NEW YORK — Nvidia has already told everyone what Wednesday’s number will be. The company guided to $91.0 billion in revenue, plus or minus 2 per cent, when it reported in May. That figure has been public for three months. On Monday morning the market sold the stock anyway.
Nvidia was at $209.81 shortly before 11am in New York, down 2.29 per cent, having traded as low as $208.62. The shares are 11.3 per cent below their 52-week high of $236.54 and have lost 6.6 per cent in five sessions. This is not a market waiting nervously for a surprise. It is a market that has been given a number and has decided the number is not the point.
What is the point, on the evidence of Monday’s tape, is everything sitting underneath that number. Nvidia is a component of both the Dow and the Nasdaq 100, and it was dragging on both while the Dow itself rose 0.28 per cent. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index fell 3.60 per cent to 11,318.11, which puts the benchmark for the entire American chip industry 22.8 per cent below its own 52-week high. That is a bear market in semiconductors, on a day the blue-chip index is green.
NVDA Stock Today: Where the Semiconductor Complex Stands
The selling was not evenly distributed, and the pattern is the story. Memory and storage took the worst of it.
| Instrument | Price | Session | Below 52-week high |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nvidia (NVDA) | $209.81 | -2.29% | -11.3% |
| SanDisk (SNDK) | $1,457.78 | -8.66% | -38.1% |
| Micron Technology (MU) | $902.15 | -6.69% | -28.1% |
| Intel (INTC) | $86.23 | -4.27% | -39.4% |
| Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) | $456.40 | -3.56% | -21.9% |
| Broadcom (AVGO) | $361.67 | -1.84% | -26.9% |
| PHLX Semiconductor Index (SOX) | 11,318.11 | -3.60% | -22.8% |
| Nasdaq 100 | 29,006.81 | -1.03% | -5.7% |
| Dow Jones Industrial Average | 53,424.46 | +0.28% | -2.4% |
| Live intraday quotes taken at 10:58am New York time, not settlements; these will move before the close. Distance from the 52-week high is calculated by Eastern Herald from the quoted price against each instrument’s trailing 52-week high. | |||
The Companies Being Sold Hardest Have Pricing Power Over Nvidia
Here is the part that does not fit the de-risking narrative. Last week Fortune reported that Nvidia’s largest customers had been told the price of servers built around its chips is going up by more than 15 per cent in many cases, on systems shipping early next year, including those carrying the flagship Vera Rubin and Grace Blackwell parts. The reason given was the cost of memory.
So the market spent Monday selling Micron down 6.7 per cent and SanDisk down 8.7 per cent, on the same morning it was selling Nvidia because Nvidia is expensive. Those two positions are difficult to hold at once. If memory is cheap enough to sell this hard, Nvidia’s cost problem goes away. If Nvidia has to raise prices 15 per cent to cover it, memory is not cheap.
Fortune’s account rests on people it did not name, and Nvidia did not respond to its request for comment. That is worth stating plainly rather than burying: the price-increase reporting is unconfirmed by the company. What is not in doubt is the direction of the leverage. Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron supply a market where demand is running ahead of capacity, and Eastern Herald has covered what happens when that balance slips, when an SK Hynix miss triggered South Korea’s worst stock market day on record.
What Nvidia Actually Reports on Wednesday
The company publishes results after the close on Wednesday, August 26, with a call at 5pm New York time and written commentary from finance chief Colette Kress about forty minutes earlier. The quarter ended July 26.
The baseline comes from Nvidia’s own first-quarter release. Revenue was $81.6 billion, up 85 per cent from a year earlier. Data centre revenue was $75.2 billion, up 92 per cent. Gross margin was 74.9 per cent on a GAAP basis. Guidance for this quarter is the $91.0 billion figure, which would be sequential growth of about 11.5 per cent on the quarter just reported. Jensen Huang, the founder and chief executive, called the buildout of AI factories the largest infrastructure expansion in human history in that release, and said it was accelerating.
The number that moves the stock is not revenue. It is gross margin. Revenue at $91 billion is already priced, because the company said it three months ago and has not withdrawn it. Margin is where a 15 per cent increase in input costs either shows up or does not.
The Position Nvidia Has Built Around Itself
Nvidia is no longer only a supplier to this buildout. It is increasingly a financier of it. This month the company brought in six Wall Street institutions to mobilise more than $500 billion for AI infrastructure, and separately backed a $105 billion credit line for an OpenAI data centre in Ohio. Goldman Sachs, which by Eastern Herald’s calculation supplied about 44 per cent of the Dow’s rally on Friday by itself, is among the six.
That structure cuts both ways and the market has not decided which way. It secures demand, because a customer who cannot finance a data centre cannot buy accelerators for one. It also means Nvidia’s revenue is increasingly extended against capital Nvidia helped arrange, which is a different quality of earnings from a customer paying cash out of operating profit.
What This Column Cannot Tell You Yet
We do not know how much of the reported 15 per cent increase is Nvidia passing through a memory bill and how much is Nvidia protecting a margin. Until the company either confirms the increase or is asked about it on Wednesday’s call, nobody outside it does. Fortune’s sources were not named and Nvidia stayed silent.
Nor can we say whether Monday’s selling is positioning or conviction. A stock that falls 2.3 per cent into a pre-announced number is either being trimmed by people who want less risk over a Wednesday night, or being sold by people who think $91 billion is the last easy quarter. Those look identical on a chart at 11am. They look very different by Friday, when Kevin Warsh speaks at Jackson Hole and the rate that discounts every dollar of Nvidia’s future revenue gets repriced again.
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