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Matt Phillips2h

Forget AI — if you’re looking for growth, check out natural gas

Everybody knows about tech’s fast growers.

And Palantir’s 63% year-over-year sales Q3 growth rate was impressive. So was Robinhood Markets, which saw a 100% sales rise, or AppLovin at nearly 70% revenue growth.

(Robinhood Markets Inc. is the parent company of Sherwood Media, an independently operated media company subject to certain legal and regulatory restrictions. I own Robinhood stock as part of our compensation.)

But as we turn into the final lap of Q3 earnings season — Nvidia reports its numbers on November 19 and Walmart closes the season on November 20 — natural gas stocks have emerged as some of the most overlooked sources of revenue growth for investors, according to a screen we recently ran using FactSet data.

Expand Energy — created by the merger of Chesapeake and Southwestern in 2024 — is the nation’s largest natural gas producer, and when it posted sales of $2.97 billion in Q3 — up over 350% — late last month, it leapt to the top of the leaderboard for Q3 sales growth, according to FactSet data.

An early US cold snap, strong LNG exports from the US to Europe, and doubts about Russian supplies to the world market amid more talk of sanctions and Ukrainian attacks on Russian infrastructure, have all helped push up prices for gas.

US benchmarks are up more than 70% over the last 12 months, including a more than 50% gain over the the last three months — and strong demand from power plants competing to churn out energy for the the AI data center boom have created a favorable growth backdrop for other gas industry players from gas pipeline and processing company Oneok , to distributor EQT Corp, to drillers like Diamondback Energy and Coterra Energy.

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AMD erases losses after CEO Lisa Su says AI business to grow more than 60% a year for three to five years

Shares of Advanced Micro Devices pared substantial losses to turn positive after CEO Dr. Lisa Su unveiled optimistic medium-term revenue guidance at the company’s analyst day.

Over the next three to five years, her outlook is for compounded annual revenue growth of over 35% for AMD as a whole, with growth north of 60% for its data center business.

AMD 3-5 year targets — Source: AMD

With a pinch of salt about how predictions are hard, especially about the (further-out) future, the consensus estimate for AMD’s data center revenues in 2028 is $51.1 billion. If we use just 60% compounded annual growth and assume AMD hits its year-end estimate for about $16.26 billion, that would put the company’s 2028 AI sales around $66.6 billion.

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J. Edward Moreno4h

Fermi falls after reporting steep Q3 loss, says US is “at war” on AI

Fermi fell on Tuesday after it reported a steeper-than-expected loss in its first quarterly earnings report since the company’s initial public offering last month.

The company, which currently generates no revenue, reported a net loss of $346.8 million for its third quarter, compared to the $13.3 million loss analysts polled by FactSet were expecting. The loss was almost entirely comprised of unspecified “other expenses” totaling $309 million.

The company said it expects to have 1.1 gigawatts of gas capacity in service by the end of 2026.

Fermi, which was cofounded by former Energy Secretary Rick Perry, plans to use nuclear energy to power data centers. In its letter to shareholders on Monday, Fermi compared the race to build AI infrastructure faster than China to the Manhattan Project, the initiative to build the first atomic bomb in World War II.

“Not all enemies wear uniforms, but make no mistake, America is at war,” the company wrote.

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Nvidia dips as SoftBank dumps entire $5.8 billion position in the chip designer

SoftBank is moving on from the AI boom’s signature stock to fund an investment in the owner of the AI boom’s signature product.

In its Q2 earnings presentation, the Masayoshi Son-led Japanese investment firm said it sold its $5.8 billion position in Nvidia in October. On the conference call, CFO Yoshimitsu Goto noted that SoftBank owes OpenAI $22.5 billion by year-end to finance its equity stake in the ChatGPT maker, and spoke positively on the performance of its core product.

“This year, the OpenAI investment is large,” he added, when asked about why SoftBank sold Nvidia. “For that, we do need to divest our existing portfolio so that that can be utilized for our financing. We don’t have any specific meaning in October, or it’s nothing to do with NVIDIA itself.”

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Nebius Group’s $3 billion deal with Meta takes some of the sting out of soft Q3 results

The knee-jerk move lower in Nebius after the company reported underwhelming Q3 results is not being fully offset by its concurrent announcement of a fresh $3 billion deal with Meta to deliver AI infrastructure over the next five years.

The numbers:

Revenue: $146.1 million (compared to analyst estimates of $156.5 million)
Adjusted net income: -$100.4 million (estimate: -$95.7 million)

In its earnings presentation, the neocloud highlighted that it sold out of all available capacity in Q3.

Management also significantly boosted guidance related to capacity, seeing contracted power at more than 2.5 gigawatts at the end of calendar year 2026, up from 1 gigawatt previously. Next year is poised to be huge for Nebius in terms of putting that power to good use, as management sees connected power (that is, energy that can be immediately activated upon GPU installation) rising from 220 megawatts at year-end 2025 to a range of 800 megawatts to 1 gigawatt by the end of 2026, or roughly quadrupling its active operations.

In a letter to shareholders, founder and CEO Arkady Volozh said that the firm is “currently in the process of securing additional sites” that would allow this contracted power guidance to be realized.

“The only real limitation on our revenue growth in 2025 has been the amount of capacity that we have been able to bring online,” Volozh wrote.

As the company works to resolve these constraints, “we believe that we can achieve annualized run-rate revenue of $7 billion to $9 billion by the end of 2026,” he added. There’s only one ARR estimate for Q4 2026 among analysts surveyed by Bloomberg, and that’s for $4 billion.

Management also announced an at-the-market equity program that will allow them to opportunistically raise capital by issuing up to 25 million shares.

Peer CoreWeave is slumping after posting its Q3 results after the close on Monday, in which management highlighted that supply constraints in the “powered shell” — that is, the supporting electrical infrastructure for the data center — are delaying its ramp, prompting a cut to full-year revenue guidance.

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