Markets
markets
Luke Kawa
8/26/25

Nvidia isn’t getting much credit for a recovery in its China business

Nvidia has talked a ton about the importance of accessing the Chinese AI market — especially after effectively getting locked out after export restrictions were enacted in mid-April.

That talk seemingly paid off: the chip designer has regained the ability to send its H20 chips to the world’s second-largest economy in exchange for sending 15% of revenues generated from those sales to the US government.

Already, those forgone sales have caused full-year revenues to be $10.5 billion lower than they otherwise would have, per Nvidia’s management, but it doesn’t seem like the company is being given much credit for this renewed access.

On the one hand, it appears analysts never fully incorporated a full loss of its H20 business into their forecasts. Or more likely, they did, but thought it would be outweighed by booming demand for AI chips elsewhere. Nvidia’s fiscal year sales estimates never went down by anything close to $10 billion after that export ban was put in place.

But despite delivering a Q1 sales beat and the investing world receiving reassurances from every hyperscaler that the AI boom is still going strong, Nvidia’s fiscal year sales estimates only recently surpassed where they were on April 15, right before export restrictions on the H20 came to light.

So some combination of...

...are all seemingly at play here.

It’s noteworthy that despite being much, much smaller than the $4 trillion chip designer, AMD’s full-year sales estimates are up by more than Nvidia’s since those export restrictions were initially enacted in mid-April. Of course, that doesn’t just reflect any enthusiasm over AMD’s sales to China, but also optimism over the prospects for AMD’s new AI chip.

AMD, for its part, did not include any revenues from sales to China in its most recent quarterly guidance, but management had a good reason: export licenses for its MI308s hadn’t been granted at the time.

That’s not the case for Jensen Huang and co. as Wednesday’s much anticipated earnings report and conference call await.

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markets
Luke Kawa
35m

Why Apple usually falls on a new iPhone launch

You can only shock the world so many times, and a thinner phone with a better camera isn’t always going to cut it.

That, in short, is why Apple has tended to go down on days when it’s introduced a new iPhone to the world, as this great chart from Bespoke Investment Group shows:

Bespoke iPhone announcement Apple performance
Source: Bespoke Investment Group

On average, the tech giant falls 0.4% on the release date and is negative more than 70% of the time, perhaps a useful tidbit on this, the day of the iPhone 17 launch.

One more thing....

A potentially complicating factor to the aforementioned data is that Apple has often done quite well in the six months leading up to a new iPhone announcement, roughly 5 percentage points better than its typical six-month return, as shown above. That’s not the case this time, with Apple shares up about 5% over the past six months compared to a typical near 20% advance in the prelude to a new iPhone drop.

So it’s not like expectations about how big of a catalyst this can be for the company are sky-high and due for a sharp retrenchment, especially given Apple’s relatively lackluster progress in developing AI capabilities relative to its megacap tech peers. But a seemingly low bar to clear hasn’t necessarily been a boon for the company on the big day, either.

In any event, staring too closely at the minutiae of all this may be missing the forest for the trees.

“While this info may be helpful to traders, we doubt it’s something that long-term shareholders are too worried about given the huge compounding returns the stock has provided during the iPhone era,” Bespoke wrote.

Luke Kawa
2h
Negative US payroll revisions as bad as 2009 add to fears of consumer spending slowdown

Reconciling the spending versus jobs trends is the key question for US economic analysts.

Yellow traffic light against an office building
markets
Matt Phillips
3h

Planet Labs slips after big post-earnings gain

Smallish midcap satellite imagery and data company Planet Labs is giving back a chunk of the nearly 50% gain it racked up after posting earnings early Monday.

No tears, though: the shares, which seem to have a fairly robust retail following, are still up roughly 340% over the past 12 months.

Retail darling Planet Labs soars on earnings pop for second straight quarter

Retail darling Planet Labs soars on earnings pop for second straight quarter
markets
Luke Kawa
4h

CoreWeave soars as Microsoft’s deal with Nebius shows unrelenting demand for AI compute

CoreWeave is soaring as Microsoft’s $17.4 billion deal with Nebius shows the immense value and continued demand for all parts of the AI data center ecosystem.

One additional reason for CoreWeave’s jump may be that its pending acquisition of AI data center infrastructure company Core Scientific looks like a great deal compared to Microsoft’s renting of (more broad and advanced) AI data center capacity from Nebius.

CoreWeave’s all-stock deal to buy Core Scientific was initially valued at ~$9 billion, but with the subsequent decline in its shares, it’s worth about 40% less. And in purchasing Core Scientific, CoreWeave is saving $10 billion in what it would have paid the company to lease data center infrastructure over the next 12 years.

As it stands, Microsoft is getting about 300 megawatts in data center power capacity from Nebius, while Core Scientific boasts that its footprint is in excess of 1,300 megawatts. So, on the surface, it looks like an absolute steal for CoreWeave.

But again, this is not an apples-to-apples comparison; not all access to AI computing infrastructure is created equal.

There are differences in the type of AI infrastructure provided by the two: Nebius owns GPUs, while Core Scientific doesn’t, and what it provides in the software layer isn’t offered by Core Scientific as a stand-alone entity. This is the difference between the “full stack” approach (Nebius) and a “colocation” approach (Core Scientific).

That being said, CoreWeave’s acquisition of Core Scientific, once completed, will make the combined entity’s business model look more like Nebius’ model, which, as Microsoft just told us, is something that top hyperscalers are willing to pay a pretty penny for.

markets
J. Edward Moreno
5h

UNH rises after preliminary data shows most Medicare Advantage enrollees will be on more lucrative, top-rated plans

UnitedHealth rose more than 4% in premarket trading on Tuesday after the company disclosed that it expects the majority of its Medicare Advantage enrollees will be on plans rated four stars or higher in 2026.

Though the data is only preliminary, about 78% of UNH’s Medicare Advantage members are in plans rated four stars or higher, the company said in a regulatory filing Tuesday morning. On Monday, the company said it plans to reiterate its full-year guidance when it meets with investors this week.

Insurance companies that provide government-sponsored plans, like Medicare Advantage, have struggled this year amid unexpected rising costs. Plans that are rated four stars or higher earn bonus payments and are typically more lucrative for healthcare insurance providers.

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