Daily: Nvidia doubles profit yoy to $60B

Highlights

1. Nvidia doubles profit. Nvidia posts blockbuster earnings, while its stock dipped (-2%) and rose (+5% in after-hours trading). Nvidia’s quarterly project doubled yoy to almost US$60 billion, beating investor expectations. The AI leader still sees room for growth for the coming year, even though the company has seen profits skyrocket in recent years. Amazon will buy 2 million Nvidia chips in the next 2 years, in a sign that Nvidia’s chips still offer higher performance than Amazon’s in-house chips.

2. Anthropic rent Nscale compute. Anthropic will lease compute from Nscale for US$45 billion. Nscale will be stocked with Nvidia’s next-gen Rubin chips and will come online next year. This comes amid a string of deals Anthropic signed with firms to lease compute, given insatiable demand for Anthropic’s AI model, Claude.

3. YMTC to IPO. YMTC expects to IPO shortly to raise an estimated US$5 billion. The Chinese storage chipmaker said it aims to be the world’s largest NAND flash manufacturer in the world, despite it currently trailing behind behemoths like Samsung and SK Hynix.

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2.1

NYT (08/26): Nvidia’s Profit Doubles to $59.69 Billion Thanks to A.I. Spending

Silicon Valley’s artificial intelligence spending spree may have unsettled Wall Street, but the chipmaker Nvidia is still cashing in on sales to the biggest technology companies.

Nvidia’s profit for the quarter that ended in July more than doubled from a year earlier to $59.69 billion, the company said on Wednesday. Revenue also more than doubled, to $96.22 billion. Just three years ago, Nvidia’s quarterly profit was $6.2 billion.

The results topped expectations. Wall Street analysts had predicted quarterly profit of $50.94 billion on revenue of $91.96 billion, according to FactSet. Nvidia’s share price was down about 1 percent in early after-hours trading on Wednesday.

2.2

Bloomberg (08/27): Nvidia Predicts AI-Fueled Sales Surge Will Extend Into 2028

Nvidia Corp., the chipmaker at the heart of the artificial intelligence boom, gave a bullish sales outlook for fiscal 2028, easing concerns that AI spending is poised to lose momentum.

“We expect to grow revenue by approximately 70% in fiscal 2028,” Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress said during a post-earnings conference call. Analysts have projected a rise of about 45% for that year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

2.3

Bloomberg (08/27): Amazon to Buy 2 Million Nvidia Chips for Data Center Build-Out

Amazon.com Inc. will add an additional 2 million Nvidia Corp. graphics processing units to its data center fleet in the next two years, a sign that the company remains committed to the AI hardware leader’s products despite its own competitive chipmaking efforts.

The two companies said on Wednesday that Amazon would deploy some 2 million of Nvidia’s high-end chips, which are designed to train and run artificial intelligence models, in 2027 and 2028. That’s in addition to the 1 million Nvidia chips Amazon in March said that it would be installing in Amazon Web Services data centers, beginning this year.

The chips in the latest deal include Nvidia Blackwell Ultra, Rubin and Rubin Ultra GPUs. Those products will likely carry a list price of at least tens of thousands of dollars a unit, though big customers can get discounts. Amazon and Nvidia didn’t announce financial terms of their latest deal.

2.4

Bloomberg (08/27): Anthropic to Pay Nscale $45 Billion for AI Computing Power

Anthropic PBC has agreed to spend $45 billion to rent AI cloud computing power from Nscale’s flagship data center development in West Virginia, the latest move in an effort to secure capacity for its expanding business in advance of going public.

Nscale will use Nvidia Corp.’s Vera Rubin chips, which will start to come online late next year, to meet Anthropic’s needs, according to people familiar with the agreement. The commitment is over six years, and represents about 460 megawatts of power, said the people, who asked not to be named discussing a private deal. That amount of electricity is enough for about 345,000 US homes at any one time.

2.5

Nikkei (08/27): Kioxia to invest $6.3bn in new memory production facility in Japan

Memory chip maker Kioxia Holdings plans to build a new production facility at its plant in northern Japan, with investment in the project expected to top 1 trillion yen ($6.27 billion), Nikkei has learned.

2.6

Chosun Ilbo (08/26): Chinese Semiconductor ETFs Plunge as AI Investment Fervor Cools

The fervor surrounding Chinese semiconductor investments, which surged following the listing of ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT), the country’s largest DRAM manufacturer, is cooling. Exchange-traded funds (ETFs) focused on Chinese AI infrastructure and semiconductor ecosystems have plummeted over 15% in the past month. Analysts attribute the decline to profit-taking amid debates over the sustainability of AI investments, concerns over overvaluation, and short-term supply-demand imbalances.

3.1

FT (08/26): China’s YMTC aims to overtake Samsung and SK Hynix in flash memory race

YMTC aims to overtake Samsung and SK Hynix to become the world’s largest Nand flash memory producer as the Chinese company gears up for a stock market listing.

The Wuhan-based group told investors and stakeholders in recent IPO preparation meetings that it wants to take the global Nand crown by as soon as the end of 2027, according to two people with knowledge of the matter.

Last week, YMTC filed for an IPO to raise Rmb33bn ($5bn), mostly to upgrade production facilities as well as for research and development, according to a prospectus published on the Shanghai Stock Exchange website.

3.2

Korean Herald (08/26): China’s CXMT joins SK hynix in race to supply LPDDR6 to Xiaomi

China’s largest memory maker CXMT has emerged as a prospective LPDDR6 supplier for Xiaomi’s new Xring O3 processor, less than a month after SK hynix was reported as Xiaomi’s expected first supplier of the same next-generation mobile memory.

3.3

Chosun Ilbo (08/26): LG CNS Applies Direct-to-Chip Cooling for NVIDIA’s Vera Rubin

LG CNS, in collaboration with Naver Cloud, is building next-generation liquid cooling infrastructure at the Samsong Data Center in Goyang City, Gyeonggi Province.

LG CNS announced on August 26 that it will apply Direct-to-Chip (DTC) cooling, one of the liquid cooling methods, to the Samsong Data Center. DTC is a method that attaches a cooling plate through which coolant flows to the GPU to absorb heat. By utilizing liquid, which has higher heat transfer efficiency than air, it can effectively control the heat generated by high-density GPU servers.

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Cover Photo by Mariia Berezovsky on Unsplash