Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang Speaks At The Bipartisan Policy Center

Nvidia cofounder and CEO Jensen Huang speaks about the future of artificial intelligence and its effect on energy consumption and production (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

First among AI-quals

Nvidia’s trouncing the competition like it’s about to deliver monster earnings

Outsized gains for Nvidia versus a broad index of chip stocks raises questions about how the stock will react to next month’s earnings report.

Luke Kawa

10/21/24 2:33PM

Nvidia, the chip designer powering the AI boom, has rocketed to new all-time highs in October with a 17% gain. In the process, it’s pulling away from its peers in a big way — the kind of thing that usually happens when the company is about to deliver a blowout set of quarterly numbers, or just did.

As of about 2:15 p.m. ET this afternoon, Nvidia is up more than double digits over the past 10 sessions, far outpacing the VanEck Semiconductor ETF’s advance. Last week, that two-week outperformance got to as much as 12.1%. That’s nearly the biggest gap between Nvidia and the semi crowd outside of the immediate run-up to or aftermath of an earnings release. The more positive outlier was the start of this year, when torrents of fresh money flowed into the AI bellwether.

The thing is… Nvidia’s earnings report isn’t just around the corner. It’s a month away (11/21).

A couple non-exhaustive, non-mutually exclusive theories on what’s going on here:

ASML’s latest quarterly report touched on some softness in chip demand ex-AI. The AI trade could be back to more of a winner-take-all mode, with Nvidia (rightfully) at its epicenter. A point in favor of this: every other time Nvidia’s gained at least 10% in a month since May 2023, the broader semiconductor group has done at least twice as well as it has this month. Earnings reports from the so-called hyperscalers (megacap tech firms investing heavily in AI) come well before Nvidia’s, which will allow for some more proof points for this thesis to be confirmed or rejected.
The bump Nvidia has gotten in the past from posting good earnings is getting pulled forward, and that’s raising the bar for how good the numbers actually have to be next to keep those gains going when the report actually lands. Some backing for this: out of the last six earnings reports, the two in which Nvidia did the best compared to semis heading into the announcement (8/23/2023 and 8/23/2024) saw a pretty lackluster relative performance thereafter.

Matt Phillips13m

Micron jumps on report of surging memory chip prices

Micron, the US memory chip specialist, is up more than 4% in early trading Monday after a report that Samsung Electronics was temporarily pausing new pricing on contracts for the latest version of ubiquitous short-term computer memory: Dynamic Random Access Memory, or DRAM. The chip giant wants to see where the market settles after a recent spike in spot prices for memory chips driven by the AI boom.

DRAM and memory chips of all sorts have pricing power because of how much demand is outpacing supply. Last week, South Korean memory chip behemoth SK Hynix said it had already “sold out” all of its 2026 production.

Exclusive: Samsung delays DDR5 contract pricing to mid-November as spot prices triple

Luke Kawa39m

Nvidia gains as two new AI deals this morning underscore demand for its flagship chips

Nvidia is off to a hot start this week, up about 3% as of 9:40 a.m. ET, as the chip designer continues to be the beating heart at the center of two fresh AI deals announced on Monday morning.

IREN is going to be outfitting a Texas data center with Nvidia GPUs that will be purchased from Dell and utilized by Microsoft.
Amazon Web Services is providing OpenAI access to “hundreds of thousands” of Nvidia GPUs as part of a $38 billion deal for computing power.

Texas wants a piece of Wall Street

With its long-teased stock exchange, TXSE, winning SEC approval in September, the state is taking aim at a market long ruled by just two giants.

Hyunsoo Rim49m

Luke Kawa1h

Beyond Meat delays release of earnings as management tries to figure out how big of a write-down to take

“You don’t want to see how the sausage is made” is an expression that appears to apply to meat, faux meat, and faux meat accounting.

Shares of Beyond Meat are tumbling after management delayed the formal release of its quarterly results as they try to pin down exactly how big of a loss to take on assets that aren’t worth as much as they previously thought.

The plant-based meat company was slated to release its quarterly update on Tuesday after the market closes, but is postponing this report until November 11.

“As previously disclosed on Form 8-K filed on October 24, 2025, the Company expects to record a non-cash impairment charge for the three months ended September 27, 2025 related to certain of its long-lived assets. Although the Company expects this charge to be material, the Company is not yet able to reasonably quantify the amount, and requires additional time, resources and effort to finalize its assessment,” per the press release.

In that 8-K, the company said an accounting recoverability test “preliminarily indicated that the carrying amount of certain of its long-lived assets was not recoverable from the projected undiscounted future cash flows of the relevant asset group.”

In other words, an initial review showed that certain plants, property, and equipment won’t make the kind of money that their previously reported value implied, so that needs to be marked down in the form of a noncash impairment charge. The outstanding question is how big that charge will be.

Beyond Meat made that announcement along with the preliminary release of its Q3 results and some positive commentary on ongoing legal matters.

Luke Kawa2h

Cipher Mining soars after revealing a $5.5 billion deal with Amazon to provide AI data center capacity and power

Cipher Mining is soaring in premarket trading amid another massive deal announced this morning between a bitcoin miner turned data center company and a hyperscaler.

Along with its Q3 results, CIFR revealed a $5.5 billion, 15-year pact with Amazon to provide capacity and power for AI workloads. Cipher will deliver 300 megawatts’ worth of capacity in two phases next year, and expects to begin collecting rent for this deal in August 2026.

This is Cipher’s “first direct lease with a Tier 1 hyperscaler,” CEO Tyler Page said, and comes a little over a month after the firm booked a 10-year hosting agreement with AI cloud platform company Fluidstack, with Google amassing a 5.4% equity stake in Cipher as part of the transaction.

As for those Q3 results, Cipher posted adjusted diluted earnings per share of $0.10, far better than the expected 5.4-cent loss, on revenues of $72 million, which were shy of the $76.5 million consensus estimate.