"Blue-Collar Jobs Are the New Flashpoint in Data-Center Fight"

These are very good, very high paying ($80K to $240K per year plus gold-plated pension/medical/vacation time etc. benefits) jobs and the trades unions are not playing around.

From the Wall Street Journal, August 28:

Trade unions threaten to withhold support for politicians, joining the building backlash

Much of the public outcry over data-center construction has centered on electricity costs, water consumption and noise. Now, a new battlefront is opening up over jobs, too.

Call it the backlash to the backlash: Nationwide resistance to the construction has grown so broad that politicians on both sides of the aisle have halted approvals or tightened oversight as midterm elections approach. Unions and construction trade groups are now entering the fray from the other side, warning that such actions endanger thousands of building-related jobs. They are threatening to withhold support of candidates opposing the data-center projects.

In some cases, these groups are breaking with longtime political allies to support those who back construction. In a memo circulated to members and viewed by The Wall Street Journal, the Steamfitters UA Local 602, whose members install mechanical piping systems in Virginia, Maryland and Washington, D.C., wrote that it is drawing a “clear line” and won’t support politicians who oppose the facilities. “This is an existential moment for Local 602,” it said.

In Kansas, a union representing HVAC and railroad workers broke from decades of precedent to endorse Republican state Sen. Ty Masterson for governor, in part because of the Democratic candidate’s opposition to the construction. In some cases, the unions are working alongside companies building data centers and running artificial-intelligence models in their advocacy.

Sidney Bonilla, treasurer and business manager of Steamfitters UA Local 602, said his members knock on doors for candidates and help finance campaigns. Though the union has historically tended to back Democrats, Bonilla said those dollars and organizational support are on the line.

The union will scrutinize politicians’ records on the data-center issue before offering support, he said, and he expects other unions to follow suit. “We are dependent on these jobs,” he said.

The union support is a welcome development for data-center companies, which are now contending with a slowdown in approvals for new construction. The build-out is key for AI companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic to support more powerful models and meet growth targets, and it has become a major economic driver. 

All of that has made for tricky political terrain ahead of midterm elections. In Wisconsin, Democratic gubernatorial candidate David Crowley, the son of an electrician, has won support from some building trade unions and been attacked by Republican Rep. Tom Tiffany for being in the pocket of labor groups and the companies building data centers. Crowley has supported some restrictions on data centers but stopped short of backing a ban or pause.

In other races, Democrats have criticized their opponents for supporting the data-center boom. Some Republicans are adopting the tactic, even if they previously supported the facilities and their economic benefits.

“You’re not a friend if you’re taking away great career opportunities,” said Don Slaiman, political coordinator of IBEW Local 26, a union representing electricians in Washington, Maryland and Virginia. Many of the jobs pay good wages with benefits, he said. “This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to really get in the upper-middle class.”....

....MUCH MORE 

Meanwhile, Axios (among others) is reporting (August 28):

China is secretly fueling America's data center rage 

I don't know if that is true, a lot of the pressure groups and their funders say it's not, but to repurpose a paraphrase from a July post:

As Clausewitz might have said, had he been born 200 years later than he actually was:

Chips are AI is just war by other means. 

I know. It's a paraphrase/misquote. But work with me here. And have some Clausewitz for being so patient:

The Softer Side Of Clausewitz 

 

U.S. Drought Monitor: Fifth Consecutive Week Of Slow Spread/Increased Intensity

Data up front: 

Week	None	D0-D4	D1-D4	D2-D4	D3-D4	D4	DSCI
2026-08-25	22.53	77.47	56.61	31.59	11.76	1.75	179
2026-08-18	23.79	76.21	52.70	29.87	10.60	1.35	171
2026-08-11	26.38	73.62	50.38	29.50	10.27	1.04	165
2026-08-04	29.05	70.95	48.54	28.57	9.51	0.95	159
2026-07-28	32.08	67.92	47.89	28.30	10.00	0.86	155
2026-07-21	34.76	65.24	45.77	29.14	10.71	0.93	152

This is a 0 (wetter than water) to 500 (dryer than the driest desert) scale. 

The table and maps + commentary are from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, August 27:

This Week's Drought Summary

During the early part of last week, an amplified ridge-trough pattern over North America brought widespread late summer heat to the West and south-central US, with milder temperatures overspreading the Corn Belt and gradually shifting to the Northeast and mid-Atlantic states. The north side of the mean ridge provided a focus for convective activity, with narrow swaths of locally heavy rainfall extending across Nebraska and Missouri, while shortwave troughs brought several rounds of storms to the eastern Corn Belt and parts of the mid-Atlantic and southern New England. Underneath the ridge, dry weather combined with excessive heat continued to promote rapid onset drought across much of the South region. Across the Southeast, summer convection competed with enhanced evapotranspirative demand due to hot temperatures, causing some degradation in areas that missed out on thunderstorm activity. Across the West, an active monsoon pattern continued to bring localized relief to parts of Arizona and New Mexico, while excessive heat and drier conditions promoted drought expansion across eastern New Mexico and portions of the Intermountain West, Great Basin, and the Northwest....

 

....MUCH MORE 

The Big Change: From Journalism To Postjournalism

The key concept, that post-journalism is written to confirm the reader's biases is almost a truism, for it can be no other way. The economics of the business will not allow a platform to constantly challenge and make uncomfortable the reader who pays the bills.

From Andrey Mir at Human-as-Media, December 30, 2025:

Postjournalism: The reversal of the media from news supply to news validation 

“If the news is important, it will find me,” said Brian Stelter in 2008. People inevitably learn

 the news that matters to them. Neither effort nor payment is required. When the scarcity of 

content reverses to abundance, people no longer hunt for news—news hunts for people.

A chapter from The Digital Reversal. Thread-Saga of Media Evolution. 

With the internet, news reliability might have degraded, but overall, people became better informed. This flipped the value in content production: news stopped being a commodity and became bait to attract users for other purposes—mainly engagement. 

It wasn’t a tragedy for the news media yet, as they had always used news to attract audiences and sell them to advertisers. The real issue was that advertisers moved to digital platforms too, where they were provided with much better service than the media could ever offer.

First, classifieds moved to digital, taking a third of newspapers’ revenue with them. Corporate ads followed. By 2014, ad revenue in newspapers had dropped below 1950 levels. The entire economic foundation of the press vanished in just a decade.

---

The decline of ad revenue in newspapers. 

Source: The Newspaper Association of America. [i]

The collapse of advertising was a catastrophe. Throughout the 20^th century, the media were 70–80% funded by ads. Journalism was built on the advertising model. When ad revenue dropped below what the media could survive on, further reversals became inevitable.

The first was the reversal of the business model itself. In 2014-2015, newspapers’ ad revenue dropped below circulation revenue. Not because subscriptions or copy sales grew—they stalled or declined as well. But ad revenue declined faster.

(Experts know that later the New York Times demonstrated subscription growth unmatched in the industry, but it had little to do with subscriptions to news. Most of the growth came from other products and packages.)

Similar dynamics hit TV and radio—ad money was diverted to digital platforms. As a result, the business model of news media flipped from predominantly relying on ads to relying more on readers/viewers. The flip happened in the early 2010s everywhere.

***

Unrecognized by the public and the industry, the business reversal changed newsrooms’ approaches and mentality. After some awkward attempts to replace lost revenue with auxiliary businesses, the media returned to their point of origin: the readers.

As everything was moving online—it was the period of the Digital Rush—the media tried to keep up. They started chasing digital audiences, which at the time consisted mostly of the educated, urban, young, and progressive. Most MSM targeted them as potential digital subscribers.

This is where another unnoticed reversal happened: instead of covering news for a broad audience, as they did under the advertising model, news media started catering to a narrow group of digital progressives. The reversal in business model led to an ideological reversal.

Attempts to attract early digital audiences radically changed news coverage, but no business came out of it. Progressives were truly progressive—they didn’t consume news from old media. Most paywalls, a popular trend in the industry in 2011–12, failed.

The environment itself delivered the news. One didn’t even need to visit media websites—news outlets posted their best headlines in our newsfeeds. With friends’ comments selected by the Viral Editor, it provided a fairly reliable picture of the day.

However, if something worrisome happened, people still needed someone authoritative to confirm how bad it was. Old media suited the role of bad-news notaries very well. They got the prompt and flipped news supply into news validation....

....MUCH MORE 

Previous visits with Mir:

• "The news media: manufacturing anger, not consent. Herman-Chomsky’s Propaganda model revised"
• "Academic Activism as an Effect of Digital Media"

Over the years we've linked to some of Mir's own writing with most links embedded in:
Andrey Mir: "How the Media Polarized Us"

...Having read a lot* of Mr. Mir's words I think he is too facile in timing the polarization; that he is shoehorning the facts into his mental matrix. To be clear, this piece is far, far from as egregious an example as some of the books that were popular a decade or two ago: "Business Lessons From Attilla the Hun," where an author might have one decent insight but then tries to stretch it out for two hundred pages, jamming as many square pegs into round holes as necessary to get the needed word count. 

 

Rather, in Mr. Mir's case it's just that he doesn't put as much emphasis on the fact that American media has always been partisan, and that in the half-decade 1985 -1990 it went hyper-partisan. 

However, even if that observation is true (it may not be, who knows?), Mir knows more about media ecology than just about anyone writing on the topic. period.

*Previous links to Andrey Mir:

• "Postjournalism and the death of newspapers" + "Factoids and Fake News"
• "Slouching Toward Post-Journalism"

I'll get off this Andrey Mir, post-journalism kick, I promise. But not yet. (shades of St Augustine)

The reason for my borderline obsession is the fact that mass media has changed so dramatically over the last five or ten years, which makes it imperative to understand and possibly channel the forces that attempt to shape our everyday view of reality. And it really is getting close to the point that the call to arms "If it isn't censored, it's a lie" is a description of what is going on.

And that would be a shame, we like journalists and, among other reasons, get some of our best ideas from them.

• "Elites have lost control of the information agenda..."
• "The Algorithm—The media's new business model is propaganda."
• Imagine That: Earliest Surviving Secular Song Is An English Guy Talking About The Weather
• Media: How Newspapers Are Like Resort Photographers
• Media: "Whoever will pay for journalism, they will pay not for journalism"
• "Reuters Institute 2022 Digital News Report is out - a lot of useful data."
• "Ubiquitous digital media offer potent rewards—but at the price of eroding our sensory and social capacities."
• Mir: "The news media: watchdogs prefer the paywalled garden"
• "Jeff Bezos’s Next Monopoly: The Press"
• That Time Marshall McLuhan Predicted Social Media

Originally posted January 24, 2026. 

Capital Markets—Looking Ahead: "September 2026 Monthly"

From Marc Chandler at Bannockburn Global Forex, August 29:

September brings a cluster of events that will shape the macro narrative into year-end. A Xi-Trump meeting, German state elections, a Federal Reserve decision with a new Summary of Economic Projections, and an ECB meeting that is not finished hiking. Each carries its own logic, but together they sketch the contours of the fourth quarter.

In our more frequent analysis, we noted that while the dollar had been dragged down by disappointing economic data and pushing of a Fed rate hike further out, we were cautious as the momentum indicators were over-extended.  The tension has been resolved.  The market took a hawkish message away from Fed Chair Warsh at his Jackson Hole speech, increasing the odds of not just a September hike but another one before year end.  And the momentum indicators for the dollar turned higher.  Even if the market has overreacted to Warsh's comments, the upside dollar correction has only just begun, it would appear. 

Xi-Trump: Trade, Not FX....

....MUCH MORE 

"Nine Dynastic Sagas That Consider the Architecture of Inherited Power"

From Observer, 

Spanning Renaissance Florence, Jackie Onassis’s Manhattan and 1990s Morocco, these titles trace what happens when wealth and legacy become inseparable. 

From the biblical tale of Cain and Abel to HBO's Succession, family sagas centering on power and inheritance have always exercised a hold on the public imagination. There is something raunchy, dramatic and almost thrilling in witnessing the freewheeling fortune of a legendary family, idolizing the patriarchs, romanticizing the women and observing the scions, who stumble and more often than not self-destruct in the eye of the masses. Whether it's the families embodying politics and prestige, such as the Kennedys, Windsors and the Gandhis, generational American billionaires like the Rothschilds and the DuPonts, or corporate empires selling taste like the Agnellis and the Hermès family, visceral impulses and unforgettable drama result when wealth and power are inextricably tied to bloodlines.

Far before the term "nepo baby" was coined or the Kardashians premiered on reality TV, tabloids, an entire literary shelf of memoirs and biographies and Graydon Carter's Vanity Fair were devoted to narrating the lives of the rich, famous and trust funded (or those with Swiss bank accounts: take your pick). And yet, more than just money, these dynasties dictated fashion, taste and culture. The 1980s saw an excess of Gucci trademark handbags, the interlocking Gs in the logo signaling an almost tacky wealth, and the Medicis in medieval and Renaissance Italy commissioned enduring works of art like Botticelli's The Birth of Venus and Donatello's bronze statue of David, the decapitated head of Goliath lying at his feet.

Even within the realm of literature, the drama of lineage and succession remains timeless, ranging from Zeus overthrowing his father to Shakespeare's plays about the Plantagenet battles for the throne of England. Classics like John Steinbeck's East of Eden and William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! spotlight power struggles around the primordial sense of belonging that can only be tied to one's last name. It's no surprise then that the dynastic wheel of fortune continues to fascinate with its twists and turns, particularly now when the 25 richest families in the world have amassed $2.9 trillion. The following books trace how the world's most storied families, real and imagined, turned fortune into myth and, in some cases, myth into a battle of heirs.

'The House of Gucci: A Sensational Story of Murder, Madness, Glamour and Greed' by Sara Gay Forden

'Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty' by Patrick Radden Keefe

'Medici Money: Banking, Metaphysics and Art in Fifteenth-Century Florence' by Tim Parks

'Marella Agnelli: The Last Swan' by Marella Caracciolo Chia

'At 24 Rue Faubourg Saint Honoré' by Frédéric Laffont

'Wide Sargasso Sea' by Jean Rhys

'An Oresteia' by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides

'Jackie As Editor: The Literary Life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis' by Greg Lawrence

'I'll Take the Fire' by Leïla Slimani

'The House of Gucci: A Sensational Story of Murder, Madness, Glamour and Greed' by Sara Gay Forden

"Who is that girl over there in the red dress who looks so much like Elizabeth Taylor?" Maurizio Gucci asked a friend at a party in 1970. He then approached Patrizia Reggiani, sparking the tempestuous romance that made and broke the Gucci dynasty. Ambitious and wanting to marry a man with an esteemed name, Patrizia helped Maurizio take control of the Florentine fashion house and revive the brand on the international market, even as lawsuits from relatives flooded in. And yet, it was precisely Patrizia's "relentless criticism and bossiness" that precipitated their bitter divorce, and later, Maurizio's murder at the hands of a hitman hired by his scorned ex-wife. Pulsing with passion and betrayal, Forden's book is a murder mystery rooted in detangling the complex feuds of the Gucci family, fixating any reader with its real-life rise and fall.

'Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty' by Patrick Radden Keefe

The story of the Sacklers is the apex of the American Dream: Jewish immigrants in Brooklyn who initially ran a small grocery store, growing into a multibillion-dollar empire at the intersection of copywriting, medicine and finding pharmaceutical solutions for psychiatric illnesses. In his 640-page magnum opus, Radden Keefe traces the lineage of the Sacklers from the brilliant, philandering Arthur Sackler, who ran the first experiments using histamine, helmed the ad agency that marketed Pfizer and other groundbreaking drugs to hospitals, and outsourced his rare art collection to the Met, to the family's ongoing downfall in several lawsuits charging Purdue Pharma with causing the opioid epidemic. True to form, Radden Keefe's painstaking research of archives, more than 100 interviews and attention to visual detail in photographs lend vigor to the lifelike narration of the book. Empire of Pain is more than just a journalistic investigation; it's a family epic of mythic proportions.

'Medici Money: Banking, Metaphysics and Art in Fifteenth-Century Florence' by Tim Parks

Perhaps the most iconic family of bankers in history, the Medicis famously funded the Italian Renaissance, propping up architectural landmarks like St. Peter's Basilica and championing artists like Botticelli, Michelangelo, da Vinci and more. In chatty, witty prose, Tim Parks breaks down the Medici family's inner dynamics and the chokehold they had on Europe by gifting the Vatican generous loans. Ranging from Machiavellian schemes of murder, the sexual hedonism of slave-concubines and illegitimate children, and the management of money that kept it all going, Parks illustrates the links between Catholic guilt (and punishment), Italian art and the Medicis....

....MUCH MORE  

"The wine made by British monks that’s making bank"

From The Hustle, July 1:

No one drinking anymore? Not on their watch

You’ve seen the bottles of health elixirs lining the grocery store. Want to hit a bar on a school night? There’s a mocktail for that. Cans of seltzer and near-beer line grocery store shelves. No one is drinking anymore.

Across the US and North America, alcohol sales are down. Alcohol spending, as a share of overall spend, is at a 40-year low.

Revenues are in freefall: Bloomberg estimates shares of the world’s top alcohol companies have lost ~$830B in the last four years.

One British company, with a wild, checkered past, is bucking the trend. How?

Wreck the hoose juice

Known now to local fans as “wreck the hoose juice,” “commotion lotion,” or just “Bucky,” Buckfast tonic wine had more dignified origins.

Production began in 1882. Initially sold as a medicine, the tonic was first adapted from a Spanish mistella recipe. A group of Benedictine monks living in the stately Buckfast Abbey on the moors of Devon, England, added a proprietary spice mix, and Buckfast tonic wine was born.

As a side hustle to help fund their charitable works, the monks opened a bottle shop and filled orders that came in by mail.

By 1927, they were selling 1.4k bottles a year.

That same year, the abbott and a group of business partners established a new company, J. Chandler and Co., to handle the wine’s distribution. Demand kept growing.

Advertisements extolled it as a “health restorative of unequalled excellence,” made “from a secret process known only to the monks.” The monks’ reputation, they said, was guarantee of its purity, and it could help with convalescence, depression, anemia, depleted vitality, loss of appetite, and more.

Advertisement from Dublin’s Evening Herald in 1928. (Photo by newspapers.com)

Over the decades, Buckfast’s recipe sweetened and evolved. J. Chandler and Co. distributed the wine through chemists, which added to its medicinal image. In winter, and during reported flu outbreaks, sales went up. By the 1950s, they were advertising it as giving imbibers “a new lease of life” if they were recovering from an illness.

In 1968, new regulations meant companies without any health benefits had to tweak their advertising. “To make you feel better, be better,” one advertisement read....

....MUCH MORE 

Deutsche Bank Research: "AI at 70: 14 lessons from a lifetime of boom and bust"

Following on the post immediately below, "Would There Be an AI Revolution If There Were No Nvidia?" (NVDA).

From the Deutsche Bank Research Institute via Beijing's 36Kr-European Central Station, August 18: 

Deutsche Bank sorts out the 70-year development trajectory of AI and sums up 14 historical takeaways. AI is witnessing exponential non-linear growth, and falling costs will spur even greater demand. However, technical routes see frequent iterations, with bottlenecks emerging in hardware and supply chains. While AI has gained rapid popularity among consumers, its commercial application in the enterprise segment is still in the early stage. Current market valuations are nearing historically high levels, and investors need to stay alert to risks brought by technological iteration and supply chain disruptions.

Deutsche Bank's latest research report sorts out the development context of artificial intelligence since its birth in 1956, extracts 14 key insights from historical patterns, and provides a reference for investors to judge the trend of the current AI boom.

This August marks exactly 70 years since the 1956 Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence, the birthplace of AI. Adrian Cox, Thematic Strategist at Deutsche Bank Research, points out in the latest report that the 70-year history of AI has been filled with alternating booms and busts, and the current round of investment and valuation frenzy is repeating the paradigm of technological revolutions that have appeared many times in history.

The report argues that "context" is critical to understanding the future direction of AI. From non-linear growth and infrastructure bottlenecks to the expansion and bursting of valuation bubbles, historical signals are clearly identifiable. The report states directly that some people may claim that "this time is different", but the data from the past 70 years provides another frame of reference — for investors betting on the AI track, these insights are directly related to asset allocation logic and risk judgment.

01 Growth is not linear, and is often severely underestimated

The report highlights the core feature of AI progress at the beginning: non-linearity. Presenting the historical data of training computing power on a logarithmic scale, it can be clearly seen that since 1956, the growth of computing power used to train major AI systems has spanned dozens of orders of magnitude, while the visual presentation of linear charts almost completely obscures this trend. Exponential growth is intuitively very easy to underestimate, which is the first cognitive threshold for understanding the AI wave.

Closely related to this, the progress speed of AI has surpassed Moore's Law. Traditional computing power doubles every 18 to 24 months, but after entering the era of deep learning, the average annual growth rate of computing power has reached about 4 times, far higher than the annual growth rate of about 1.4 times before the deep learning era. The reason lies in the simultaneous improvement of multiple factors such as system scale expansion, memory enhancement, and algorithm optimization, forming a superposition effect.

02 Technical routes continue to iterate, today's leader is not necessarily tomorrow's winner

The report presents the 70-year evolution of routes through the AI technology spectrum: from symbolic logic and expert systems to statistical machine learning, deep learning, and then to the currently dominant large language models. Each generation of mainstream technology has gone through a cycle from rise to replacement. Some routes (such as recurrent neural networks) have been surpassed, while others are still evolving in parallel. The report points out that large language models may give way to new paradigms such as "world models" in the future, and the intergenerational replacement of technologies does not depend on the will of current leaders.

Historical changes in market share also confirm this point. Internet Explorer once outperformed Netscape, but was later replaced by Chrome. In the current competitive landscape of generative AI platforms, ChatGPT leads in monthly visits, but Google Gemini, DeepSeek and Claude are all catching up rapidly. Early advantages do not equal long-term moats.

03 R&D accumulation determines the competitive landscape, and the rise of DeepSeek is no accident

The sudden rise of Chinese AI models, represented by DeepSeek, seems to be "overnight success" on the surface, but it is actually the result of years of R&D investment accumulation. Data shows that China has surpassed the United States in total R&D expenditure in 2024, and its catching-up speed in the number of major AI models is also remarkable. In terms of the number of AI patent grants, China's growth curve is also far ahead of other economies. For investors, this means that changes in the competitive landscape often accumulate at the underlying level for many years before they are visible on the surface.

04 Cost reduction will not compress demand, but will instead expand demand

The report cites the "Jevons Paradox" to illustrate that the sharp drop in the cost of AI use will not lead to a reduction in total expenditure, but will instead stimulate a surge in demand. Since 2006, the cost of GPU computing power has dropped by more than 99%, but according to the forecast of the International Energy Agency (IEA), global data center power consumption will double from 2024 to 2030. Lower marginal cost means more application scenarios and higher total demand....

....MUCH MORE 

Here's the original at DB, 17 page PDF, downloadable.

If interested see also the RAND Corporation's relationship with AI: 

RAND: "Artificial Intelligence and Biotechnology: Risks and Opportunities"

RAND has a very deep history in artificial intelligence. From Jeremy Norman's History of Information:
Newell, Simon & Shaw Develop the First Artificial Intelligence Program

During 1955 and 1956 computer scientist and cognitive psychologist Allen Newell, political scientist, economist and sociologist Herbert A. Simon, and systems programmer John Clifford Shaw, all working at the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica, California, developed the Logic Theorist, the first program deliberately engineered to mimic the problem solving skills of a human being. They decided to write a program that could prove theorems in the propositional calculus like those in Principia Mathematica by Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell. As Simon later wrote,

"LT was based on the system of Principia mathematica, largely because a copy of that work happened to sit in my bookshelf. There was no intention of making a contribution to symbolic logic, and the system of Principia was sufficiently outmoded by that time as to be inappropriate for that purpose. For us, the important consideration was not the precise task, but its suitability for demonstrating that a computer could discover problem solutions in a complex nonnumerical domain by heuristic search that used humanoid heuristics" (Simon,"Allen Newell: 1927-1992," Annals of the History of Computing 20 [1998] 68).

The collaborators wrote the first version of the program by hand on 3 x 5 inch cards. As Simon recalled....

For a bit more on Mr. Simon here's the introduction to 2016's "Interview: Manuela Veloso Head of Machine Learning, Carnegie Mellon University":

Our readers probably know Carnegie Mellon more for the  top-ranked financial engineering program (Master of Science in Computational Finance) but artificial intelligence was pretty much invented at CMU by Herbert Simon and Allen Newell. Simon received the Nobel in Economics but it actually could have been for any of four or five subjects, he was quite the polymath.

Newell had to settle for the Turing award (along with Simon) from the Association for Computing Machinery, probably the root'in-tootin high-falootinest tchotchke in the computer biz.
The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence along with the ACM subsequently named an award in Newell's honor. Ditto for CMU.

The University's machine learning department was the first in the world to offer a doctorate and as far as I know is still the largest.
A department, for one branch of AI.

Carnegie-Mellon used to have a world class robotics Institute but Uber gutted it with a combination of cash and stock options leaving a Dean and a couple robots to rebuild.
One of the robots is said to be in advanced negotiations with the Ube-sters.

"Would There Be an AI Revolution If There Were No Nvidia?" (NVDA)

From the Wall Street Journal via MSN, August 27:

Would there be an AI revolution if there were no Nvidia?

That’s what I found myself thinking as I listened to CEO Jensen Huang during the company’s earnings call yesterday after it reported a blowout quarter. Delivered in a just-the-facts tone even if it was peppered with words such as “extraordinary,” Huang made it clear that if you turn left or right, look up, down or under, you’re likely to find Nvidia in whatever part of the transformation you’re exploring. 

There’s no doubt that we still don’t know how this all will play out. It is, of course, in Huang’s interest to emphasize his company’s role in the AI build-out. Nvidia also has a lot on the line through its role as the de facto banker/backer of many pieces of the revolution. 

But even here, Huang expressed the kind of confidence that the market has appeared to be searching for, as some investors fretted over the gargantuan amounts of capital being bet to build the necessary compute. (Its stock was up nearly 5% in after-hours trading.)

Investing in companies including Anthropic and OpenAI is a “once in a generation opportunity,” he said. “I think the only regret that I have is that I didn’t invest more and sooner. And two of the companies will likely go public soon, and others will follow, and these will be some of the most consequential technology companies in history.”

Not only that, but they’re also Nvidia customers. “I have 100% confidence that you know through quite a long period of time they’re going to be utilizing Nvidia compute for a lot of their computing,” he added. 

Huang noted more than once that capacity, not demand, is constraining Nvidia’s growth—it projected 70% revenue growth for fiscal 2028. What if there are no capacity constraints, he was asked. 

“The unconstrained, you know, is significant, and so we’re just going to have to go work hard to get more capacity.” Thus its involvement in the AI supply chain that includes data centers. 

The open versus closed AI models debate? Nvidia wins with both, he said....

....MORE

Regarding capacity constraints, here's the transcript: 

....Tiffany, Conference Operator: Your next question comes from the line of James Schneider with Goldman Sachs. Your line is open.

James Schneider, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: Good afternoon. Thank you for taking my question. If you think about the 100% growth you talked about in terms of the plus unconstrained demand growth you are expecting, the 70% you expect to fulfill in terms of supply, can you maybe talk about some of the, or rank order some of the most acute constraints, whether that be things like data center, power and shell availability, DRAM, wafer foundry availability, et cetera? If you could maybe help us understand which are the biggest among those, that would be very helpful. Thank you.

Jensen Huang, President and Chief Executive Officer, NVIDIA: There’s something funny I could say, but I’m going to just not. Last year, one of the funnest things to do is just to go figure out where I go for dinner and who I have dinner with, and their stock price doubles the next day. I think the answer is, our entire supply chain is challenged. Everybody is really running flat out. More capacity is coming online all the time, which is one of the advantages of what’s going to happen this year. It’s not going to come online in an instance in time, but it’s going to come online every day. Yields are going to get improved. We’re going to be doing yield improvement. We’re going to work hard on working with every one of our suppliers.

We have a It’s not even next year yet, so we’ve got lots and lots of time to work hard every day. So at this moment, we have supply for 70%. We have more supply than 70%, but about 70%. Our demand is much higher than that, and we’ve got to go work hard, or we’re going to be disappointing customers. We like not to disappoint our customers, and we like to work hard for them. So I’m going to need the help of the entire supply chain to help me out here. They all know that. What I’m telling you about our needs for next year is exactly consistent with what I’ve told them. Everybody’s on the exact same song sheet, and I’m trying to be as transparent as we can because we’re talking about big numbers....

"The shadow of Edward Gibbon and Adam Smith hangs over two contemporary efforts to explain what makes nations wealthy and what makes empires decline."

From the Dublin Review of Books, 29 May 2026 (Issue 161, Summer 2026):

Messy versus Tidy

Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse, by Luke Kemp Viking, 592 pp, £25, ISBN: ‎978-0241741238

Peak Human: What We Can Learn from the Rise and Fall of Golden Ages, by Johan Norberg Atlantic Books, 512 pp, £22, ISBN: 978-1838957315

The year 1776, whose quarter-millennium we mark this year, was a good vintage for documents that would last. Almost four months before the publication on July 4th of The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America (sic), the publishers William Strahan and Thomas Cadell in the Strand published, on March 9th, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith. A few weeks before that (sources disagree about the exact date), the same publishers launched the first volume of a projected six-volume work, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon. It’s surprising that subsequent historiography has drawn few explicit comparisons between the second and third of these documents, almost as if the chronological coincidence were an embarrassment for serious scholars, like a form of astrology. The disciplinary separation between history and political economy is doubtless part of the story. One of the rare books to treat both works together, Harold James’s The Roman Predicament: How the Rules of International Order Create the Politics of Empire (Princeton) is by a scholar unusually at home in both traditions.

Smith and Gibbon certainly knew each other, at least through correspondence. In a letter dated November 26th, 1777, Gibbon writes to Smith: ‘Among the strange reports that are every day circulated in this wide town, I heard one today so very extraordinary that I know not how to give credit to it. I was informed that a place of commissioner of the customs in Scotland had been given to a philosopher who for his own glory and for the benefit of mankind had enlightened the world by the most profound and systematic treatise on the great objects of trade and revenue which had ever been published in any age or in any country. But as I was told at the same time that this philosopher was my particular friend, I found myself very forcibly inclined to believe what I most sincerely wished and desired.’

Gibbon probably knew Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. It’s hard to read Smith’s ironic account in 1759 of the social function of religion (‘That the terrors of religion should thus enforce the natural sense of duty, was of too much importance to the happiness of mankind, for nature to leave it dependent upon the slowness and uncertainty of philosophical researches’) without wondering whether it influenced what may be Gibbon’s most famous sentence: ‘The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people, as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful. And thus toleration produced not only mutual indulgence, but even religious concord.’ Smith had begun writing The Wealth of Nations in 1764 in my home city of Toulouse. This was just a year after Voltaire (whose interest in universal history was certainly an influence on Gibbon) had published his Treatise on Toleration in response to the terrible miscarriage of justice in that city in the Calas affair. It makes sense to think of these two writers as exercised by a common set of preoccupations, even if neither framed them in the same terms.

Smith’s ostensible subject is what makes nations wealthy, while Gibbon’s is what makes empires decay. But each of them is fascinated by the mirror image of their focal question. For Gibbon, what made the Roman empire decay was not a single cause but an accumulation of political, fiscal and religious trends, themselves the fruit of prosperity, that together undermined both civic virtue (especially through luxury consumption) and institutional capacity. For Smith the qualities that made nations wealthy were precisely the qualities that could be blocked by the short-sightedness of opportunistic political leaders. These included not just environmental and technological qualities – the division of labour, mechanisation, the absence of constraints on trade. He also believed in the importance and fragility of civic virtue (trustworthiness, prudence, a sense of justice), albeit in a more sober and less martial version than Gibbon’s, and as a supporting condition rather than a central motor of historical change....

....MUCH MORE 

"Unprecedented: Scientists Have Built Miniature Brains That Experience The Passage Of Time"

I wonder if they tap their little organoid toes as they wait? (mark time?)

From ScienceAlert: 

Our brains comprise 86 billion neurons and the trillions of connections between them, whipping up an orchestrated storm of electricity and chemicals that pulse within a 3-pound lump of jellified fat, protein, and water.

The intricate biological machine that defines us humans requires about 20 years to mature, a much lengthier developmental period than in most other species.

This, along with the added inconvenience that it's locked within our craniums, makes our developing brains experimentally inaccessible.

So, scientists are building brains in the lab, no big deal.

In a breakthrough described in the journal Nature, researchers have created miniature brains, called organoids, that can 'sense' the passage of time and retain a cellular 'memory' of how long they have already spent developing....

....MUCH MORE 

Previously on the wee whiz-kids:

September 2018 - Lab Grown Mini-Brains Raise Some Ethical Questions

November 2018 - "Lab-Grown Mini Kidneys 'Go Rogue,' Sprout Brain and Muscle Cells"
Getting into a weird area here. 

August 2023 - ICYMI: "Researchers Teach Human Brain Cells in a Dish to Play 'Pong'"

January 2024 - Cyborg computer with living brain organoid aces machine learning tests"

June 2024 - Another Way To Beat AI's Power Consumption Problem: Brain Organoids

March 2026 - "Human Brain Cells Learn to Play Doom in Cortical Labs Experiment" 

March 2026 - "Human Brain Cells Run New Data Centers in Singapore, Melbourne"

"A Mafia Treasure Hunt"

From Field Ethos, August 22:

In 1820 the Spanish government in Peru was facing a military uprising and the constant threat of rebels. Spanish officials in Peru decided to hire a British privateer named Captain William Thompson to transport their vast wealth to Spanish forces in Mexico for safekeeping. Recognizing the opportunity before them and not ones to look a gift horse in the mouth, Thompson and his crew mutinied, slitting the throats of the guards and Spanish priests before throwing their bodies overboard.

Thompson and his crew had effectively transformed themselves into some of the wealthiest pirates in history, with an estimated $1 billion worth of treasure in their possession. After hiding the loot on Coco Island and creating a map to locate it later, the crew was eventually captured and sentenced to hang. However, Thompson and his first mate were spared after promising to lead the Spanish to the hidden treasure.

The Spanish returned with Thompson to the remote island, but he managed to escape into the thick jungle. Neither Thompson nor the treasure was ever seen again.

Wise Guys, Maps & Buried Treasure...

....MUCH MORE 

 

"The $2 Billion Brawl Over a Ruinous Wood-Pellet Trade" ("one of the most disastrous commodity trades of the decade")

Iceland thinks they have sagas. Pshaw. 

This one has executives fearing for their bonuses, Drax*, Germans, subsidies, Putin, paleolithic flashbacks and so much more.

From the Wall Street Journal, August 27 

Creditors say Enviva’s former C-suite blew up the once-highflying green-energy company by chasing bonus targets 

The fight for restitution is on at a fallen green-energy giant, following one of the most disastrous commodity trades of the decade. 

The ill-fated wood-pellet trades that bankrupted Enviva during the sustainable-investing boom were made by executives hoping to trigger their own bonuses, according to creditors who are seeking more than $2 billion in damages.Instead of producing big profits that would spur payouts for Enviva’s C-suite, however, the nine-figure trades backfired and bankrupted the company, which once had a nearly $6 billion market value. Shareholders received nothing in the bankruptcy, and some bondholders recovered just pennies on the dollar.  

Five of the company’s top executives concealed the inordinately large and risky trades from its board, according to a lawsuit filed last week by investors, suppliers and others with claims outstanding after Enviva’s 2024 bankruptcy.

 

“A board of directors cannot fulfill its duties if corporate officers withhold material information and act beyond the scope of their authority,” said Eric Madden, one of the plaintiffs’ lawyers. 

 

The allegations draw on findings from a seven-month board investigation into the trades that sent the country’s largest exporter of wood pellets spiraling toward insolvency. 

 

The board enlisted law firm Baker Botts, which determined that there were solid legal claims to be made against the executives, according to bankruptcy filings.  

 

Lawyers representing the five former Enviva executives, including former Chief Executives John Keppler and Thomas Meth, either declined to comment or didn’t respond. 

 

Enviva said it wasn’t involved in the litigation, and none of the former executives named in the suit are affiliated with the reorganized company, which emerged from bankruptcy in December 2024 with new owners and leadership. 

 

Enviva’s creditors are unlikely to recoup anything close to $2 billion. Recovery cases are fairly common following corporate bankruptcies and are typically settled without trial. Once legal fees are paid, creditors usually receive whatever is left of the company’s directors-and-officers liability insurance coverage.  

 

The suit, though, sheds new light on Enviva’s collapse. The company was considered one of the winners of the green-energy boom, and demand for wood pellets was rising when it imploded.

 

Enviva pioneered the business of pressing sawdust into cylindrical capsules and shipping boatloads of them to overseas power plants looking to burn an alternative to coal. The company built pellet plants across the southern U.S., moving into parts of the pinery where pulp and paper mills had closed and left behind surfeits of sawdust, wood chips and cheap pulpwood.

 

The smokestack emissions are comparable with those from burning coal. Nonetheless, governments in Europe and Asia subsidized wood pellets as renewable energy. Not only would another crop of trees be planted, they reasoned, but the new trees would absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as they grew.

 

Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine shocked energy markets and boosted demand for wood pellets, along with coal, natural gas and anything else that could be burned to generate electricity. 

At the time, Enviva was dealing with problems at some plants that made it difficult to fulfill obligations to customers. The company was at risk of missing profit targets. Executives were in danger of losing out on annual bonuses that, in some cases, would more than double their salaries, creditors claim.

Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine shocked energy markets and boosted demand for wood pellets, along with coal, natural gas and anything else that could be burned to generate electricity. 

At the time, Enviva was dealing with problems at some plants that made it difficult to fulfill obligations to customers. The company was at risk of missing profit targets. Executives were in danger of losing out on annual bonuses that, in some cases, would more than double their salaries, creditors claim....

....MUCH MORE 

*Drax is the largest power plant in Britain at just under 4 megawatts capacity and has been converted from coal to biomass-and-coal to biomass base load with natural gas peakers. 

Previously:

April 2015 - Hey Gang, Want To Participate In Britain's Back-to-the-Future "We Burn Wood" Energy Program? (EVA)

PE-backed Enviva Partners goes public... 

June 2022 - "Ban on Russian wood pellet exports to Europe to cause difficulties with waste disposal at Russian sawmills"
Ah ha! Maybe these sanctions will be the ones that bring the Russians to their knees. 

November 2023 - Renewable Fuel: "Wood Pellet Giant Enviva Discloses a Financial Crisis"

January 2024 - Who Is Going To Supply Europe's Wood-Burning Power Plants Now, Putin? (EVA)
Opportunity for Sweden and Finland.

***

They ignored the first rule of wood pellet trading: Don't buy the whole damn forest!

March 2024 - "Why Britain is burning North American forests to keep the lights on" (EVA)

I suppose it's better than the Germans burning their brown coal but the optics of going paleolithic for your illumination does lead to some schoolboy humor. (see Putin et al)

Additionally, having the largest American supplier of firewood to Britain going bust - a bankruptcy filing is possible at literally any minute - does not add luster to the "We burn wood" marketing tagline.

March 2024 - Update: "Enviva’s Stock Rises After Wood-Pellet Exporter Gets Another Week to Make Bond Payment" (EVA) 

March 2024 - Wood Fuel Maker Enviva Has Filed For Chapter 11 Bankruptcy Protection (EVA [Q?}

More On Britain Burning Wood [including tips on how to write to King Charles III]

Followup: "More than 100 water systems were hit in July cyberattacks

From The Register, August 26: 

'These are test runs for a larger-scale attack' 

The US government disclosed that crims targeted more than 100 internet-exposed water systems during July cyberattacks. That's the first time the feds have put a number on the digital intrusions, but they have yet to attribute the campaign, widely suspected to be linked to Iran, to a particular group.

“In July 2026, CISA observed malicious cyber activity targeting over 100 internet-exposed systems in the Water and Wastewater Systems (WWS) Sector, commonly via programmable logic controllers (PLCs) connected directly to a cellular modem,” America’s lead cyber-defense agency said, adding that connecting PLCs directly to the internet “can create significant security risks.”

Suspected Iranian attackers targeted water and wastewater facilities across at least a dozen states in July, including internet-exposed PLCs. While neither federal nor state officials have identified all 12, we know that the cyberattacks occurred at mostly small, rural utilities in Minnesota, Michigan, Georgia, South Dakota, and New Jersey.

“This is very serious. What stands out isn't any single incident. It's the scale,” Matt Hartman, chief strategy officer at the Merlin Group and CISA’s former acting head of cyber, told The Register....

....MUCH MORE 

Previously:

August 21 - "US says hackers are targeting vulnerable water systems with the help of AI"

Vaguely reminiscent of Stuxnet vs. the Iranian nuclear program... 

The U.S. Consulate In Wuhan China Knew Covid-19 Was Spreading In OCTOBER 2019

Of course at that time it hadn't been named Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) but it was spreading and obvious to the folks at the Consulate General.

From State Magazine (an official publication of the U.S. Department of State for employees and retirees), April 2020 edition:

Surviving the Outbreak: Reflections on ConGen Wuhan’s evacuation and life in quarantine

By Russell J. Westergard

By mid-October 2019, the dedicated team at the U.S. Consulate General in Wuhan knew that the city had been struck by what was thought to be an unusually vicious flu season. The disease worsened in November. When city officials began to close public schools in mid-December to control the spread of the disease, the team passed the word to Embassy Beijing and continued monitoring. The possibility of a new viral outbreak was always on the consulate’s radar. Still, the working assumption in every scenario had always been that, as in past outbreaks like H1N1 (known as swine flu), it would appear in rural areas first and then spread to major urban centers across China.

When the Chinese government announced on December 29th that the new and novel coronavirus (COVID-19) had been identified and traced to a live animal market near the U.S. consulate, it caught the team’s attention. Four hectic weeks later, ConGen Wuhan closed under ordered departure with the consulate team pulling off what some people involved have since described as a minor miracle.

Consulate staff found themselves at the airport of a paralyzed city preparing to evacuate family members and other U.S. citizens from what would turn out to be ground zero of a deadly global pandemic....

....MUCH MORE 

Mr. Westergard was deputy consular chief at the U.S. Consulate in Wuhan. 

Previously:

May 20, 2026 - "U.S. probing whether Chinese companies cut production of shipping containers before COVID pandemic"  

June 2, 2026 - Flashback: China Began Hoarding Personal Protective Equipment Months Before The Covid-19 Pandemic Was Declared 

As noted introducing May 28's "For the Public, Covid Is No Longer a Mystery":
Over the next six months there will be a lot of information coming out regarding coronavirus, Covid-19 and the responses thereto. A lot....

August 1 - Former Director Of The Centers For Disease Control: Covid Was Spreading In Wuhan In September or October 2019

Our focus/purpose is not the 'proximal origin', raccoon dog or Biosafety Level 4 Laboratory, but rather the date the virus was circulating.

Possibly related, July 31's: Covid: China's Purchases Of PCR Test Kits Soared Months Before The First Cases Were Announced

 August 7 - Fauci Is Covering For Someone, We May Be About To Find Out Who

August 23 - Covid Fun Fact: Early Report Of A Connection Between The Coronavirus And The Wuhan Institute Of Virology 

Long-time readers know that we keep tabs on early reports of covid, not searching them out but dropping them into the link-vault as they appear. Here's one from Radio Free Asia, January 9, 2020 

"Earnings call transcript: NVIDIA beats Q2 2026 estimates as AI demand stays hot" (NVDA)

First up, from Barron's Adam Levine who is obviously not a member of the NVDA obsessive-compulsive club, August 26:

These Two Sentences May Have Just Fixed Nvidia’s Stock 

As usual, the Nvidia earnings call was a discursive affair, touching on many different subjects. But the only thing that mattered in the end came right near the beginning of the call.

The stock was down after the earnings release showed that Nvidia's vaunted 75% gross margin would slip a bit in the second half of the year due to spiraling memory chip costs That outlook overshadowed another stellar second quarter. The stock was roughly flat as the call began at 5 p.m. ET.

But moments later Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress said the magic words: "We expect to grow revenue by approximately 70% in fiscal 2028. This is a supply-constrained outlook." Nvidia shares instantly surged 4%.

Fiscal 2028 begins in late January, so it encompasses 11 months of calendar 2027. Wall Street was expecting 45% growth next year, a big slowdown from what looks to be a doubling of sales this year.

Later in the call, CEO Jensen Huang said that were the company not supply-constrained, sales would double again next year, and that the company was working on opening up some of the bottlenecks holding them back.

There was another hour of talking on the call, but none of it mattered as much as those two sentences spoken by Kress. 

And for those of us who are obsessive about the company and its stock, Investing.com has the fix, August 26: 

NVIDIA said fiscal second-quarter revenue more than doubled from a year earlier to $96.2 billion and adjusted earnings topped Wall Street expectations, underscoring how the company remains at the center of the global AI spending boom. The chip maker reported adjusted earnings of $2.22 a share, above the $2.08 forecast, and said revenue exceeded the $91.9 billion consensus. Shares rose 3.98% after hours to $218, after closing the regular session at $209.66, down 1.59%.

Key Takeaways

• Revenue rose to a record $96.2 billion, more than doubling from a year earlier.
• Adjusted EPS of $2.22 beat expectations by 6.73%.
• Data center revenue reached $89 billion, or 92.7% of total sales.
• NVIDIA said demand is broadening beyond hyperscalers to sovereign AI, NeoClouds and enterprises.
• The company guided for $108 billion in revenue in the current quarter, above the latest consensus.

Company Performance

NVIDIA’s latest quarter showed that the AI infrastructure build-out remains in full force. Revenue growth accelerated for a fourth straight quarter, driven mainly by data center demand. The company said data center sales rose 18% from the previous quarter to $89 billion, with hyperscale revenue at $49 billion and its ACIE business — which includes sovereign AI, regional cloud providers and enterprises — at $40 billion.

The results reinforce NVIDIA’s position as the dominant supplier of AI computing systems. Management said the company’s architecture now supports the full AI life cycle, from data preparation and training to post-training and agentic inference. That broadening use case has helped NVIDIA expand beyond the original wave of large cloud customers into a wider customer base.

Gross margin remained 75%, but management warned that margins are likely to come under pressure in the near term because of memory pricing. Even so, the company said demand remains stronger than supply and that its products are fully utilized across every cloud it serves.

Financial Highlights

• Revenue: $96.2 billion, more than double year over year.
• Adjusted EPS: $2.22, up from a forecast of $2.08.
• Data center revenue: $89 billion, up 18% sequentially.
• Hyperscale revenue: $49 billion, up 13% sequentially.
• ACIE revenue: $40 billion, up 25% sequentially and 138% year over year.
• Gross margin: 75%, unchanged from the prior quarter.
• Return on equity: 114%, reflecting exceptional profitability.
• Market capitalization: $5.08 trillion, maintaining its position as one of the world’s most valuable companies.
• Operating expenses: up 10% on a GAAP basis and 11% on a non-GAAP basis sequentially.
• Inventory: $32 billion, higher as the company prepares for the Vera Rubin launch.
• Days sales outstanding: 60 days, reflecting longer payment terms for large investment-grade customers.
• Shareholder returns: $26 billion, including $20 billion in buybacks and $6 billion in dividends.

Earnings vs. Forecast

NVIDIA beat expectations on both earnings and revenue. Adjusted EPS of $2.22 came in $0.14 above the $2.08 forecast, a surprise of 6.73%. Revenue of $96.2 billion beat the $91.9 billion estimate by $4.3 billion, or 4.68%.

The size of the beat was solid, though not unusual for NVIDIA in the current AI cycle. Investors have come to expect strong outperformance from the company, so the market reaction likely reflected not only the beat itself but also the strength of the outlook and the continued scale of demand. The revenue beat was larger in dollar terms than the EPS surprise, which suggests that sales momentum remains the main story.

Market Reaction

The stock moved higher in after-hours trading, rising 3.98% to $218, or $8.34 above the regular-session close. The shares had finished the day at $209.66, down 1.59% from the previous close of $213.05, so the post-earnings move reversed part of that decline.

At $218, the stock traded near the upper end of its 52-week range of $164.07 to $236.54. The reaction was positive, but not extreme, which may reflect the market’s view that NVIDIA’s results were strong but broadly in line with the company’s powerful recent run. No unusual trading volume data was provided.

Outlook & Guidance

NVIDIA said it expects fiscal third-quarter revenue of $108 billion, plus or minus 2%, which implies a range of about $106 billion to $110 billion. The company also guided for gross margins of 74%, plus or minus 50 basis points, and operating expenses of $9.2 billion on a GAAP basis and $9.0 billion on a non-GAAP basis.

Management said Vera Rubin shipments began in August and that the new platform is already seeing purchase orders from major hyperscalers, AI cloud providers and system makers. The company said Vera Rubin should account for about 20% of data center revenue in the current quarter.

Looking further ahead, NVIDIA said revenue growth in fiscal 2028 should be about 70%, though management stressed that demand would be higher if supply were not constrained. The company also said CPU revenue is expected to more than double in fiscal 2028. InvestingPro Tips highlight that 10 analysts have revised their earnings upwards for the upcoming period, reinforcing the bullish outlook. For investors seeking deeper insights, NVIDIA is one of 1,400+ US equities covered by comprehensive Pro Research Reports, which transform complex Wall Street data into clear, actionable intelligence through intuitive visuals and expert analysis.

Executive Commentary

Chief Executive Jensen Huang said the company is seeing a shift toward agentic AI, which he said requires far more computing power than human-driven use. “The amount of compute necessary for an agent versus a human using it is probably 15 to 100 times,” he said.

Huang also argued that NVIDIA’s advantage comes from offering a full-stack platform rather than just chips. “We are the only company in the world that creates and builds, offers an entire AI factory platform, a full stack system,” he said.

Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress said the company’s business is broadening across customer groups. “Non-hyperscaler growth, our ACIE segment spanning sovereign regional NeoClouds, enterprise edge, and air gap data centers will represent roughly half of our data center business,” she said.

Risks and Challenges

• Margin pressure: NVIDIA said memory scarcity is pushing costs higher and could weigh on gross margins in coming quarters.
• Supply limits: Management said demand exceeds supply, which means the company may not be able to capture all available demand immediately.
• China exposure: The company said it did not include China data center compute revenue in forward guidance because of geopolitical uncertainty.
• Heavy customer concentration: Hyperscalers remain a large share of the business, even as the customer mix broadens.
• Execution risk on new products: Vera Rubin is only beginning to ramp, and any delay could affect growth expectations.

Q&A

Analysts focused on three main issues: the sustainability of 70% growth, the scale of future demand from agentic AI, and the impact of open-source models and custom chips.

Questions also centered on supply-chain bottlenecks, especially memory, power and data-center capacity. Huang said the company has supply for 70% growth but that demand is much higher. He added that the entire supply chain is under strain and that NVIDIA is working closely with suppliers to add capacity.

Another theme was competition from custom chips developed by major AI labs. Huang said NVIDIA is not just selling chips, but a full platform that can run across clouds and workloads worldwide. He said the company expects to remain a long-term partner to those customers.

Analysts also asked about open-source models. Huang said both open and closed models are growing quickly and that nearly all open models run on NVIDIA’s platform. He said the rise of open models is not a threat, but another source of demand.

Full transcript - NVIDIA Corporation (NVDA) Q2 2027....

***boilerplate*** 

....Colette Kress, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, NVIDIA: Thanks, Toshiya. We delivered another outstanding quarter with record revenue, operating income, and EPS. Total revenue of $96 billion more than doubled year-over-year as growth accelerated for the fourth consecutive quarter. The surge in AI demand is driving a global infrastructure build-out, supported by an expanding and diverse set of growth opportunities, spanning hyperscalers, AI labs, AI natives, enterprises, and sovereign customers. We expect to grow revenue by approximately 70% in fiscal 2028. This is a supply-constrained outlook. Q2 data center revenue increased 18% quarter-over-quarter to $89 billion, with strong contributions from both sub-segments, hyperscale and ACIE, which includes our NeoCloud, industrial, and enterprise customers. Hyperscale revenue of $49 billion grew 13% sequentially, driven by sustained strength in Blackwell.

Reinforcing that more compute drives more revenue as new GPU capacity comes online, our hyperscale customers delivered strong financial results in the quarter, with accelerating revenue growth and expanding margins. With cloud industry backlog now greater than $2 trillion, CapEx by the top five hyperscalers is expected to reach nearly $800 billion in 2026 and $1.3 trillion in 2027. Today, we are delighted to announce an expansion of our partnership with AWS. Building on its already vast installed base of NVIDIA Compute, AWS is deploying an additional 2 million GPUs starting this quarter through the second quarter of fiscal 2029, along with Vera CPUs, some integrated with Rubin, others standalone. AWS will serve NVIDIA Nemotron family of open models on Amazon Bedrock and SageMaker. Amazon will also adopt our full physical AI stack, Omniverse, Cosmos, Isaac, and Jetson to power its fleet of warehouse robots.

ACIE revenue of $40 billion increased 25% sequentially and 138% year-over-year. Growth was driven by NeoCloud capacity additions to meet the rising demand from enterprises, AI startups, and sovereigns, as well as hyperscalers purchasing capacity to supplement their own build-outs. Using NVIDIA DSX reference designs, our NeoCloud partners are bringing capacity online faster and at lower token cost. They are expected to exit the year with 8 gigawatts in total installed capacity, up from approximately 3 gigawatts at the end of 2025. Incredibly, we are seeing demand acceleration even at our scale. Customers’ forecasts point to our growth doubling next year. However, as I mentioned earlier, we expect to grow approximately 70% as we are supply-constrained. NVIDIA Compute is fully utilized across every cloud we serve. The economic value it generates for our hyperscale, NeoCloud, and AI lab partners keeps rising.

Besides building the best AI computing technologies and the most capable supply chain, NVIDIA has three unique capabilities that are engines powering our growth. First, NVIDIA’s architecture runs every model, and we’re growing share as closed and open model adoption grow. Closed and open models alike, adoption is skyrocketing. NVIDIA runs the leading closed models, OpenAI, Anthropic, Groq, Meta, Gemini, and the leading open models, Thinking Machines Lab, Mistral AI, Qwen, Kimi, GLM, DeepSeek, MiniMax, and Nemotron. We’re great at small models and giant ones, large or video, auto, regressive or diffusion, in the cloud or in the edge. NVIDIA is great at training, great at inference, great at agentic workloads. One platform, fungible for every model and workload. Durable for the entire life cycle of AI. That combination of performance, fungibility, and durability is what makes NVIDIA the productive and financiable compute infrastructure.

Our second unique capability is our full stack AI factory platform that is expanding our share of the data center TAM. Since Hopper, our revenue opportunity has grown from roughly $18 billion per gigawatt to $25 billion with Blackwell, to $40 billion with Vera Rubin, which now spans Vera CPU, Rubin GPU, NVLink, InfiniBand or Ethernet, and Groq LPU, announced earlier this week. Our ability to extreme co-design across GPU, CPU, NVLink scale-up networking, scale-out networking, systems, algorithms, and software enables us to deliver X factor performance gain every generation. Vera Rubin exemplifies this, delivering 30x higher throughput per megawatt and 35x lower token cost relative to Grace Blackwell Ultra. We commenced production shipments of Vera Rubin earlier this month. Having already received purchase orders from every major hyperscaler, AI cloud, and system OEM, we expect Vera Rubin to mark the fastest product ramp in NVIDIA’s history.

Our networking business had another record quarter, with revenue growing 18% on a sequential basis. Spectrum-X Ethernet, which grew 2.6x on a year-over-year basis, is already helping us become the largest and fastest-growing network company in the world. Rising adoption of agentic AI is driving an acceleration in demand for data center CPUs. Our Grace CPU, introduced in 2021, has been a great success, with revenue on a trailing 12-month basis exceeding $5 billion. Today, we are in full production of our next generation Vera CPU. As a standalone product, Vera expands our TAM even further. Vera completes agentic tasks 1.8x faster on the spec benchmark and provides five times the bandwidth per watt than any other data center CPU.

We expect Vera to be deployed by every major hyperscaler, NeoCloud, AI lab, and system OEM, with shipments already underway to our lead partners, including Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, SpaceX AI, and starting this quarter, AWS. We continue to see demand for approximately $20 billion in total server CPUs. Based on our customer demand and improving supply outlook, our preliminary expectation is for CPU revenue to more than double in fiscal 2028, positioning us as one of the world’s leading server CPU suppliers. Since the announcement of our Groq partnership last year, we’ve been working to unite NVIDIA’s high throughput and Groq’s high interactivity architectures. At Hot Chips earlier this week, we announced that Groq 3 LPX, our first rack-scale LPU system, is in full production and already setting records, demonstrating nearly 4x the number of tokens per second against the next best alternative on our Artificial Analysis benchmark....

....MUCH MORE 

In pre-market trade the stock is changing hands at $221.89 up $12.23 (+5.83%)

If interested Yahoo Finance has a truncated version of the call transcript.