Nvidia shares gave up their earlier gains on Thursday, closing down three percent at $180.64, as the Street had to reconcile the persistent fears of an AI bubble with the simply stellar results from the company.

I didn’t think CEO Jensen Huang did a good job addressing concerns of an AI bubble. Frankly, I thought he ignored the questions of whether there is a looming funding gap, and to what degree financing is “circular.”

But the Street is generally a lot less worried than I am. The view from the analysts covering the stock is that as long as the business is humming along, which it is, worries of a bubble get kicked down the road.

“No AI Bubble Here, At Least Not Yet,” writes Craig-Hallum’s Richard Shannon, who has a Buy rating on the stock, and a $245 price target.

Nvidia shares are rising in the pre-market Thursday morning, and estimates and price targets are once again rising as the company pulled another rabbit out of the hat, delivering the $65 billion revenue forecast for the current quarter that was the “whisper number” the company had to hit. Gross profit margin also is holding up astoundingly well despite massive investment in materials and inventory. ‍ ‍

Given just how stellar those results are, one could excuse CEO Jensen Huang for both raising the topic of an artificial intelligence “bubble” and then failing to actually address the concern.

With each passing week, the enormity of investment in artificial intelligence becomes more striking, and the risk seems to rise as well.

Some are finally stepping back and downgrading their view of Mega-Cap Tech.

“It is time to take a more cautious stance on the hyperscalers and move beyond the industry’s reassuring ‘trust us – Gen-AI is just like early cloud 1.0’ narrative, which looks increasingly misplaced,” writes analyst Alex Haissl of Rothschild & Co. Redburn on Tuesday.

Haissl cut his ratings on Amazon and Microsoft to Neutral from Buy. His main contention is that the capital burden on these firms is a lot bigger than it was in what he calls “Cloud 1.0,” which was the cloud computing era that began in 2006 when Amazon first turned on its “AWS” cloud computing service. Amazon and Microsoft are the two biggest of the Big Three cloud computing operators, ahead of Alphabet’s Google.

Privately held artificial intelligence developer Anthropic, which has gotten $31 billion in funding from Amazon, Alphabet, and numerous venture capitalists since 2021 — including an “F” round two months ago — on Tuesday received pledges of billions more from both Nvidia and Microsoft.

In the latest instance of “circular” financing, as many are calling the customer-vendor deals, Microsoft announced that Anthropic has committed to spending $30 billion on Microsoft’s Azure cloud services, and that Microsoft will invest “up to” $10 billion in Anthropic and Nvidia will invest $5 billion.

The Anthropic spending is earmarked for use of Nvidia chips in Azure, said Microsoft, adding, “Anthropic’s compute commitment will initially be up to one gigawatt of compute capacity with NVIDIA Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin systems.” Anthropic had its own press release on the deal.

Following the announcement, CNBC’s MacKenzie Sigalos reported that Anthropic is now valued at $350 billion, up from the $183 billion at which the F round valued the company in September.

“As much as we read about some of the hype around AI, the reality is, at the SMB level, the value is very, very real.”

Two heavy weeks of earnings reports have left stocks lower, the Nasdaq Composite Index closing down half a point the week ending November 14th, and five percent the week before. That is likely because of stocks hitting new 52-week and all-time high prices.

I compiled a list of thirty-two stocks that had the biggest declines and gains in the days and weeks following their earnings reports.

Shares of chip equipment giant Applied Materials are up fractionally on Friday at $225.01 following Thursday evening’s earnings release — the first gain on earnings following six quarters of sharp sell-offs. The last report, in August, the stock sold off by the most in over a decade.

The ray of hope this time around is that the company’s forecast for quarterly sales finally topped expectations after four quarters in a row of disappointment.

But Applied is still in a sense in uncharted waters. The issues have been uncertainty related to the effects of tariffs and restrictions on sales to China. The tariff fears have eased for the moment, given detente between the U.S. and China; but the company is definitely going to sell less to China going forward, though it’s hard to say how much less.

The larger issue, as I explained in August, is what I call “The Taiwan Semi Effect,” the company’s dependence on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing as the most dominant of its customers. That is making business less predictable than in past for Applied’s sales.

Everyone loves a potentially new way to play the artificial intelligence trade, and shares of Cisco Systems are up four percent Wednesday on just a glimmer the company might be the latest vendor caught in a rush of investment for AI.

That’s noteworthy because Cisco is a cheap stock. At $77.32, it trades for five times this year’s projected revenue, and nineteen times possible EPS.

There’s some debate, however, over what to make of Wednesday evening’s outlook.

The headline news is that the company lifted its revenue forecast for the fiscal year that ends next July by a billion dollars, to $6.6 billion, give or take four hundred million. That would represent a rate of growth of 6.5%. Maybe that doesn’t sound like much, but it is a big relief Thursday to bulls on the stock who had been agitated back in August that the year outlook was for merely five percent growth.

One of those worriers back in August, Rosenblatt Securities’s Mike Genovese, is reassured. “This Cisco quarter made us more positive on the name than before,” he writes, reiterating a Buy rating and hiking his price target to $100 from $87.

“The beauty is, he's built a business that's bigger, and scaled much greater, than Procore. He knows what he's doing, that's for sure.”

Advanced Micro Devices is a company that for a long time couldn’t get any credit as a credible competitor to Nvidia in AI chips. All that changed on October 5th when the company struck a deal with OpenAI to a massive amount of AMD chips, in return for OpenAI taking a stake in AMD.

Shares of AMD soared by twenty-four percent the next day, and since that time, they are up seventeen percent at a recent $237.52.

Tuesday was the coda to the October announcement, as AMD CEO Lisa Su and her executives took the stage in New York for an “analyst day” event, the dog & pony show where a company discusses long-term product strategy, market outlook, and some financial goals.

The headline from the five hours of proceedings was one trillion dollars. That is the amount of the annual addressable market that is related to artificial intelligence that Su foresees in 2030.

Shares of artificial intelligence data center operator CoreWeave are slumping by eight percent in early trading at $97.04, after the company delivered results Monday night that topped expectations but also cut its outlook for 2025, citing a delay in a third party that was helping CoreWeave assemble one of its data center “shells,” the basic physical structure of the facility.

This is only the company’s third report since it went public in March, and the first report since CoreWeave called off its proposed acquisition of Core Scientific. The stock was up 164% since the IPO heading into Monday night’s report.

Both bull and bear are taking the shortfall in stride.

It’s been a year and a half since I interviewed Paddy Srinivasan as he took the reins at software maker DigitalOcean. The challenge for Srinivasan was to turn around a company that had seen growth dramatically slow in 2024, sending its stock into a tailspin.

It looks like Srinivasan’s efforts are working. DigitalOcean stock is up fifty-four percent this year at a recent $51.93.

Growth has picked from last year, projected at almost fifteen percent this year versus twelve percent in 2024, and the stock is winning new fans.

Following last Wednesday’s upbeat earnings report, the shares soared eighteen percent, the second quarter in a row the stock saw a double-digit gain.

One new fan is Oppenheimer & Co.’s Param Singh, who initiated coverage on Monday with an Outperform rating, and a $60 target, which would be about sixteen percent from here.

Welcome to the end of a week of over a hundred tech earnings reports of some significance. While I’m not covering each one exhaustively, I think we can say some things in broad strokes about what’s working and what’s not.

Based on the table at the bottom of the post, there are some definite trends here.

BEING SUB-SCALE IS NO BUENO

First, the losers.

Being a “sub-scale” vendor in the advertising market, meaning, not having the influence of Google or Meta that comes from being much bigger, is not a great place to be. You can see that in the muted response to decent reports from DoubleVerify and The Trade Desk and Yelp.

There are other places where it is bad to be sub-scale. Being a smaller, focused chip-equipment vendor such as Onto Innovation is proving not as rewarding as being one of the giants such as Lam Research, KLA, BE Semiconductor or ASML.

The latest sign of the strong Street interest in quantum computing was a packed audience Wednesday at the Nasdaq for a product unveiling by Quantinuum, a division of industrial giant Honeywell.

Quantinuum is probably the best-known private company in the quantum race, while most of the Street’s attention is typically focused on the three public “pure plays,” IonQ, D-Wave, and Rigetti. (IonQ and D-Wave both reported upbeat quarterly results this week.)

Quantinuum CEO Rajeeb Hazra told the crowd that the new “Helios” machine marks the company’s achievement of the “first commercial-grade quantum computer.” The hour and a half of discussions with Hazra, with customers, and with an executive from partner Nvidia were moderated by CNBC anchor Morgan Brennan and by Alix Steel, a former Bloomberg reporter now a principal at a consultancy called DrivePath advisors.

The choice of the two moderators was unfortunate as the duo seemed not to know very much at all about quantum, and the questions were all softball types. Well, that’s to be expected from a product “launch,” I suppose.

The hits keep coming in yesterday and this morning’s earnings reports. Here’s just a sample. See the table at the bottom of the post for the complete rundown.

Fiber-optic giant Coherent is surging eighteen percent in pre-market trading, reversing the big sell-off that happened to the company with the August report. Among the highlights, the company’s revenue forecast for the quarter, nearly five percent above consensus, is the most upside in years.

Coherent’s report adds fuel to the fiber-optic outlook following on the heels of Tuesday’s upbeat report from smaller competitor Lumentum.

The highlight is, of course, sales of transceivers into data centers, driven by the raging cloud and AI nature of things. On the call, CEO James Anderson said the company is “experiencing exceptionally strong demand.” Sales for that part of the business rose twenty-three percent, year over year, faster than the nineteen percent level of total revenue.

With tech stocks hitting new all-time highs lately, and with a massive sell-off of the market on Tuesday, on fears of artificial intelligence bubble spending, it is perhaps no surprise that some perfectly fine reports on Tuesday evening were greeted with further selling. (See the table of reports at the bottom of the post.)

Arista Networks is one of the names that sold off hard, down seven percent in early trading Wednesday, at $142.10, despite beating expectations Tuesday evening for the September quarter, and forecasting this quarter higher as well.

The consensus is that the Street wanted Arista to raise its outlook for 2026 and it didn’t, so that was disappointing.

“The negative stock reaction post close reflects the reality that forward estimates are not moving up in a material manner,” writes Amit Daryanani of Evercore ISI, who has an Outperform rating on the shares, and a $175 price target.

“ANET maintained their expectation of 20% sales growth in CY26 though off a higher revenue base vs. 90-days ago (implicitly CY26 dollar revenues are revised higher).”

Simon Leopold of Raymond James, who has a Market Perform rating on the stock, writes similarly that the stock drop “we think resulted from elevated expectations and no real fundamental shift.”

The artificial intelligence trade can make some people do crazy things, like buying shares of a stock trading for ninety-two times projected sales, as in the case of Palantir Technologies.

The shares are down over seven percent, pre-market, at $192.16, despite an upbeat report and forecast Monday evening that just wasn’t enough for a stock this richly valued.

This is basically a repeat of what happened back in May, when results were also pretty stellar but the stock sold off by twelve percent. It’s what happens when a high-performing company has an over-valued stock.

Why might Palantir deserve such a rich stock price? The numbers, themselves are certainly nice. The eight-percent surprise on revenue, $1.18 billion versus $1.09 billion, was the biggest upside surprise in the company’s reporting history. And the outlook for this quarter’s revenue, $1,329 at the midpoint, was also the highest upside in forecast so far, thirteen percent.

Two heavy weeks of earnings reports have left stocks lower, the Nasdaq Composite Index closing down half a point the week ending November 14th, and five percent the week before. That is likely because of stocks hitting new 52-week and all-time high prices.

I compiled a list of thirty-two stocks that had the biggest declines and gains in the days and weeks following their earnings reports.

We’re past the biggest week of earnings season by market capitalization, and it’s worth reflecting upon what’s working and what’s not.

Five of the biggest names reported results back to back, Wednesday and Thursday, Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon and Apple. All five showed healthy growth, but only Alphabet and Amazon saw a healthy pop in their stocks.

For Microsoft and Meta, the prospect of much higher spending is weighing on their shares. The patience that was displayed for Microsoft and Meta back in July seems to have evaporated.

I guess, when the stocks were only up twenty percent, mid-year, people were willing to indulge both companies. But, with gains of twenty-nine percent heading into these reports, investors showed less patience for both companies’ constant increase in spending.

The first crop of cloud giants’ earnings reports, Alphabet, Meta, and Microsoft Wednesday evening, are forcing the Street on Thursday to lift their models for data center and artificial intelligence spending.

All three companies indicated much higher spending ahead, and the Street reaction was mixed: Alphabet shares today are up four percent at $285.46, while Microsoft is down three percent at $526.73, and Meta is down ten percent at $675.97.

I found the most interesting item was Microsoft’s remarks that it is still trying to get enough capacity in its Azure cloud service to meet demand.

“Mgmt. noted they now expect to be capacity constrained through the end of the fiscal year,” writes Deutsche Bank’s Brad Zelnick, and “As physical limitations on the pace of standing up new capacity continue to chase further accelerating demand, this dynamic is now expected to continue through FY26.”

We’ve come to the busiest week of tech earnings, or, certainly one of them, with sixty-four companies of note reporting. This week is rather unusual in that it happens to include five of the largest companies, Microsoft, Apple, Alphabet, Amazon and Meta.

Wednesday the 29th will be Meta and Microsoft and Alphabet, and then the following day, we'll hear from Apple and Amazon on Thursday, October 30th, all after market close.

I can tell you via time travel — I’m recording this Wednesday evening — that Microsoft, Alphabet and Meta all reported impressive growth. But Microsoft and Meta sold off on rising costs, while Alphabet shares surged in late trading by 6%.

That caps 46% price appreciation for Alphabet this year, ahead of the 29% appreciation in Microsoft and Meta shares through Wednesday’s close.

Wednesday evening brought the first installment of the Big Five techs reporting this week, Microsoft, Meta, and Alphabet, and, as expected, the reports were good.

But Alphabet is the star this evening, rising over six percent while Meta is down seven percent and Microsoft is off by three percent.

The headline numbers from all three are strong, with Microsoft’s Azure cloud service’s sales rising by 39%, and Google’s cloud sales up 34% percent, and Meta’s advertising revenue rising 25.6%, higher than Street consensus that was around 21%.

We’ll know more after the conference calls, but it appears spending is the devil in the details for both Microsoft and Meta.

Tuesday was another one of the many days of the year when Nvidia dumps a massive amount of press releases on the market, usually when its CEO, Jensen Huang, is giving a keynote somewhere. This time around, it was Nvidia’s “GTC” conference in Washington, D.C.

The headline number for the Street was Huang telling his audience that “I think we're probably the first technology company in history to have visibility into half a trillion dollars of cumulative Blackwell, and early ramps of Rubin, through 2026.”

He was referring to projected sales of his company’s latest generations of GPU chips, the “Blackwell” model that has just started selling, and the forthcoming “Rubin” model.

Analysts covering the stock were delighted with Huang’s half-trillion remarks. The current estimate for Nvidia sales for the data center for this year and next are lower than that: $207 billion this year, and $281 billion next year, so, just $488 billion.

The stock ended the day up five percent at $201.03 following Huang’s talk.

Earnings results Monday and Tuesday contained some nice news and some nice stock price jumps for names linked to everything data center.

Shares of Bloom Energy, makers of fuel cells that can be deployed to data centers quickly, which had already more than quintupled this year, are up twenty percent in late trading on Tuesday after its sales topped expectations for the fourth quarter in a row. While not forecasting explicitly, the company now sees results for the full year being better than originally expected.

Bloom’s appeal was reiterated this summer by our friend Paul Wick, head of the Columbia Seligman Technology & Information fund, which is the largest holder in Bloom.

On a conference call with analysts this evening, founder, Bloom CEO and chairman KR Sridhar remarked that the company has already established itself as the “the standard for onsite power” among phone companies and chip makers. For example, AT&T has been a customer for fourteen years now, and Verizon and T-Mobile subsequently became customers.

Monday was the day for analysts to commence coverage of Fermi America, the startup planning to build multiple gigawatts of power for data centers in Texas. The company was just founded in January and rushed to IPO on October 1st, well in advance of any revenue.

Yes, it’s a play on the surging need for energy for massive artificial intelligence data centers.

The coverage has produced unanimous approval, as far as I can see, from the eight analysts covering, and has produced some of the more amusing report titles in recent memory.

“Go Ahead Envy Me, I'm America's IPP and I Ain't Going Nowhere So You Should Get to Know Fermi,” is the title of Nicholas Amicucci’s report at Evercore ISI. Another one, from Mizuho Securities’s Vikram Malhotra, quotes the original Spider-Man comic book: “With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility.” And, perhaps most aptly, Stephen Gengaro at Stifel & Co. headlines his note, simply, “If You Build It, They Will Come.”

One of the bigger areas of controversy in tech these days are the new era of nuclear energy companies such as NuScale Power. NuScale and its brethren attract adamant defenders and detractors who are divided much more cleanly than the shades of gray that separate opinions in other areas of technology.

This past week, while I was busy covering earnings reports, I let slip by three notes on NuScale that throw into stark relief the disparity of opinion. There was one initiation of NuScale at a Buy rating, and two analysts downgrading the stock to a Sell. That’s the kind of skirmish that’s always fun to see.

In an industry with almost no revenue, NuScale is one of the more advanced nuclear hopefuls, which means that it may make a paltry forty-eight million in revenue this year, versus no revenue for competitors Nano Nuclear and Oklo.

Cantor Fitzgerald’s Derek Soderberg started NuScale at Overweight, with a $55 price target, a thirty-two-percent return from Friday’s close of $41.81. Soderberg argues that the company’s having at least some revenue, as well as approval by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, gives it a big head start.

“We've continued to see a lot of excitement with these large fleets […] The larger you are, the larger your footprint is of your operation, you get the largest benefit from the safety technology, and from the efficiency gains.”

There was a lot to catch up on with Intel on Thursday night. Following a report in July in which CEO Lip-bu Tan gave mixed messages about his willingness to pursue leading-edge chip technology, the U.S. government in August announced it took a ten percent stake in the company, and then Nvidia last month said it would take a four percent stake in the company.

The results and outlook show the same struggle for Intel as they have been for a while now.

The company’s revenue for chips to the data center and artificial intelligence, the key metric, continue to be uneven from quarter to quarter, with this quarter’s sales declining a point from a year earlier. Tan continues to argue for the appeal of “AI PC” to boost personal computer microprocessors, although there’s no sign that AI PCs are a hit with consumers.

Aside from a partnership with Nvidia, Tan has not really outlined how Intel will stage a comeback in AI, where its products are no match for Nvidia’s.

The remarks about the company’s most cutting-edge tech, “14A,” continue to be vague, with Tan saying that “We remain active engaged with potential external customers and are

encouraged by the earlier feedback which help us to drive and inform our decisions.” Waiting for your customers to give you the signal is not necessarily a great place to be with advanced technology.

It’s becoming more and more the case that fans of Tesla look to the future for some kind of deliverance. The present state of the business is underwhelming, and the promise of the “Optimus” robot is a pleasant place to escape.

The third-quarter report Wednesday evening was anti-climactic because the important part had been announced three weeks ago, which were the September-quarter deliveries, which were the highest in company history, but also showed a trend of slowing growth for deliveries. The stock initially traded down at the open, but have gained a couple points Thursday afternoon, at $447.34. 

The best that can be offered by the bulls given the slowing trend is that this quarter, “there is broad agreement volume is set to decline sequentially,” but, “the magnitude of the drop might not be as bad as feared,” as writes Deutsche Bank’s Edison Yu, who has a Buy rating on the stock and a $440 price target.

There was also no forecast by the company for 2026, which leaves nothing to be excited about the rest of this year or next year from a vehicle standpoint.

So much for playing defense. Back in July, at the last earnings call, Netflix was a defensive stock, seen as relatively insulated in a time of tariff-driven uncertainty.

That seems to have run its course. The shares are down by eight percent Wednesday following the company’s report Tuesday evening, which featured the first earnings-per-share shortfall in almost two years, and a revenue number that was roughly in line with consensus but that is actually being counted a miss.

My sense is 2026 is going to be harder for Netflix based on the need to show revenue growth, something hinted at by this report.

One analyst, Brian White of Monness, Crespi, Hardt, who rates the stock Neutral, characterized the report as “a lackluster third quarter” and “an uninspiring fourth-quarter outlook.” Remember that Netflix this year stopped reporting its subscriber numbers, which means that when financial results don’t dazzle, there’s an element of uncertainty that makes it worse.