimated 100 basis points—fully one percentage point—to second-quarter GDP growth, according to Morgan Stanley’s research. This pace outstrips the rate of underlying consumer spending growth by tenfold, underscoring its centrality to both market performance and broader economic data.

    “People conflate AI adoption, which is in the first inning, with the capex infrastructure buildout, which has been going full-out since 2022,” Shalett told Fortune. She cited concerns about the prominence of private equity and debt capital coming into play, as that “tends to produce bubbles, because it may be unspoken-for capacity.” In other words, people have money to burn and they’re throwing it at things that may not pay off.

    Shalett waved away macro theories about the labor market or the Federal Reserve. “We think that’s missing the forest for the trees because the forest is entirely rooted in this one story” about AI infrastructure. Morgan Stanley’s bull-case mid-2026 price target for the S&P 500 is an eye-popping 7,200, but Shalett highlights that even the most optimistic outlook admits that risk premiums, credit spreads, and market volatility do not seem to fully account for the vulnerabilities lurking beneath the AI-fueled advance.

    Shalett’s analysis suggests that AI capex maturity is approaching and some possible slowdowns are already visible. For instance, hyperscalers have already seen free-cash-flow growth turn negative, a sign that investment may have outpaced underlying technology returns. Strategas, an independent research firm, estimates that hyperscaler free cash flow is set to shrink by more than 16% over the next 12 months, putting pressure on lofty valuations and forcing investors to demand more discipline in how these funds are deployed.

    Shalett was asked about data centers’ disproportionate impact on GDP throughout 2025, which media blogger Rusty Foster of Today in Tabs described as: “Our economy might just be three AI data centers in a trench coat.” The Morgan Stanley exec said “That’s what makes this cycle so fragile,” adding that at some point, “we’re not gonna be building any data centers for a while.” After that, it’s just a question of whether you crash: “Do you have a mild 1991-92-style recession or does it really become bad?”

    A more bullish case

    Bank of America Research weighed in on the semiconductors sector in a Friday note, writing that vendor financing in the space, especially Nvidia’s $100 billion commitment to OpenAI, has been “raising eyebrows.” Nevertheless, the team, led by senior analyst Vivek Arya, argued that the deal is structured by performance and competitive need, rather than pure speculative frenzy.

    In an interview with Fortune, Arya explained why he wasn’t worried despite the “optics” being pretty obviously bad. “It’s very easy to say, ‘Oh, Nvidia is giving [OpenAI] money and they are buying chips with that money” and so on, but he argued the headlines are misleading about how much money is actually being spent and the $100 billion sticker price on the OpenAI deal “scared everyone.” Noting that the deal has multiple tranches that will play out over several years to come, he said it’s not like Nvidia is “just handing a $100 billion check to OpenAI [and saying] you know, go have fun.”

    “Nvidia didn’t fund all of it,” Arya said of the wider generative AI capex boom. Citing public filings, Arya argued that Nvidia’s entire investment in the AI ecosystem is in fact less than $8 billion or so over the last 12 months, not such a large figure after all. And he’s still bullish on Nvidia and OpenAI, he added, because he sees them as the winners of this particular story. “We think they are going to be among the four or five ecosystems that come up. It’s not like Nvidia is going and investing in every one of those ecosystems, right? They’re only investing in one of those five, which is, of course, the most disruptive,” that being OpenAI.

    When asked about his own fears of a bubble, Arya actually sounded a calmer but strikingly similar tune to Shalett. “I’m extremely comfortable with what will happen in the next 12 months,” Arya said, “And I have high sense of optimism about what will happen in the next five years. But can there be periods of digestion in between? Yeah.” Explaining that this is the nature of any infrastructure cycle, “it’s not always up and to the right.” In other words, after the next nine months in Shalett’s opinion and the next year in Arya’s, the data-center buildout endgame could be in play. “When these data centers are built,” Arya said, “they are not built for today’s demand. They’re built with some anticipation of demand that will develop in the next, you know, 12 to 18 months. So, are they going to be 100% utilized all the time? No.”

    Rising worries about a bubble

    Some of the biggest names in tech and Wall Street offered were hedging hard about the possibility of a bubble on Friday. Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon and Jeff Bezos, both speaking at a tech conference in Turin, Italy, said they were seeing the same patterns as Shalett. Solomon said the massive amounts of spending weren’t fundamentally different from other booms and busts. “There will be a lot of capital that was deployed that didn’t deliver returns,” he said. That’s no different from how investment works. “We just don’t know how that will play out.”

    Bezos characterized it as “kind of an industrial bubble,” arguing that the infrastructure would pay off for many years to come.

    OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who got markets jittery in late August when he mentioned the B-word, was asked again to comment on the subject while touring (what else?) a giant new data center in Texas. “Between the 10 years we’ve already been operating and the many decades ahead of us, there will be booms and busts,” Altman said. “People will overinvest and lose money, and underinvest and lose a lot of revenue.”

    For his part, Cisco CEO John Chambers, one of the faces of the dotcom bubble, told the Associated Press on October 3 that he sees “a lot of tremendous optimism” about AI that is similar to the “irrational exuberance on a really large scale” that marked the internet age. It indicates a bubble to him, but only “a future bubble for certain companies. Is there going to be train wreck? Yes, for those that aren’t able to translate the technology into a sustainable competitive advantage, how are you going to generate revenue after all the money you poured into it?”

    When asked whether the size of this potential bubble represents uncharted waters for the economy, especially considering the one-note nature of the long bull market, Shalett said Wall Streeters are always evaluating risk. But putting on her “American citizen hat,” she warned about the media consolidation that sees Oracle’s founder Larry Ellison also now playing a major role in TikTok (as part of a buying consortium of Trump-friendly billionaires) and Paramount in Hollywood and CBS News in New York (through his son, David Ellison, the media company’s new owner). Shalett said she’s worried about “groupthink” filtering into the functioning of markets. “That is not something that most of us have experienced in our lifetimes,” she said. “You stop factoring in risk premiums into markets, there is no bear case to anything.”

    Nick Lichtenberg

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  • AMD Inks Huge Compute Power Deal With OpenAI, Mirroring Nvidia’s Move

    OpenAI’s Sam Altman and AMD’s Lisa Su testify before the Senate on May 08, 2025 in Washington, DC. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

    Nvidia may be dominating the graphics processing unit (GPU) market right now, but its closest rival, AMD, is catching up. Today, (Oct. 6), AMD announced a landmark collaboration with OpenAI that mirrors a recent deal between OpenAI and Nvidia. Under the agreement, AMD will deploy six gigawatts of computing power to OpenAI, which will in turn have the option to acquire up to 10 percent of AMD’s stock—a stake worth roughly $33 billion now after the announcement sent AMD shares to soar 24 percent.

    The partnership gives OpenAI a critical boost in computing resources as it continues to roll out new A.I. models and tools. “This partnership is a major step in building the compute capacity needed to realize A.I.’s full potential,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a statement.

    OpenAI’s first one-gigawatt deployment is scheduled for the second half of 2026 and will use AMD’s MI450 chips. This initial rollout will coincide with a vesting schedule of AMD stock for OpenAI, allowing OpenAI to acquire up to 160 million shares as deployments scale to six gigawatts. The stock grant will vest based on OpenAI hitting technical and commercial milestones. The full deal will only be executed if AMD’s stock reaches $600 per share. AMD shares are currently traded at $204 apiece.

    The AMD partnership is the latest in a string of blockbuster A.I. deals. Nvidia recently announced its own long-term pact with OpenAI, pledging up to $100 billion in investments over the next decade. In return, OpenAI will obtain as much as 10 gigawatts of computing power from Nvidia’s systems.

    Global venture capital funding rose 38 percent year-over-year to $97 billion in the third quarter, according to Crunchbase, with nearly half of that money flowing into A.I. ventures. Analysts say the current boom evokes the early days of the internet.

    “We still believe we are in the early innings of this spending cycle,” said Dan Ives, an analyst with Wedbush Securities, in a client note. AMD’s new deal with OpenAI marks a “1996 moment” for the tech world, he added, likening today’s A.I. momentum to the foundational years of the tech economy.

    Nvidia’s shares slipped more than 1 percent today following AMD’s announcement, but the company still holds a commanding lead with more than 90 percent of the global GPU market. Nvidia’s early success in meeting A.I.-fueled GPU demand has propelled its market cap to $4.5 trillion and fueled $41 billion in data center revenue between May and July. AMD, in comparison, has a market cap of $334 billion and brought in $3.2 billion in data center revenue in its most recent quarter.

    Lisa Su, who has led AMD as CEO since 2014, is confident that the OpenAI deal will accelerate that growth. Her company has a “clear line of sight” to achieve tens of billions of dollars in data center revenue by 2027, Su told analysts today, adding that these numbers could grow even higher. “In addition to the OpenAI opportunity, and the very significant revenue addition there, we expect to generate well over $100 billion in the next several years,” she said.

    AMD Inks Huge Compute Power Deal With OpenAI, Mirroring Nvidia’s Move

    Alexandra Tremayne-Pengelly

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  • Nvidia announces $5 billion investment in Intel along with collaboration

    Nvidia, the world’s leading chipmaker, announced on Thursday that it’s investing $5 billion in Intel and will collaborate with the struggling semiconductor company.

    The two companies will team up to work on custom data centers that form the backbone of artificial intelligence infrastructure as well as personal computer products, Nvidia said in a press release.

    Nvidia said it will spend $5 billion to buy Intel common stock at $23.28 a share. The investment, which is subject to regulatory approvals, comes a month after the U.S. government took a 10% stake in Intel.

    “This historic collaboration tightly couples NVIDIA’s AI and accelerated computing stack with Intel’s CPUs and the vast x86 ecosystem — a fusion of two world-class platforms,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said. “Together, we will expand our ecosystems and lay the foundation for the next era of computing.”

    The two companies said they will work on “seamlessly connecting” their architectures.

    In morning trading, Intel shares jumped 25%, its biggest one-day percentage gain in decades. Nvidia shares added 2%.

    For data centers, Intel will make custom chips that Nvidia will use in its AI infrastructure platforms. While for PC products, Intel will build chips that integrate Nvidia technology.

    The agreement provides a lifeline for Intel, which was a Silicon Valley pioneer that enjoyed decades of growth as its processors powered the personal computer boom, but fell into a slump after missing the shift to the mobile computing era unleashed by the iPhone’s 2007 debut.

    Intel fell even farther behind in recent years amid the artificial intelligence boom that’s propelled Nvidia into the world’s most valuable company. Intel lost nearly $19 billion last year and another $3.7 billion in the first six months of this year, and expects to slash its workforce by a quarter by the end of 2025.

    The U.S. government stepped in last month to secure a 10% stake, making it one of Intel’s biggest shareholders. Federal officials said they invested in Intel in order to bolster U.S. technology and domestic manufacturing.

    The deal is “bullish for U.S. tech,” Wedbush Securities analyst Daniel Ives said in a client note.

    “This is a game-changer deal for Intel as it now brings them front and center into the AI game,” Ives said. “Along with the recent U.S. government investment for 10% (equity stake in Intel) this has been a golden few weeks for Intel after years of pain and frustration for investors.”

    Nvidia, meanwhile, has soared because its specialized chips are underpinning the artificial intelligence boom. The chips, known as graphics processing units, or GPUs, are highly effective at developing powerful AI systems.

    The deal between the two chipmakers comes as China moves to be less dependent on U.S. semiconductor technology. This week, Chinese officials reportedly forbade several large domestic technology companies from purchasing Nvidia chips, and Huawei announced that it was expanding its development of AI chips and manufacturing.

    While Nvidia and Intel will work together to develop new chips, a manufacturing deal has yet to be struck between the two. The potential access to Intel’s chip foundries by Nvidia poses a risk to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, which currently manufactures the tech giant’s flagship processors.

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  • Nvidia CEO: Some Jobs Will Disappear As AI Advances | Entrepreneur

    Nvidia, the world’s most valuable company with a market capitalization of $4.39 trillion at the time of writing, beat revenue expectations for its fiscal second quarter, reporting sales of $46.74 billion on Wednesday after market close.

    Nvidia posted that data center revenue was up 56% from a year prior, reaching $41.1 billion.

    The company’s longtime CEO, Jensen Huang, told Fox Business Network’s The Claman Countdown on Thursday that AI, which Nvidia is advancing, would cause “some jobs” to disappear but result in new jobs becoming “invented.”

    Related: Nvidia Pulls Ahead of Apple and Microsoft to Become the World’s First $4 Trillion Public Company

    “One thing for sure, every job will be changed as a result of AI,” Huang said.

    Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. Photo by Wan Quan/VCG via Getty Images

    Huang also told Fox Business that he expects the economy to be doing “very well” in the future due to AI and automation, and stated that the quality of life for humanity would improve.

    Huang’s remarks add to what he said last month on an episode of The All-In Podcast. On the podcast, Huang stated that the “one thing we know for certain” is that people who use AI will replace those who don’t. He predicted that AI use will lead to more millionaires in the next five years than the Internet produced in two decades.

    Related: How Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang Transformed a Graphics Card Company Into an AI Giant: ‘One of the Most Remarkable Business Pivots in History’

    Huang also called AI the “greatest technology equalizer of all time” because it allows anyone to program by simply using plain English prompts (a practice known as “vibe coding,” which even Google CEO Sundar Pichai has dabbled in).

    “AI in my case is creating jobs,” Huang said on the podcast, adding that the technology enables people to “create things that other people would like to buy.”

    AI allows creative people to act on their ideas by providing technical services. In turn, it enables technical people to use it for creative endeavors, Huang pointed out.

    Nvidia held 92% of the market share for AI chips in the first quarter of the year. Its chips power ChatGPT, an AI chatbot with more than 700 million weekly users as of this month, up from 500 million users in March.

    Related: Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang Says He’s ‘Created More Billionaires’ Than Anyone Else — Adding Two More This Week

    Nvidia’s stock was up over 30% year-to-date at the time of writing.

    Nvidia, the world’s most valuable company with a market capitalization of $4.39 trillion at the time of writing, beat revenue expectations for its fiscal second quarter, reporting sales of $46.74 billion on Wednesday after market close.

    Nvidia posted that data center revenue was up 56% from a year prior, reaching $41.1 billion.

    The company’s longtime CEO, Jensen Huang, told Fox Business Network’s The Claman Countdown on Thursday that AI, which Nvidia is advancing, would cause “some jobs” to disappear but result in new jobs becoming “invented.”

    The rest of this article is locked.

    Join Entrepreneur+ today for access.

    Sherin Shibu

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  • Nvidia Tops Wall Street Estimates, But China Tensions Cloud Its A.I. Chip Business

    Strong earnings highlight Nvidia’s dominance, but China export curbs weigh on growth. Adek Berry/AFP via Getty Images

    Nvidia delivered another estimate-beating quarter, but regulatory setbacks and U.S.-China tensions are casting doubt over its core data center business even as Wall Street continues to demand more from the world’s most valuable public company.

    Revenue for the May–July quarter jumped 56 percent year-over-year to $46.7 billion, while net income climbed 59 percent to $26.4 billion, reported Nvidia yesterday (Aug. 27). Both figures beat analyst expectations. However, shares fell more than 3 percent after the earnings release as Nvidia’s core data center sales slightly missed estimates.

    The chipmaker’s data center revenue, its most important line of business, came in at $41.1 billion for the quarter compared to expectations of $41.3 billion. It was hampered in part by geopolitical tensions between the U.S. and China. Sales of Nvidia’s H20 chips, which are designed specifically for the Chinese market in compliance with America’s export restrictions, in April were blocked under the Trump administration.

    Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has since convinced the President to lift the ban on H20 exports to China, agreeing to cut the government 15 percent of the company’s revenue from such sales. However, Washington “has not published a regulation codifying such requirement,” said Colette Kress, the company’s chief financial officer, on yesterday’s earnings call.

    If restrictions do ease, Nvidia expects $2 billion to $5 billion in H20 revenue in the current quarter, Kress said. That will likely come from Nvidia’s existing inventory of H20. The company has reportedly halted H20 production after the Chinese government banned it, citing security risks. Nvidia is said to be developing another China-specific chip.

    Huang has spent much of the past year shuttling between Washington and Beijing in an effort to soothe over tensions. While speaking to analysts, he stressed China’s importance as home to roughly half of the world’s A.I. researchers, the second-largest computing market globally and its status as a leader in open-source models through releases from DeepSeek and Qwen. Such advances, Huang argued, should be supported by U.S. technology to “help make the American tech stack the global standard.”

    China’s A.I. market could represent a $50 billion opportunity for Nvidia, one that grows at 50 percent a year, said Huang. Globally, A.I.-native startups have already raised $180 billion in 2025, up from $100 billion last year, according to the CEO. Their revenues are growing even faster, reaching $20 billion this year, compared with $2 billion in 2024. “Next year being ten times higher than this year is not inconceivable,” he said.

    In other business, Nvidia’s gaming division generated $4.2 billion in quarterly sales, while its professional visualization and equipment manufacturer units brought in $601 million and $173 million, respectively. Nvidia’s auto and robotics segment remains small, at just 1 percent of overall sales. Yet its $586 million in revenue marked a 69 percent year-over-year jump, reflecting Nvidia’s push into “physical A.I.” “As a result of agentic A.I. and vision-language models, we are now seeing a breakthrough in physical A.I. in robotics and autonomous systems,” Huang told analysts.

    Nvidia Tops Wall Street Estimates, But China Tensions Cloud Its A.I. Chip Business

    Alexandra Tremayne-Pengelly

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