이미지: CNBC Technology · METAL LAB 편집
Summary
- NVIDIA posted its fourth straight quarter of accelerating revenue growth in fiscal Q2, and Amazon agreed to buy an additional 2 million NVIDIA GPUs for 2027-2028 even as it develops its own AI chips
- Salesforce beat estimates on both revenue and guidance, saying 9 of the top 10 AI companies use its products and that related spending was up 435% year over year
- CrowdStrike's revenue also grew 26%, showing demand for AI-driven security is rising, and all three major indexes — the Nasdaq, S&P 500, and Dow — closed higher, with the Dow posting its first weekly gain in three weeks
What happened
NVIDIA, Salesforce, and CrowdStrike all beat market expectations with their earnings this week, sending the Nasdaq Composite up 0.9%, the S&P 500 up 0.5%, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average up 0.5%. The Dow closed higher for the week for the first time in three weeks. Most of the gains came on Thursday, when the ripple effects of NVIDIA's earnings report pushed all three indexes to their best single day since August 4.
NVIDIA extended its streak to four straight quarters of accelerating revenue growth in its fiscal Q2 results, and its guidance for the next fiscal quarter came in well above market expectations. During the earnings call, the company revealed that Amazon has agreed to buy an additional 2 million NVIDIA GPUs for 2027 and 2028, even as it continues developing its own AI chips. CEO Jensen Huang said the payback period on the investment "is now under a year."
The same day, Salesforce beat expectations on both revenue and guidance, and CEO Marc Benioff pushed back forcefully against concerns that AI would cannibalize the software industry. He said 9 of the top 10 AI companies use Salesforce products, and that their related spending jumped 435% year over year. Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike also reported 26% revenue growth, driven by rising demand for defense against AI-powered attacks.
What this means
Investors have spent much of this year worried about a zero-sum scenario in AI spending, where gains would ultimately flow to either hardware or software companies, but not both. The logic was that training and running AI models requires GPUs from companies like NVIDIA, and that cost would eat into software companies' profitability. This week's earnings told a different story: NVIDIA kept selling chips, while Salesforce and CrowdStrike both saw their revenue grow because of AI, not despite it.
On the 26th, Salesforce expanded its partnership with Anthropic, unveiling "Claudeforce" — an integration that lets Claude pull customer data from within Salesforce to handle sales tasks like drafting emails and updating records. The plugin ships with 37 prebuilt sales-task skills, and a preview for pilot customers is set to begin in September. Salesforce's stake in Anthropic generated $2.6 billion in unrealized gains in the quarter alone, underscoring just how intertwined the two companies' interests have become.
What's next
NVIDIA CFO Colette Kress said the main driver of growth this quarter wasn't hyperscalers like Amazon and Google, but emerging cloud providers like CoreWeave and Nebius, along with enterprise customers more broadly. That suggests AI infrastructure spending is spreading beyond a handful of Big Tech companies to a wider customer base. A day after CrowdStrike's earnings, more than 100 companies and organizations signed a joint letter pledging to strengthen cybersecurity defenses for the AI era. Whether this pattern of hardware and software rising together continues will become clearer with next quarter's earnings.
Comments