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Roula Khalaf, editor-in-chief of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Nvidia earnings are officially a crossover spectacle. Market strategists say the quarterly event for the semiconductor darling now rivals U.S. unemployment reporting day as a harbinger of broader economic health and animal spirits. As per instructions, an Nvidia earnings watch party was set for Thursday afternoon at a Manhattan sports bar and advertised on social media.

The group shouldn’t have been disappointed by the actual results. Overall, Nvidia’s second-quarter revenue of $30 billion was up 122 percent from a year ago. And within its core data center division, revenue was up 154 ​​percent. The latter growth was muted from 426 percent in the previous quarter.

Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia, was still a big believer in this system. He said that the AI ​​revolution was still in its infancy and that shipments of Nvidia’s next-generation chip, Blackwell, would increase in the coming months due to supply chain issues.

But perhaps surprisingly, Nvidia’s shares fell, albeit by an unremarkable 7 percent in after-hours trading. It was all, for lack of a better word, dull, even if Nvidia’s stock value of $2.9 trillion is nearly three times that of Berkshire Hathaway, which joined the trillion-dollar club on Wednesday.

If investors were looking for real fireworks in the AI ​​trade, they were to be found elsewhere this week. Super Micro, a maker of equipment for AI data centers, postponed its $10,000 filing. Short seller Hindenburg Research published a report focused on its accounting practices. Shares of Super Micro have fallen 62 percent from their March peak, a $40 billion market cap loss for the once-unknown company.

With expected fiscal year revenue of around $120 billion, Nvidia’s enterprise value/sales multiple is still around 24x (for a hardware company generating 75 percent gross margins). The company’s net cash balance has reached $25 billion. Its new share repurchase authorization of a hefty $50 billion still reflects less than 2 percent of its market cap.

In private markets, investment is pouring in to find the next Nvidia, whose chips have even more advanced processing capabilities. But for the incumbent, even if it still generates more than $10 billion in quarterly revenue, the wow factor may fade even if the underlying business doesn’t.

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