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Greetings!
We’re heading into the last full workweek before Thanksgiving and plenty is going on. A short time ago, bets on prediction market Polymarket were giving an 88% chance that Google would release its much-anticipated Gemini 3 AI model this week. Google CEO Sundar Pichai on Friday fueled the speculation with this cryptic X post. Meanwhile, Microsoft holds its Ignite developer conference in San Francisco this week (more on that, see below).
But the focus is on Nvidia. On Wednesday, the AI chip behemoth reports its latest quarterly results, always a big event for Wall Street and tech. After weeks of debate about the rising costs of AI development, and signs that Nvidia rivals such as AMD and Broadcom are making headway in the AI chip market, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang gets his chance to remind everyone just how dominant Nvidia remains.
Nvidia projected in August that its October-quarter revenues would reach $54 billion, about 54% higher than a year earlier. That compares to the $9.2 billion revenue number reported earlier this month by Nvidia’s distant rival, AMD, for its September-ending quarter. AMD’s revenue was up 36% on the year-earlier period, so it is growing. But it is years behind Nvidia, whose growth has exploded since 2023. That’s when Nvidia’s revenues were around where AMD’s are now, as the chart below shows. It would be hard to find another company whose ascent has been so steady and so spectacular.
And all evidence suggests that Nvidia’s ramp-up is likely to continue—at least for the near term. At Nvidia’s GTC event in Washington in late October, Huang surprised Wall Street analysts when he said the company already had sales commitments for its new Blackwell and upcoming Rubin chips totaling $500 billion. Some of that has been recorded since the start of calendar 2025, but most will show up through 2026. To put that number into context, Nvidia reported revenue of $130 billion in the year to January 2025, and analysts expect it to generate $207 billion in the year ending this coming January, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence.
Not that Jensen Huang is content with this state of affairs: His frequent warnings about the threat China poses in AI—meant to underline why Nvidia should be allowed to sell its stuff to that country—have spotlighted the impact of Nvidia losing that market. It’s remarkable that the company has been able to report 50%-plus growth despite that loss, as our recent story (and Huang’s follow-up comments) noted. We expect Huang to talk more about China, as well as perhaps Nvidia’s spate of investments in potential customers, on the Wednesday call. Despite the various threats hovering over the company, the overall tone is likely to be triumphant as always.
Microsoft Ignites
Microsoft’s Ignite developer conference kicks off at San Francisco’s Moscone Center on Tuesday. Speakers include Judson Althoff, recently promoted to be CEO of Microsoft’s commercial business, as well as Scott Guthrie, a top executive in the company’s cloud and AI group.
My colleague Aaron Holmes has heard Microsoft may have announcements about additional advanced features in its Office software and Copilot AI service that are powered by either Anthropic or OpenAI, building on what the company recently announced.
In Other News
• Apple’s succession plans for its next chief executive have accelerated, with its board and senior executives preparing for current CEO Tim Cook to step down potentially next year, according to the Financial Times.
• Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway purchased shares in Google parent Alphabet worth $4.3 billion at the end of the third quarter, a vote of confidence in the search giant after its shares have surged this year.
• XAI plans to release its next-generation Grok 5 AI model in the first three months of next year, CEO Elon Musk said on Friday. That’s later than a deadline he had previously set of releasing it by the end of 2025.
• OpenAI said Friday it has begun piloting group chat capabilities in ChatGPT for people in Japan, New Zealand, South Korea and Taiwan. The move confirms The Information’s report from June about the feature.
• Walmart CEO Doug McMillon will retire in January, the company said Friday. He’ll be succeeded by John Furner, currently CEO of its U.S. business.
• Shares of StubHub plunged 22% on Friday, the day after the ticketing company reported its first earnings result as a public company. The stock is now trading 38% below its IPO price, just two months after its debut.
Friday on The Information’s TITV
Check out our latest episode of TITV in which Akash speaks with a former Twitter CEO, Parag Agrawal, about his new AI company, and separately about his thoughts on AI-generated content.
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