이미지: Fortune · METAL LAB 편집
Summary
- On Nvidia's Q2 earnings call, an analyst asked Jensen Huang to rank the company's supply constraints, and he answered with a story about his own dinner plans
- Nvidia reported $96.2 billion in Q2 revenue and guided for 70% growth next year (versus analysts' 44% estimate), while saying current supply covers only 70% of demand
- There's a real track record behind the joke: stocks of companies tied to executives who've dined with Huang — from SK and LG's chairmen to Samsung and Hyundai leadership — have jumped sharply afterward
On Nvidia's Q2 earnings call, a Goldman Sachs analyst asked Jensen Huang to rank the company's supply bottlenecks in order of severity. Instead of talking chips, the CEO brought up his dinner plans. "One of the most fun things is figuring out who I had dinner with," he said, "because the next day, that person's stock doubles." It landed as a joke, but it's also a pattern that's played out for real several times in recent years.
The earnings call came as Nvidia reported $96.2 billion in Q2 revenue, well above the analyst consensus of $92.2 billion. The company also guided for 70% revenue growth next fiscal year, far exceeding the market's 44% forecast. On the back of that guidance, Nvidia shares jumped more than 4% in after-hours trading.
What the analyst was really asking
The Goldman Sachs analyst wanted to know which factor was holding back Nvidia's growth the most: data center power, server rack (shell) supply, memory pricing, or foundry wafer availability. Huang opened by saying, "I could tell you something fun, but I won't," then added: "The entire supply chain is under pressure. Everyone is sprinting flat out, and the fact that capacity keeps expanding works in our favor." CFO Colette Kress confirmed that the $5 trillion company remains seriously supply-constrained.
Huang did offer one concrete figure during the call: Nvidia can currently meet only about 70% of customer demand, and actual demand is "much higher" than that. He added that he doesn't want to disappoint customers, but scaling up capacity further will require help from the entire supply chain.
When dinner actually moved stocks
Huang is known for eating out wherever he travels. He's been spotted trying street food, tipping waitstaff, and posing for photos with fans gathered outside restaurants — there's even a blog dedicated to tracking his meals. But several of these dinners have coincided with real market moves.
| Timing | Dinner companions | Stocks in focus | Price move |
|---|---|---|---|
| June 2026 | SK Chairman Chey Taewon, LG Chairman Koo Kwangmo, Naver founder Lee Haejin (Korean BBQ restaurant, Seoul) | LG | +30% |
| June 2026 | Following the same gathering | Listed LG affiliates | +17–29% |
| October 2025 | Samsung Electronics Chairman Lee Jaeyong, Hyundai Motor Chairman Chung Euisun (fried chicken and beer) | CherryBro, Kyochon F&B, Neuromeka | Rose (figures undisclosed) |
| 2024 | Larry Ellison and Elon Musk (Nobu Palo Alto, sashimi) | — | Undisclosed |
In June 2026, Huang visited Korea and shared Korean BBQ — wrapping meat in perilla leaves — with SK Chairman Chey Taewon, LG Chairman Koo Kwangmo, and Naver founder Lee Haejin at a restaurant whose name translates roughly to "Hey, bro, it's me." Before the meeting was even widely reported, LG's stock jumped 30%, and listed affiliates rose 17–29%. In October 2025, after Huang shared fried chicken and beer with Samsung Chairman Lee Jaeyong and Hyundai Motor Chairman Chung Euisun, shares of CherryBro, Kyochon F&B, and chicken-cooking robot maker Neuromeka all moved together, according to Bloomberg.
Back in 2024, Oracle founder Larry Ellison invited Huang to Nobu Palo Alto along with Elon Musk, where the two reportedly pressed him to sell them more GPUs. Ellison later described the dinner as "Oracle—me and Elon begging Jensen for GPUs". He said the pitch worked.
Editor's take
What makes this episode worth a second look isn't the joke itself but the problem it points to. The analyst asked Huang to rank the bottlenecks — data center power, server racks, memory, foundry capacity — in order. He refused to rank them, saying instead that everything is tight at once. That's actually a heavier answer than it sounds. If there were a single bottleneck, you could fix it with targeted investment. But if the entire supply chain is maxed out simultaneously, clearing one constraint just pushes the problem to the next one.
Anyone who's watched the semiconductor industry for a while will recognize this pattern. A generation ago, a single component shortage — a foundry expansion or a memory shortfall — would send just one stock spiking. The picture around Nvidia today is different. Data center power grids, server chassis, HBM memory, and TSMC wafer capacity are all bottlenecked in sequence, which is why the market keeps looking for hints in the CEO's travel schedule rather than in official earnings reports. That's exactly why stocks like LG's or CherryBro's moved before any formal supply agreement was even announced.
For listed Korean companies, this isn't something to laugh off. When just a rumor of a dinner with Nvidia's CEO can send an entire group's stock prices double digits in a single day, it points to a serious information gap — and to short-term trading that's eager to exploit it. IR teams would be smart to have a plan in place for how to respond to disclosure requirements when rumor-driven spikes like this happen. And investors should be careful not to mistake a dinner photo for an actual earnings signal.
In the coming weeks, we're likely to see real news about Nvidia's supply expansion — new foundry lines coming online, power agreements getting signed. Until then, expect the market to keep watching which city, which restaurant, and who Huang is having dinner with.
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