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Investors need to mark Wednesday in fat red ink on their calendar for next week that could ultimately prove far more important than Federal Reserve chair Jay Powell\u2019s speech at Jackson Hole.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Wedbush Securities\u2019 Dan Ives, one of the most influential tech bulls on Wall Street, just began the figurative drumroll in anticipation of Nvidia\u2019s quarterly results expected for Aug. 28. Only don\u2019t confuse these with your run-of-the mill update to investors: according to Ives, they are nothing less than the \u201cmost important tech earnings in years.\u201d<\/p>\n
In his view, the tech bull market lives and dies on whether underlying demand in new data center capacity\u2014needed to operate OpenAI\u2019s ChatGPT, for example\u2014remains robust as ever. A miss and markets could easily see a repeat of the turbulence around\u00a0Aug. 5<\/a>, a day likened to 1987\u2019s\u00a0Black Monday<\/a>, even if Powell signaled<\/a>\u00a0today that rates will start to fall.<\/p>\n And that all comes down to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. His state-of-the-art graphics processors, once used to power video games, now fuel the AI gold rush thanks to their ability to perform computations in parallel, rather than in sequence like most central processors. Once networked together in massive compute clusters, they become powerful neural networks without which generative AI is not possible.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThere is one company in the world that is the foundation for the AI Revolution,\u201d Ives wrote on Thursday. \u201cAnd that is Nvidia with the Godfather of AI Jensen having the best perch and vantage point to discuss overall enterprise AI demand and the appetite for Nvidia\u2019s AI chips looking forward.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n With investors like hedge fund Elliott Management warning Nvidia\u2019s valuations are in\u00a0bubble territory<\/a>, the market will parse the report for even the slightest sign that demand for its benchmark H100 processors might be softening. Huang\u2019s company is estimated to\u00a0control 90% of the AI training chip segment<\/a>.<\/p>\n Equally as important will be any comments Huang has on the transition from the current Hopper chips to the next-generation Blackwell architecture, led by the upcoming\u00a0B200<\/a>\u00a0chip. A report from\u00a0The Information\u00a0<\/em>earlier this month suggested that there might be\u00a0delays<\/a>, a risk that could ripple through the entire AI food chain. <\/p>\n Charles Liang, the CEO of data center hardware provider Super Micro Computer<\/a>, has already\u00a0tempered his fiscal year revenue expectations<\/a>\u00a0as a result.<\/p>\n This speculation came hard on the news that\u00a0major customers<\/a>\u00a0such as\u00a0Elon Musk<\/a>\u00a0are investing in contingency plans in case they have\u00a0difficulty<\/a>\u00a0getting their hands on Nvidia chips. <\/p>\n Musk said last month that Tesla<\/a>, hot in pursuit of a breakthrough in\u00a0autonomous driving<\/a>, is doubling down<\/a>\u00a0on its own custom AI silicon. These chips are designed specifically with vision (rather than text) machine learning in mind, but Musk has been\u00a0careful not to overstate progress<\/a>.<\/p>\n Should Huang confirm that customers are continuing to line up for every last chip he can sell,\u00a0bulls like Ives will likely feel confirmed in their thesis the AI party is only just beginning\u2014or, as he puts it, the market is reliving the 1995 dotcom boom, not the 1999 dotcom crash.\u00a0<\/p>\n By his estimate, then, market valuations are still very much in the phase where a youthful, shaggy-haired Marc Andreessen\u00a0first took Netscape public<\/a>. We haven\u2019t gotten to the AI equivalent of Pets.com quite yet.<\/p>\n \u201cThe stage is set for tech stocks to move higher,\u201d Ives added, predicting \u201canother masterpiece quarter\u201d from Nvidia.<\/p>\n Come Wednesday, investors should have a better idea whether Wedbush or Elliott made the right call.<\/p>\n<\/div>\nRumored delays for next-gen AI training chip \u2018Blackwell\u2019<\/h3>\n
Ives predicts \u2018another masterpiece\u2019 from Nvidia\u2019s Huang<\/h3>\n
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