Lead Analysis
Nvidia's Earnings Beat Snaps Its Losing Streak as Memory Costs Force a Margin Reset
Nvidia reported fiscal second-quarter revenue of $96.2 billion late Wednesday, up 106% year-over-year and above the roughly $92.2 billion Wall Street expected, with Data Center revenue rising 117% to $89 billion, per the company's SEC filing. Adjusted earnings of $2.22 per share beat the $2.09 estimate, and gross margin held at 75.0%, but the guidance is where the memory story bites: Nvidia sees third-quarter revenue of $108 billion, plus or minus 2%, on a gross margin of 74%, and told investors, via Fortune's earlier reporting confirmed on the call, that margin will keep falling to bottom in the 71%-72% range by the fourth quarter, a decline the company attributes partly to memory costs. Nvidia shares closed regular trading down 1.59% at $209.66 ahead of the print, then jumped as much as 4.71% after hours and were indicated up roughly 7% in Thursday's premarket, per Forbes, breaking a streak of four straight post-earnings selloffs despite beats.
"We've partnered with our extensive network of suppliers to secure the critical components needed to meet demand for the next several years … Our commitments increased from $119 billion last quarter to $279 billion, primarily related to the procurement of memory." — Colette Kress, Chief Financial Officer, Nvidia, via Yahoo FinanceKress's number is the financial mechanics behind the margin guide: total multiyear infrastructure commitments now stand at $366 billion, including that $279 billion in supply and capacity deals and up to $108.5 billion in phased guarantee exposure, alongside $26 billion spent on buybacks and dividends in the quarter. Jensen Huang framed the reset bluntly on the call, telling analysts the company decided to "rip the Band-Aid off" and reset expectations to 72%-73% gross margin for next fiscal year, per Fox Business, while separately guiding to 70% revenue growth for fiscal 2028 and insisting "our demand is much higher than that." For portfolio managers, the quarter answers the question every ChipSentinel edition this week has previewed: Nvidia's roughly 75% gross margin gives it room to absorb memory inflation and still beat, but the cost is now explicit and guided, not merely rumored — a dynamic Marvell's own results, due after today's close, will be read against directly.
Markets
Daily Top-10 Movers
Prices are Wednesday, August 26, 2026 closes at 4:00 PM EDT. Ranked by absolute price change among semiconductor stocks with market cap ≥$5B.
★ highlighted = today's news-driven movers.
Companies & Financials
Nvidia Chases Hugging Face as Marvell's Google Deal Faces Its First Earnings Test
- Nvidia has agreed to acquire open-source AI platform Hugging Face for roughly $12.9 billion, up from a valuation near $4.5 billion when Nvidia first invested in 2023, per CNBC, citing The Information. Why it matters: the deal would put one of the most widely used open-source AI model repositories under Nvidia's ownership on the same day as its blowout earnings, extending a pattern of Nvidia spending on the software and model layer even as gross margin guidance comes under pressure from hardware-side memory costs.
- Marvell reports fiscal second-quarter results after today's close with its $120 billion Google custom-silicon warrant agreement in focus, after guiding to $2.70 billion in revenue, up 35% year-over-year, with Data Center revenue up 27% in the prior quarter, per TradingKey. Why it matters: the Google warrant vests in 240 tranches tied to $500 million of custom-product revenue each through fiscal 2033, so tonight's results are the first real data point on whether that revenue is actually starting to show up, rather than remaining warrant math on a term sheet.
Memory Desk
Micron Reshuffles Its Executive Suite to Chase HBM Execution as Contract Prices Keep Climbing
- Micron promoted Manish Bhatia to President and Chief Operating Officer and Scott DeBoer to President and Chief Technology and Products Officer, both reporting directly to CEO Sanjay Mehrotra, while Sumit Sadana moved to Senior Advisor to the CEO, per TradingKey. Why it matters: the reorganization consolidates manufacturing execution and R&D under two executives explicitly to accelerate HBM mass production, an acknowledgment that Micron remains in a catch-up position behind SK Hynix and Samsung even as AI accelerator compute grows roughly threefold every two years against less than double the bandwidth growth in HBM over the same span.
- HBM contract prices could still rise 70%-140% in 2027 despite price caps written into some long-term agreements signed since the second quarter, while server DRAM contract prices are projected to climb a cumulative 270% in 2026 and enterprise SSD prices about 235%, per TrendForce, via TradingKey. Why it matters: suppliers are prioritizing HBM and RDIMM capacity for server applications at 51% of total DRAM bit supply in 2026, meaning the pricing power memory makers are enjoying is a function of a deliberate supply allocation choice, not just scarcity, and one that keeps flowing through to Nvidia's own cost of goods.
Supply Chain, Equipment & Fabs
AWS Locks In 2 Million More Nvidia GPUs as a Single Ohio Site Reveals AI's Real Estate Math
- AWS and Nvidia are expanding their partnership to deliver 2 million additional Nvidia GPUs — spanning Blackwell Ultra, Rubin and Rubin Ultra — plus Vera CPU-based infrastructure, extending AWS's confirmed supply well into 2027 and 2028, per GlobeNewswire. Why it matters: the commitment lands the same day Nvidia disclosed its own supply commitments jumped to $279 billion, showing hyperscaler-side demand visibility extending in lockstep with the supplier-side capacity Nvidia says it needs to lock down.
- Nvidia CFO Colette Kress said each generation of infrastructure deployed at the company's new PORTS-Pike data-center site in Ohio, built with SB Energy, could represent approximately 1.5 million Nvidia GPUs, or $150 billion to $200 billion in Nvidia revenue, with the site expected to support multiple upgrade cycles over 20 years, per Yahoo Finance. Why it matters: the disclosure is a rare, concrete unit-economics figure for a single AI data-center campus, giving investors an actual dollar-per-site benchmark for the kind of multi-decade infrastructure spending underlying the sector's capex forecasts.
Policy & Geopolitics
Washington Opens a New Front in Chip-Smuggling Enforcement, Targeting the Freight Forwarder
- The U.S. Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security is investigating Singapore-based logistics firm Apex Logistics, a unit of Kuehne+Nagel, over 47 shipments handled in 2024 that allegedly routed Nvidia-powered Super Micro servers from Taiwan through the United States and Southeast Asia and Hong Kong before reaching China, per Bloomberg, via Investing.com. Why it matters: this would be the first U.S. enforcement action against a transportation company for its role in alleged chip smuggling, rather than against a chipmaker, reseller or end customer, widening the compliance perimeter to the logistics layer of the supply chain.
- Apex acknowledged that U.S. authorities had raised concerns about a limited number of shipments and said it is fully cooperating with the investigation, per Bloomberg, via Investing.com. Why it matters: targeting freight forwarders rather than only chip designers signals Commerce is treating the physical movement of hardware, not just the point of sale, as the enforcement chokepoint — a shift that raises compliance costs across the logistics vendors every major chipmaker and server builder relies on.
Analyst Corner
Goldman Says It's Not Too Late on Nvidia as Michael Burry Hedges His Own Short
- Goldman Sachs (via TipRanks, August 27): the firm argued it is not too late to buy Nvidia after the stock rallied more than 7% following its fiscal second-quarter beat, a valuation call that lands directly against the margin-compression debate the quarter's own guidance opened up.
- Michael Burry (via TipRanks, August 27): the investor known for shorting Nvidia said the stock is "wildly undervalued" and disclosed he bought call options as a hedge against his own short position ahead of the earnings report, an unusually two-sided position from one of the trade's best-known skeptics.
Calendar / Week Ahead
Marvell Reports Tonight as Broadcom's Own AI Test Looms Next Wednesday
- Thursday, Aug. 27 — Marvell reports fiscal second-quarter results after the close, with consensus revenue near $2.70 billion, the first test of how its Google custom-silicon warrant deal is translating into actual bookings, per TradingKey.
- Wednesday, Sept. 2 — Broadcom reports fiscal third-quarter results, with consensus revenue near $29.44 billion and AI semiconductor revenue guided to $16 billion, per Yahoo Finance.
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