S&P 500 Today, August 27, 2026: NVIDIA Adds $435bn as the Average Stock Falls

NEW YORK – Six hours into Thursday’s session, one company has added roughly $435bn of market value and the average S&P 500 stock is still down. Both of those things are true at once, and the second one is the more interesting.The index itself is at 7,720.49 as of 2:14 p.m. Eastern, up 44.79 points or 0.58 per cent on Wednesday’s close of 7,675.70. The equal-weighted version of exactly the same 500 companies is down 0.16 per cent. That gap opened at the bell at 60 basis points and has widened to 71 across the afternoon, which is the clearest measure available of how much of this rally belongs to NVIDIA and how much belongs to the market.NVIDIA reported its second quarter of fiscal 2027 after Wednesday’s close and the stock is up 8.55 per cent at $227.58, having touched $230.47. Revenue came in at $96.22bn, up 106 per cent on a year earlier, with $89.0bn of that from the Data Center segment alone. On the roughly 24.3 billion diluted shares implied by the company’s own net income and per-share figures, the move from Wednesday’s $209.66 close is worth about $435bn of market capitalisation. That is more value created in a single session than all but a handful of companies are worth in total.

The gain is one sector wide, and barely that

Technology is up 2.55 per cent. Energy has crept 0.41 per cent into the green over the afternoon. Financials, health care and utilities are all down between 0.54 and 0.78 per cent. Small caps and mid caps have edged barely positive, by 0.21 and 0.03 per cent, which is not a broadening so much as a rounding error. The Nasdaq 100 is up 0.96 per cent, but that index is a still more concentrated expression of the same handful of names, so it confirms the pattern rather than adding to it.A market where one sector carries the tape is not unusual. A market where one sector carries the tape while the equal-weighted index goes down is a narrower thing, and it is worth being precise about what it does and does not mean. It does not mean the rally is fake. It means that an investor holding the index made money today and an investor holding a representative basket of its members did not, and those two people will tell you different stories about Thursday.

The quarter itself

The figures are not ambiguous. Non-GAAP operating income of $63.96bn on revenue of $96.22bn is an operating margin of 66 per cent, which is not a normal number for a company that manufactures physical goods. Gross margin held at 75.0 per cent. Jensen Huang’s line in the results release was that compute is now revenue, which is the kind of thing chief executives say when the demand curve is doing the arguing for them.The guidance is where the caution sits, and it is worth reading closely rather than skipping. Third-quarter revenue is guided to $108.0bn plus or minus 2 per cent, a 12 per cent step up. Gross margin is guided down 100 basis points to 74.0 per cent. GAAP operating expenses are guided up about 9 per cent on the quarter just reported. Those three together describe a business still growing fast while its unit economics soften slightly, which is a normal shape for a company scaling, and not the shape an 8.5 per cent share move on its own would suggest.

China is not in the number

One sentence in the outlook does more work than any other in the release: NVIDIA is not assuming any Data Center compute revenue from China. The $108.0bn the market repriced around today treats the world’s second-largest economy as contributing nothing at all.That is a consequence of United States export policy, not of Chinese demand, and it has now been formalised into the forecast of the largest company in the index. The reasonable reading is that Washington has cut a customer base out of an American company’s revenue line and the American market has decided it does not mind. Whether that judgment holds depends on questions this page cannot answer: how quickly domestic Chinese accelerators close the performance gap, and whether the excluded revenue is deferred or permanently gone.

The read-across that did not happen

If Thursday were a story about artificial intelligence demand broadly, the rest of the semiconductor complex would be up with it. Broadcom is, by 3.3 per cent. It is the only one. Micron is the clearest case against: it opened up 3.1 per cent at $967.16, touched $968.71, and is now $912.50, down 2.8 per cent on the day and 5.8 per cent from its own high. AMD poked its head above water at $483.00 and is now down 1.8 per cent. Meta got to $588.39 and has given back 3.2 per cent from there. Alphabet and Amazon are lower.The pattern suggests the market is not buying an industry today. It is buying one supplier’s share of an industry, which is a different trade and a more fragile one. Tuesday’s session had a similar shape from a different direction, with a small number of single-stock moves doing most of the index work.

What this page does not know

This is an open session. Every figure above is a snapshot at 2:14 p.m. Eastern taken from the exchange’s own delayed quote table, which runs fifteen minutes behind the tape, and the S&P 500 has already covered a 51-point range. Nothing here is a close. There is an hour and three quarters of trading left, and the last of it is where index rebalancing flows land, so the breadth picture can still move. The 71 basis point cap-weight to equal-weight spread is the number to re-check at four o’clock.The market-capitalisation figure is an estimate. NVIDIA’s release gives net income and diluted earnings per share but not a share count, so the roughly 24.3 billion shares used above is derived by division and is a diluted figure rather than shares outstanding. The true number is somewhat lower and so, therefore, is the dollar value of today’s move.There is also an event risk sitting one day out. Kevin Warsh speaks at Jackson Hole on Friday, and the rates market has spent the week positioned around it, as the gold desk has been tracking. The crude and gas complexes have gone their own way this week, with Brent holding a floor near $87.65 and Henry Hub climbing to $2.90, neither of which is behaving like a market that expects an easing surprise. Indian technology names, meanwhile, fell on the same NVIDIA news for reasons that have nothing to do with accelerators.

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