Bloomberg - Evening Briefing - ‘Printing money’

Nvidia’s surge to an all-time high is the biggest single-session increase of market value in history, besting Meta’s historic gain just three weeks ago. Shares of the chipmaker jumped 16% Thursday, adding about $277 billion in market capitalization and bringing its total market value near
$2 trillion. The addition eclipsed the $197 billion gain made by Facebook-parent Meta at the start of the month.

Nvidia shares surged after it reported blowout results that cemented Wall Street bets on the potential for its artificial intelligence technologies. The chipmaker also gave guidance above expectations, driven by AI spending at its biggest customers, including Microsoft and Meta. “The company is printing money at this point,” said Stacy Rasgon an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein. “And the prospect for continued growth from here still seems solid.” —David E. Rovella

Nvidia’s earnings have assured the market that AI mania is still going strong. It might also make the stock look cheaper. All eyes were on the chipmaker’s guidance for signs about the strength of the AI market, and Nvidia didn’t disappoint. With the numbers now in, bulls are swiftly calculating the stock’s new price-to-earnings ratio, or how much investors are paying for future growth. “Some investors have been scared to buy because they think the stock is too expensive, but that’s been a huge mistake,” said James Demmert, chief investment officer at Main Street Research. “Every time it reports, the P/E shrinks because the E ends up being so much stronger than people expect.”

Cathie Wood made a wild prediction almost two years ago: Annual economic growth could accelerate to as much as 50%, thanks to breakthroughs in AI. Yet as the frenzy intensifies across Wall Street thanks to Nvidia’s stellar earnings report, Wood’s flagship ARK Innovation exchange-traded fund is missing out in epic fashion—down nearly 8% so far this year.

AT&T said its mobile network had been restored after a widespread outage Thursday as the FBI and US Department of Homeland Security began investigating why tens of thousands of wireless subscribers lost service. At one point, AT&T customers had filed more than 70,000 outage reports. The cause of the hours-long disruption, and whether it was related to a cyberattack, is not yet clear. One beneficiary of the calamity were all those people still working from home, who kept busy on their Wi-Fi.

Venture firm Andreessen Horowitz invested $100 million in crypto startup EigenLayer, a sign that some of the industry’s top backers are still betting on blockchain despite a steep downturn in crypto venture funding. Andreessen Horowitz was one of the top deal-makers for crypto venture funding last year and raised a record $4.5 billion crypto fund in 2022. Still actively pursuing investments in the space, General Partner Ali Yahya said EigenLayer is an important player in the crypto industry.

US President Joe Biden’s increasingly strong attacks on Republican candidate Donald Trump as well as Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin continued this week. The Democrat called Putin, who the US says is considering placing nuclear weapons in orbit, a “crazy SOB” and pilloried Trump for likening himself to Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny, whose death last week Biden laid squarely at Putin’s feet. The president’s comments, made at a pair of West Coast fundraisers, also included an angry assessment of the Republican Party—specifically its far-right members. “I’ve served with real racists. I served with Strom Thurmond. I served with all these guys that have set terrible records on race,” Biden said. “But guess what? These guys are worse.” 

A huge trove of documents appeared to outline in extraordinary detail the scope of China’s state-sponsored cyberattacks on foreign governments. The documents, which industry experts believe to be authentic, appeared to reveal successful attacks on a series of high-value government targets in 2021 and 2022, from the UK foreign office to the Royal Thai Army and even NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg.

An ex-partner at Bridgewater Associates accused the world’s largest hedge fund of favoritism as well as age and sex discrimination, the second such complaint from a senior executive in recent months. The partner, Jeff Gardner, 53, was fired from Bridgewater in December after working there for almost three decades,  according to a filing in Connecticut Superior Court. He made the filing along with Paul Ross, 43, a former senior executive who previously submitted a similar complaint to Bridgewater’s board. Their accusations stem from Chief Executive Officer Nir Bar Dea’s past office romance with another Bridgewater employee and a restructuring of the firm last year that ousted Gardner and Ross from their roles, according to the filing. 

Nir Bar Dea Photographer: Noam Galai/Getty Images North America

• Israel says it still plans to empty Rafah before its planned attack.
• Iran-backed Houthis prepare for long Red Sea battle with America.
• T-bills without tax bills? This fund says it cracked the code.
• Bloomberg Opinion: Japan and Nvidia reach points of no return.
• Bloomberg Opinion: Russia’s big new threat is underwater, not in space.
• Google pauses AI-made images of people after race inaccuracies.
• Yale brings back SAT testing as an academic reversal continues. 

Property lenders have often been willing to work with borrowers since the pandemic upended commercial real estate. Increasingly, their patience is running out. There were 635 US commercial real estate foreclosures in January, up 17% from the previous month and roughly twice as many as in January 2023. Meanwhile, borrowers are grappling with higher interest rates and shifting work trends that have cratered demand for office buildings. In the mini-documentary The Time Bomb in Empty Office Buildings, Bloomberg Originals explores how the 2008 financial crisis sowed the seeds of the commercial real estate crisis—a crisis that could soon morph into something bigger.

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Bloomberg Power Players Jeddah: Set against the backdrop of the Formula One Saudi Arabian Grand Prix, Bloomberg Power Players Jeddah on March 7 will bring together some of the most influential voices in sports, entertainment and technology as we identify the next potential wave of disruption for the multibillion dollar world of sports, media and investment. Join powerbrokers, senior executives, leading investors and world-class athletes who are transforming the business of sports. Learn more.