NVIDIA Corporation

Goldman Sachs expects the S&P 500 to deliver another strong earnings season, with artificial intelligence investment driving an increasingly large share of corporate profit growth, according to an Oct. 2 report led by strategist Ben Snider. Consensus forecasts call for S&P 500 earnings per share to rise 27% from a year earlier in the third quarter, a slowdown from the 33% growth recorded in the second quarter after excluding accounting distortions, and Goldman expects most companies to beat consensus estimates again. The headline growth rate masks an unusually concentrated picture: information technology and energy are expected to generate nearly 80% of the index's earnings growth, AI infrastructure companies alone are expected to account for more than half of S&P 500 EPS growth, and the 10 biggest contributors are forecast to generate 68% of that growth, with Micron Technology and Nvidia together accounting for more than one-third. Micron has already reported, posting year-over-year earnings growth of 1,003% and beating consensus estimates. For the median S&P 500 company the outlook is considerably less spectacular, with consensus forecasts calling for EPS growth of 9%, down from 14% in the second quarter, revenue growth slowing to 6% from 7%, and a third-quarter net margin of 14.7% versus 15.1% in the previous quarter. The coming reports could also test whether enormous AI investments are translating into revenue, with consensus forecasts calling for hyperscaler capital spending to jump 116% from a year earlier in the third quarter, accelerating from 87% growth in the second, and Goldman expecting hyperscaler capex to grow more than 50% in 2027 and exceed the roughly $1.1 trillion currently embedded in consensus forecasts. Goldman forecasts S&P 500 EPS of $375 for 2026, up 36% from 2025, followed by $415 in 2027, with a year-end 2026 S&P 500 target of 8,000 and a 12-month target of 8,700.

Nvidia's board authorized an additional $150B for its existing share-repurchase program, bringing the remaining authorization to $235B, which the company said was the largest increase to a share-repurchase authorization in history. Micron Technology reported fiscal fourth-quarter results and guidance that topped Wall Street's expectations by a wide margin, earning an adjusted $33.42 per share as revenue soared 379.1% year-over-year to $54.23B, versus analyst expectations of $31.72 per share on $51.49B in revenue. Accenture shares rose after its Q4 beat expectations and it forecast upbeat fiscal 2027 revenue growth, reporting GAAP earnings of $3.29 per share, revenue up 6.3% year over year to $18.7B, and new bookings of $22.2B. MongoDB shares fell after CEO Chirantan Desai stepped down effective immediately to become the newly created Chief Enterprise Platform Officer at Meta, with the board appointing Dev Ittycheria as interim president and CEO. Summit Therapeutics shares surged after AstraZeneca announced a $2B equity investment in the U.S. biotech and a clinical collaboration to develop new cancer treatments, purchasing convertible preferred shares at a conversion price equivalent to $18.36 per common share, a 10% premium to Summit's five-day volume-weighted average price. For the week, the Dow fell 1.26%, the S&P 500 lost 0.27%, and the Nasdaq Composite climbed 0.45%.

Amazon has established an $8 billion special purpose vehicle to buy and lease back Nvidia Grace Blackwell chips to AWS clients, an off balance sheet financing tool for AI hardware as cloud capital demands rise. Morgan Stanley has reinstated Nvidia as a Top Pick, citing its view on AI data center demand and capacity expansion. The Amazon vehicle and the Morgan Stanley call both sit inside a wider Nvidia AI infrastructure story, alongside Nvidia's own US$500 billion ecosystem financing plans. The structure lets AWS keep building AI capacity without stacking all the hardware on its own balance sheet, pointing to new funding structures that can support large orders as AI factories become more capital intensive across cloud and sovereign projects. The clearest early signal on whether the model scales would be other hyperscalers or sovereign AI buyers setting up similar chip vehicles that explicitly name Nvidia hardware, with disclosed sizes and timelines.

AI-related investment is generating unusually large spillover effects across the U.S. economy, according to UBS research, with every 1 percentage-point contribution to growth from AI-related investment generating about 1.46 percentage points of investment growth in the following quarter. UBS economist Arend Kapteyn said in a Sept. 25 research note that AI-related technology investment is growing about 30% year over year, while other business fixed investment has risen just 0.8% and residential investment has contracted 3.8%. Of the 1.46 percentage points, 0.46 percentage points comes from continued investment within AI-related categories, 0.30 percentage points through software and research and development, and 0.69 percentage points through other sectors. UBS defines its AI investment proxy across five national accounts categories — electrical transmission and distribution equipment, special industry machinery, computers and peripherals, communications equipment and data centres — which together account for roughly 18% of non-residential fixed investment and about 2.5% of GDP. The spillover is particularly visible in industries supplying data-centre infrastructure, including gas turbines, electricity infrastructure and utilities, and UBS also pointed to less obvious beneficiaries such as Japan's TOTO, whose electrostatic chucks for semiconductor production now account for more than half of the company's profits. The multiplier effect has strengthened over time, with the estimated contribution from a 1 percentage-point increase in AI-related capital expenditure rising from 88 basis points in 1980 to 106 basis points in 2000 and 146 basis points by June 2026.

IonQ jumped roughly 12% in premarket trading on September 23 after testing the industry's first real-time quantum error decoder, then extended gains on news that its Superion quantum processor would be integrated into NVIDIA's Accelerated Quantum Research Center, with Rigetti Computing trading up in sympathy. IonQ's second-quarter revenue came in at $80 million, up 287% year-over-year, and management boosted its 2026 projection to $280-290 million, with combined revenue after closing the SkyWater foundry purchase potentially reaching $460 million for the year. The company held roughly $2 billion in pro-forma cash, cash equivalents and investments following the SkyWater acquisition, dwarfing Rigetti's approximately $540 million. IonQ's market capitalization is around $17.48 billion against combined 2026 revenue guidance of $450 million to $460 million, putting its forward price-to-sales multiple in the 39x range, while Rigetti trades at a trailing price-to-sales ratio of 391.65x. Since September 2024, insiders at IonQ, Rigetti, D-Wave, and Quantum Computing Inc. have collectively sold around $895.1 million more stock than they bought, and short interest stands at 10.15% of IonQ's shares versus 19.07% for Rigetti.

Nvidia said its board increased its share buyback program by $150 billion, leaving $235 billion in total authorization, the largest buyback program in U.S. history according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Advanced Micro Devices said it would acquire AI model and research lab World Labs in an all-stock transaction valued at nearly $8.2 billion, a deal Citi analyst Atif Malik said gives the company deeper visibility into how AI models are evolving, while RBC analyst Srini Pajjuri said it could help position AMD to offer full-stack solutions for robotics, simulation and physical AI markets. Micron Technology reported fourth-quarter results and an outlook that beat expectations as its strategic customer agreements continued to increase, and Accenture reported fiscal quarterly results that exceeded expectations on both revenue and bookings, sending its shares up nearly 16% on Thursday. HPE closed nearly 4% higher after saying it won a $1.2 billion order of AMD's Helios AI rack from cloud infrastructure company Vultr, and raised its fiscal 2027 networking growth outlook to the high-teens to low-20s on a percentage basis, with data center networking revenue expected to grow at a low-to-high 50s percent compound annual rate through fiscal 2029. Anthropic intends to launch its initial public offering before the Thanksgiving holiday, according to Bloomberg, which also reported that Broadcom's Wall Street syndicate is starting to gather $60 billion of fresh AI chip financing to benefit Anthropic PBC and other companies, while Meta Platforms is adding a new Meta Enterprise Platform for organizations, tapping MongoDB CEO Chirantan Desai to lead it, and introduced Muse for Small Business.

Super Micro has started shipping server racks built for NVIDIA's next-generation Vera Rubin AI architecture, sending its shares up 4.3% in the afternoon session. The start of shipments reinforces the server solutions provider's role in the AI infrastructure supply chain, as Vera Rubin-ready racks house and interconnect the high-density systems data centers need for advanced AI workloads. The stock was trading at $43.69, up 4.4% from the previous close. Super Micro is up 41.1% since the beginning of the year, but at $43.69 per share it remains 25.6% below its 52-week high of $58.68 from October 2025. The company's shares are extremely volatile, having logged 69 moves greater than 5% over the last year.

NVIDIA announced a $150 billion share buyback, the largest in its history, along with a new engineering-based architecture framework designed to control autonomous agents, a plan joined by Anthropic and other major tech companies. Jim Cramer highlighted both developments on the September 28 episode of Mad Money, reiterating his advice to own rather than trade the stock. The buyback is backed by quarterly revenue of $96.2 billion, up 106% year over year, with Data Center revenue of $89 billion and gross margins of roughly 75%. Management's gross margin outlook stands at 74%, plus or minus 50 basis points, though the company faces rising high-bandwidth memory costs and customer concentration among a small number of hyperscale cloud providers. At the close of the second quarter, 285 hedge funds held the stock, up from 275 in the first quarter, with Fisher Asset Management the top holder at nearly 91 million shares and short interest at 1.27% of the float. NVIDIA traded at about 16.5 times 12-month forward earnings as of September 28, below the S&P 500's roughly 19x forward multiple.

Technology and energy emerged as the two most consequential sector stories of the first nine months of 2026, with the S&P 500 gaining 11.4% and the Nasdaq Composite up 15.6% even as the 10-year Treasury yield moved above 5% and Brent crude gained about 40% in the third quarter. According to the Zacks Earnings Trend report dated Sept. 30, the tech sector is expected to post 42.1% earnings growth in the third quarter of 2026, with semiconductor earnings projected to surge 85.5% on 62.8% revenue growth; that growth would moderate to 29.6% excluding semiconductors and to 20.6% excluding NVIDIA, Micron and Alphabet. NVIDIA's fiscal second-quarter 2027 revenues rose 106% year over year, with Data Center revenues jumping 117%, while Micron reported fiscal fourth-quarter 2026 revenue growth of 379.3% year over year, beating the Zacks Consensus Estimate by 6.33%, with EPS of $33.42 topping the estimate by 5.73%. On the energy side, Middle East disruptions pushed Brent above $100 per barrel during September, and Zacks expects Energy earnings to surge 111.8% in the third quarter, the sector's most pronounced upgrade to its earnings outlook since the quarter began. Chevron reported $12 billion in second-quarter 2026 adjusted earnings, its highest quarterly profit in six years, with upstream earnings rising 200% to $8.2 billion and U.S. production reaching a record nearly 2.1 million barrels of oil equivalent per day, while Exxon Mobil reported $14.7 billion in second-quarter adjusted earnings, $23.6 billion in operating cash flow and $17.2 billion in free cash flow.

SpaceX shares have stabilized after notching an all-time low of $104.83 in early August, with the company citing fresh catalysts that could drive the stock higher into year-end and into 2027. Starship, SpaceX's two-stage rocket and the largest human-made flying object, recently reached orbit for the first time, and the recent flight deployed the first 26 next-generation Starlink V3 satellites. Anthropic expanded its computing agreements with SpaceX, committing up to $84.5 billion through May 2029 for NVIDIA-based AI infrastructure, while Zacks Consensus Estimates suggest SpaceX will grow revenue by 147% in 2027. The odds of a SpaceX and Tesla merger by the end of next year have spiked to 63% on Polymarket. The company also pointed to Planet Labs and Google's launch of the first AI satellite as proof of concept for its ambitions in space-based AI data centers.

UBS said it sees the artificial intelligence infrastructure market staying hot, keeping CoreWeave in focus on Friday. In a note to clients, UBS analyst Karl Keirstead wrote that the per-hour price of hosted Nvidia GPUs is rising, that the environment is inflationary, and that revenue-per-gigawatt figures are moving higher, now a key pillar of the hyperscaler and neo-cloud bull case. Keirstead noted that CoreWeave disclosed this week it raised per-hour GPU pricing across all SKUs by 25% in July 2026 and has since raised them by another 10% in just the last two to three months. He also flagged the risk that local community and state and local government pushback could throttle the pace of AI data center additions, though he said checks suggested the industry will manage through the hurdle. Keirstead added that the availability and cost of capital could slow the AI buildout, with some projects expected to fade, but said better-positioned players including CoreWeave will not have an issue.

Nvidia shares climbed more than 2.5% Friday to an intraday record, breaking above their previous all-time high as renewed optimism around artificial intelligence spending combined with the chipmaker's record share buyback authorization. The stock was last up 2.9% at $237.75, a fresh record for the first time since May, extending a rally that has lifted the shares roughly 27% this year. The move follows Nvidia's board authorization this week of an additional $150 billion for share repurchases, bringing its total remaining authorization to $235 billion through fiscal 2028, the largest such authorization in corporate history. Morgan Stanley reinforced the optimism Friday by reinstating Nvidia as its top semiconductor pick after meetings with CEO Jensen Huang and other executives, citing continued strength in AI demand and an expanding customer base. The firm also said the AI infrastructure bottleneck is shifting from semiconductor production toward data center land, power and financing, constraints it believes could favor Nvidia as customers seek to maximize computing output from limited electricity.

Aptiv entered the second half of 2026 with roughly $5 billion of new commercial awards, a base that breaks down into about $2.4 billion in Intelligent Systems and $2.5 billion in Engineered Components. The company said second-quarter adjusted revenue growth accelerated sequentially to 2%, while Software & Services increased 10% and non-automotive revenues grew 12%. Aptiv also secured its first commercial award for Gen 8 automotive radar, gained an initial robotics perception-system award and expanded its collaboration with NVIDIA around production-ready Edge AI platforms. Aptiv repurchased $250 million of shares in the quarter and expects to return about half of free cash flow through buybacks over the next few years. The article also compared Aptiv with two U.S.-listed peers, BorgWarner and Magna International, noting that execution on new-program launches and conversion of technology investments into higher-margin content will shape future earnings growth.

Micron Technology reported record financial results for its fiscal year 2026, crediting rising AI-driven demand and effective operational execution. The company said memory chips are becoming increasingly critical as AI evolves into what it calls "Super Intelligence," and pointed to increased technology investments and strategic customer agreements as the basis for its outlook. Micron last closed at $1,097.39, up 3%. In other chip trading, GlobalWafers rose 9.7% to NT$1,190.00, while VeriSilicon Microelectronics (Shanghai) fell 11.3% to CN¥171.68. NVIDIA ended at $230.86, up 1.1% near its 52-week high, after announcing a collaboration with Delta to enhance autonomous driving solutions using its AI technology; Advanced Micro Devices settled at $615.73, up 0.6%, and Broadcom ended at $343.64, down 2.1%.

NVIDIA Corporation has added $150 billion to its share repurchase authorization, the largest increase in the company's history, bringing the remaining authorization to $235 billion with execution planned through fiscal 2028. The program is backed by second-quarter fiscal 2027 revenues that jumped 106% year over year to $96.2 billion, including Data Center revenues that surged 117% to $89 billion, with GAAP and non-GAAP gross margins both at 75%. In that quarter NVIDIA generated operating cash flow of $24.08 billion and free cash flow of $21.34 billion, and returned approximately $26 billion to shareholders through $19.7 billion of stock repurchases and $6 billion in dividends. For the first half of fiscal 2027, operating and free cash flows reached $74.42 billion and $69.9 billion, respectively, and third-quarter revenues are expected to grow 12% sequentially to $108 billion. Among peers, Broadcom generated $31.9 billion in free cash flow in the first three quarters of fiscal 2026, roughly 45% of revenues, and returned $18.3 billion to shareholders in the first nine months, while Texas Instruments generated $4.1 billion in free cash flow in the first half of 2026, repurchasing $185 million of stock and paying $2.6 billion in dividends.

IonQ announced a real-time quantum error correction decoder that runs complex workloads without slowing quantum computations. The company reported new deployments at the NVIDIA Accelerated Quantum Research Center, integrating its hardware into NVIDIA's quantum research stack, and disclosed a partnership with SDT in South Korea to support quantum computing access for regional enterprises and researchers. IonQ said the decoder handles benchmark circuits with up to 408 logical qubits and more than 31.5 million quantum operations with just 0.02% added time, running on a single off-the-shelf CPU while the quantum system keeps operating. IonQ, a US semiconductor player valued at about $17.4b, builds quantum computing systems for clients in the United States, Switzerland, and other regions. Investors will watch how many Superion 256 deployments move from contract to installed and active systems at sites like NVIDIA's research center, FIU and SDT's data center from 2027.

Singapore state investor Temasek said it is not concerned about the massive investments by major IT companies driving the expansion of artificial intelligence. Jane Atherton, head of its North America business, spoke on the first at the Reuters Investment USA conference in Boston. Amid a global bond selloff and expectations of tighter monetary policy, some have questioned whether Big Tech's huge spending is sustainable in an era of high interest rates, but Atherton expressed the view that companies engaged in infrastructure investment can earn returns commensurate with the risk as AI spreads, stressing that "what is supporting all of this AI infrastructure buildout is a group of companies with some of the strongest balance sheets in the world. We maintain a very positive view on AI." Analysts forecast that Big Tech's capital expenditure will exceed 1 trillion dollars by 2027, driven mainly by funding needs for expensive semiconductors and data centers to meet enormous computing demand. Temasek, which holds stakes in Anthropic and OpenAI, is one of the world's largest state-owned investment institutions with total assets of about 400 billion dollars, and its holdings in the Americas account for 26 percent of its overall portfolio, with BlackRock, Mastercard and Nvidia among its major investments.

Jacobs Solutions has been selected by NVIDIA to deploy its Data Center Digital Twin platform at a large U.S. research and development facility, sending the company's shares up 3.3% in the afternoon session. The work is a three-year SaaS agreement built on NVIDIA Omniverse libraries, under which Jacobs will use the digital twin to optimize energy demand, monitor operations, and balance power loads across the AI facility. The stock closed the day at $139.76, up 3.3% from the previous close. Jacobs Solutions is up 3.3% since the beginning of the year, but at $139.77 per share it is still trading 15% below its 52-week high of $164.44 from October 2025.

Nvidia's fair value estimate in the latest analyst model rose to US$327.70 from US$302.83, an increase of about 8%, as research commentary weighed strong AI demand against financing and execution risk. The model now assumes revenue growth of 47.28%, up from 41.23%, while net profit margin was trimmed to 51.62% from 54.98%, future P/E was cut to 21.25x from 25.21x, and the discount rate moved to 11.28% from 10.99%. On the bullish side, Barclays cited a chart implying hyperscaler revenue materially above its base case, Raymond James and BMO Capital lifted their price targets to US$352 and US$340 respectively, and Rosenblatt and Raymond James called the planned Hugging Face acquisition financially modest but important for Nvidia's AI software role. BofA and Goldman flagged rising vendor financing and the new US$500b financing platform as introducing off balance sheet risk and leverage, while Morgan Stanley said further upside may depend on clearer evidence on long term market share, gross margin durability and the eventual impact of Rubin. In company news, Nvidia approved a record US$150b expansion of its share repurchase program, lifting remaining buyback authorization to US$235b through fiscal 2028 and total authorization to about US$391.3b, reported fiscal Q2 revenue of US$96.2b and net income of US$59.7b with around 92% of sales from the Data Center segment, and issued a first full year revenue outlook pointing to approximately 70% growth for fiscal 2028. Nvidia also outlined more than US$500b of compute financing agreements and plans with partners including Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR to mobilize over US$500b of third party capital for AI infrastructure over time, agreed to acquire open source AI platform Hugging Face for about US$12.9b, and is in talks to invest up to US$10b in Anthropic while pursuing further investments in AI firms including Perplexity and Decart AI.

Palantir Technologies and Armada announced a partnership to deliver sovereign AI on infrastructure manufactured in the United States and allied nations, with Palantir naming Armada its Inaugural Certified Modular Data Center Partner. The joint offering combines Palantir's Sovereign AI Operating System with Armada's infrastructure layer: Galleon modular data centers, the Armada Platform that keeps every deployment under the customer's control, and the Sovereign AI Grid that connects deployments into a resilient distributed system. Palantir will validate and integrate its Sovereign AI Operating System, built on AIP, Ontology, Foundry and Apollo, on Armada's Galleon modular data centers, extending the Palantir Sovereign AI OS Reference Architecture developed with NVIDIA to a ruggedized, modular data center. The Armada Platform distills the latest open-source models, including NVIDIA Nemotron, for fine-tuning and inference on infrastructure the customer owns and controls, without reliance on any external cloud, including any operated by Armada, and can operate fully air-gapped where the mission requires it. Enterprises and governments gain the ability to run open-weight models on compute, data, and physical infrastructure they own and control outright, deployed in months rather than years.

PaleBlueDot AI has closed a $200 million Series C financing led by ComputeCore at a valuation of $3.2 billion. The round follows the Silicon Valley company's $150 million Series B announced in January, with existing shareholder B Capital participating alongside other global investors. Founded in 2024 and headquartered in Palo Alto, PaleBlueDot AI operates a Super Intelligence Infrastructure Platform combining self-owned GPU clusters, a GPU marketplace and serverless inference, and its B300 cluster in Japan recently earned NVIDIA Exemplar Cloud status. As of the end of September 2026, the company had signed over $5 billion in customer contracts, with customers from the U.S. and Japan together accounting for more than half of monthly revenue. Proceeds from the Series C will fund additional Super Intelligence compute capacity, and CEO Stephen Watts said the company will broaden its customer base with a focus on frontier labs, Neolabs and enterprises in the U.S. while investing in its full-stack and go-to-market teams.

Cowboy Space Corporation launched Reason-1, its first satellite, on a mission to demonstrate the first laser power beaming from orbit to Earth. The satellite will collect solar energy in space and transmit it to a ground receiver with a kilowatt-class laser, a foundational step toward the company's planned orbital data centers. Cowboy designed, built and tested Reason-1's laser systems, large-aperture optical telescope and beam-steering architecture, and the mission will also provide the first in-orbit test of optical and thermal technologies central to its compute plans. The company, founded by Robinhood co-founder Baiju Bhatt and formerly known as Aetherflux, is developing a purpose-built rocket whose upper stage is designed to remain in orbit as a 1-megawatt data center, and is collaborating with NVIDIA to deploy NVIDIA Space-1 Vera Rubin Modules in low Earth orbit. Multi-year support from the Operational Energy Capability Improvement Fund enabled hiring of early personnel, procurement of custom components and design work on the laser and optical payloads, and Reason-2, slated for launch in 2027, will share many of Reason-1's optical components and demonstrate optical data transmission from space to Earth at near-record rates.

Micron delivered a blowout quarter, beating sales and profit forecasts on explosive demand from the AI boom, with guidance also coming in strong except for margin comments on the earnings call that may be causing a muted market reaction. The memory chip maker added about $43 billion in sales in the most recent quarter compared to the year ago quarter, and more than $13 billion in sales from the quarter reported just three months ago, with operating margins exploding in every single business segment both year over year and quarter over quarter. On the earnings call, Micron's CFO said the company expects price increases to moderate eventually, with a better mix of products worked based on technology and product leadership, and that market conditions would remain tight and supportive through 2028. Separately, Mattel CEO Ynon Kreiz is stepping down to become co-CEO of the merged Paramount and Warner Bros, a company that has said it may need to cut over $6 billion in costs. BFA's Vivek Arya raised his total addressable market outlook for AI in 2030 to about $2.2 trillion, up from about $1.8 trillion previously, naming Nvidia, Intel, Marvell, Micron and Lam Research among his top picks on the play.

Barclays said fresh data shared by Nvidia points to at least $30 billion of potential upside to the chipmaker's revenue from the top five cloud providers in both 2026 and 2027. Analyst Tom O'Malley noted that Nvidia disclosed its share of IT capital spending across the five largest cloud service providers in recent years, through the second quarter of 2026, along with an estimate of 44% for 2027. Using Barclays' internet team's assumption that cloud capital spending reaches about $1.1 trillion by 2027, with 80% going to IT, O'Malley calculated hyperscaler revenue of $237 billion in 2026 and $401 billion in 2027, above Barclays' current forecasts of $206 billion and $370 billion. In an upside scenario where historical ratios hold, he sees revenue reaching $246 billion and $417 billion in those years. O'Malley also noted that Nvidia's hyperscaler revenue includes SpaceX while the top five cloud provider figure does not, implying an even larger total, and said sentiment on the name can continue to improve amid solid numbers upside, increased buybacks and the Hugging Face acquisition.

La Rosa Holdings Corp. announced it acquired latest-generation NVIDIA B300 GPUs and leased those assets back under a long-term lease expected to generate recurring, long-term cash flows, advancing the company's previously announced transition into the artificial intelligence infrastructure sector. As part of that broader strategic transition, the company said it intends to evaluate strategic alternatives for its real estate operations, including a potential divestiture of its existing real estate businesses, which management believes could further accelerate the shift toward AI infrastructure. La Rosa also announced that Nicholas Adler has been appointed Chief Executive Officer and interim Chief Financial Officer effective October 1, 2026; Adler has served as Chairman of the Board since December 2025, while founder and former CEO Joe La Rosa has stepped down to lead the real estate business and will remain a member of the Board of Directors. The company said it intends to pursue additional opportunities including strategic partnerships and investments to expand its presence in the AI ecosystem, and may also pursue opportunities in alternative high-growth sectors. La Rosa added that it intends to change its corporate name and Nasdaq ticker, with further updates to come as the Board determines appropriate.

CoreWeave, Inc. CRWV is expanding its AI cloud ecosystem through the launch of the CoreWeave Partner Network and a new customer deployment with Ennoble Care. The Partner Network brings together technology integrations validated on CoreWeave Cloud under production conditions, including collaborations with VAST Data, CrowdStrike, Reflection and ClickHouse, among others, covering infrastructure, data services, software, security, models and inference. The network is also expanding into tools used by AI agents, starting with search, with Exa, Parallel Web Systems and You.com joining to give agents built on CoreWeave access to a shared search layer through a single integration. Separately, Ennoble Care selected CoreWeave to support clinical AI inference workloads across its home-based care network, deploying NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition nodes through CoreWeave Kubernetes Service with reserved GPU capacity, managed Kubernetes, hardware-enforced isolation, zero-trust controls and direct access to CoreWeave specialists. CoreWeave stated that CKS provides eight to 10 times faster container spin-up times than a general-purpose cloud alternative, and highlighted its MLPerf inference and training results along with three consecutive Platinum rankings in SemiAnalysis ClusterMAX.

Singapore-founded neocloud Aolani announced a partnership with Karman, formerly known as Utilidata, to squeeze more AI compute out of its existing power supply through advanced power orchestration. Under the deal, Aolani will integrate the Karman platform, a dynamic power orchestration system built on a custom NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano that combines high-resolution metrology with local processing and AI, into its infrastructure stack to measure and dynamically allocate available power across high-density GPU workloads and manage rack-level energy consumption in real time. The joint proof of concept will be deployed on the NVIDIA Blackwell Platform. Karman's platform has already unlocked 33% more compute capacity from existing power infrastructure at its first commercial deployment in North America, potentially translating into a $20M increase in revenue per 1 MW, and the company says it increases tokens per watt by 50% by unlocking stranded power. Aolani CEO Nicholas Chia said the partnership improves the economics of AI workloads and lets customers scale without waiting on the grid, while Karman CEO Josh Brumberger said the two will demonstrate how the platform can fully utilize power already available to data center operators and cloud providers.

InnovestX Securities has unveiled its investment strategy for the fourth quarter of 2026, saying investors need to exercise greater caution amid rising interest rates and high oil prices, which are pressuring inflation, bond yields, and foreign fund flows. The firm set a target for Thailand's benchmark stock index in 2027 at 1,715 points and said the 1,550 level is starting to look attractive for accumulation. It named five top picks: AMATA, CENTEL, CRC, KTB, and PR9. Suthichai Kumworachai, Head of Investment Strategy & Research, said the prolonged conflict between the United States and Iran creates a chain of risk running from oil prices to inflation, the direction of interest rates, financing costs, and the baht. Dr. Piyasak Manasant, Head of Economic Research, kept his forecast for Thai economic growth in 2026 and 2027 at 2.0% while raising his average oil price assumptions for 2026 and 2027 to 90 and 80 US dollars per barrel, respectively. Sitthichai Duangrattanachaya, Head of Investment Strategy, said earnings per share for the Thai stock market have been continuously revised upward, particularly from the energy sector. For overseas investment, he recommended stocks that benefit from AI, namely Google, Amazon, Nvidia, Tencent, and Alibaba, while in the semiconductor group he highlighted Lumentum, Naura, SMIC, and Biren. He also advised diversifying into defensive and dividend stocks. Joranapong Rattanasopha, Head of Investment Product Specialist, recommended the M-SCHD fund, which invests through the Schwab U.S. Dividend Equity ETF. SCHD currently has less than 10% exposure to technology stocks, compared with nearly 40% for the S&P 500 index, and the correlation between SCHD and the S&P 500 has fallen to about 0.3, the lowest level since the fund was established in 2011.

Total S&P 500 earnings in the third quarter are currently expected to increase 24.1% from the same period last year on 11.6% higher revenues, according to Zacks Director of Research Sheraz Mian, putting the index on track for its 8th straight quarter of double-digit earnings growth. Fourteen of the 16 Zacks sectors are expected to post positive earnings growth, with six producing double-digit growth, the most broad-based performance in recent times; only Conglomerates, down 35.2%, and Consumer Staples, down 0.1%, are expected to see lower earnings. The double-digit growth sectors are Aerospace at 159.7%, Energy at 111.8%, Tech at 42.1%, Basic Materials at 29.7%, Transportation at 14.4%, and Industrial Products at 13.1%. Micron, Nvidia and Alphabet remain material contributors to the Tech sector's growth picture, and excluding those three names, Q3 earnings for the rest of the Tech sector would be 20.6% instead of 42.1%. Within Tech, the Zacks Semiconductor industry is expected to enjoy 85.5% earnings growth in 2026 Q3 on 62.8% revenue growth, following 110.1% and 96% earnings growth in each of the preceding two periods, and the Tech sector's 42.1% growth drops to 29.6% once the semiconductor contribution is excluded. Since the start of Q3, the Energy sector has enjoyed the most pronounced upgrade to its earnings outlook, reflecting elevated oil prices as a result of the Persian Gulf situation, with Aerospace, Industrial Products, Tech, Autos, Transportation, Finance and Utilities also seeing positive estimate revisions.

Tencent, China's internet giant, has signed a five-year agreement to lease about 100,000 advanced AI chips from Oracle for $7 billion, in a push to accelerate its AI development and sharpen its competitive edge. The Financial Times reported on October 1, citing two sources, that Tencent will lease the chips from several Oracle data centers in Southeast Asia. The deal is Tencent's largest overseas leasing contract and gives the company access to roughly 100,000 advanced chips that are not sold in China. Tencent must pay about 30% of the deal's value upfront, and the lease costs weighed on Tencent's free cash flow in its second-quarter results. Under U.S. regulations, Chinese technology companies cannot buy advanced AI chips directly, but they can still lease such chips from abroad, giving them access to advanced Nvidia chips that are generally unavailable in China. Meanwhile, Tencent's latest Hunyuan model has improved markedly in recent months and is seen as narrowing the gap with leading Chinese AI models such as DeepSeek and Alibaba Group Holding.

CoreWeave unveiled Forge, a unified AI development environment, at its Fully Connected AI cloud conference. The company also introduced the CoreWeave Partner Network, featuring validated technology integrations aimed at enterprise and advanced AI users, and expanded its compute lineup by adding the NVIDIA Vera CPU to support emerging AI agent workloads. CoreWeave runs cloud infrastructure for AI developers and enterprises, and the launch sequence signals how the US-based provider is trying to pull more of the AI build process onto its own stack. The company said the clearest test of the strategy will be future disclosures tying Forge and the Partner Network to measurable backlog or workload share, such as updated figures on how much of its contracted AI capacity is running through Forge-driven workflows in quarterly updates through 2027.

GMI Cloud has raised $668 million in new financing, comprising $223 million in equity for its Series B round and a $445 million credit facility led by CTBC. The Series B was led by ARCHIV, a San Francisco investment firm specializing in AI and robotics, with participation from NVIDIA and Asia-Pacific investors including DSC Investment, Trend Micro, KB Investment, Kyobo Life and KT Corporation. The growth capital will fund capacity expansion in the United States, Taiwan and the rest of APAC, building on the company's Taiwan AI Factory and its Japan sovereign AI initiative, and will also support its inference services and strategic hiring. GMI Cloud said its contracted ARR has reached more than 9x its year-end 2025 level, while live ARR in production has grown more than 4.5x over the same period, and its inference platform now processes approximately 4 trillion tokens per week. Customers include Fireworks, Higgsfield, Nous Research, OpenRouter, Reflection, Cartesia, Trend Micro and Utopai Studios.