The excitement over Nvidia’s earnings announcement on Wednesday, August 26th, is building. The analyst community is estimating 97% sales growth to $92.1 billion and 99% earnings growth of $2.09 per share. Due to the anticipation of Nvidia’s spectacular quarterly results, plus the fact that the financial media will be all excited about their annual trip to Jackson Hole for the annual Kansas City Fed Conference, investor optimism is expected to be sky-high next week.
Nvidia is clearly becoming more vertically integrated in data center development, which should ensure its market dominance for decades. The Wall Street Journal reported that Nvidia () is in advanced talks to acquire an interest in Cloverleaf Infrastructure, a company that arranges power for data centers. The WSJ said that Cloverleaf has been working with J.P. Morgan to explore strategic options, including a potential sale of the business. Cloverleaf’s specialty is signing power agreements with utilities so that developers can build on land with access to reliable power. Over the past two years, it has sold projects comprising more than 7 gigawatts of powered land to data center developers.
In addition, a few days ago, Nvidia took an equity interest in ’s SB Energy, which was a deal tied to a megacampus in Ohio that OpenAI leased for 20 years. Also, earlier this year, Nvidia made a $2 billion investment into Lancium, the power developer behind a campus in Abilene, Texas, where OpenAI rents computing capacity from Oracle.
Walmart’s () announcement of 2.6% same-store sales growth in the second quarter was disappointing. Even though WMT exceeded analysts’ consensus sales and earnings estimates, its sales guidance was below analyst consensus estimates. What is happening is that Walmart’s dominance in food retailing is being increasingly challenged by and other food retailers. The good news is that these price wars will help to reduce food costs and inflationary fears, but Walmart is now being challenged by other retailers with improving results, like Target ().