Call it the baron of blue-chip stocks, the Wembanyama of Wall Street, or the twinkle of tech CEO’s eyes: Nvidia reported earnings yesterday that proved its chips are still very much in demand.

It was the company’s first time reporting since DeepSeek, a Chinese AI company, debuted a low-cost, open-source AI model in January that turned the industry on its head and sent Nvidia’s stock down 17% in a single session. Yesterday, CEO Jensen Huang sought to reassure investors that AI isn’t overhyped and that his company is still the driving force behind the technology:

• It reported quarterly earnings of $39.3 billion, a 78% increase compared to Q4 last year.
• Data center revenue, which investors use to gauge appetite for AI computing, nearly doubled, to $35.6 billion.
• Demand for Blackwell, Nvidia’s latest chip series, was “amazing,” per the company. Blackwell sales accounted for 28% of revenue, higher than anticipated given initial manufacturing issues.

Wall Street has a lot riding on this

Because its tech undergirds AI, the company’s performance is taken as a proxy for the health of the whole industry, so these quarterly numbers were highly anticipated. Investors have good reason to pay attention: 22% of the S&P’s gains last year could be attributed to Nvidia, compared to 6% from Amazon.

Nvidia beat expectations for sales and profits, but some investors didn’t consider the earnings to be the blowout they’ve gotten used to seeing from the company over the past two years. So after yo-yoing for a bit, the company’s stock ultimately fell slightly in after-hours trading yesterday as investors digested the report.

Looking ahead…while DeepSeek is still lurking, yesterday’s report has quieted industry concerns about the Chinese competitor. In its place are other worries, like the possibility of further trade restrictions on Nvidia’s exports to China, or how long Nvidia’s main customers, including Alphabet, Meta, and Amazon, will keep spending big on data centers for cloud computing.—CC

Ukraine’s Zelensky expected to come to US to sign minerals deal. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is said to be planning to come to Washington, DC, tomorrow to sign an agreement that gives the US access to his country’s mineral resources, after both countries agreed to a framework. But major issues surrounding Ukraine’s security remain undecided. Drafts of the agreement viewed by news outlets did not provide an explicit security guarantee from the US, stating only that the US “supports Ukraine’s efforts to obtain security guarantees needed to establish lasting peace.”

Deaths reported in Texas measles outbreak. An unvaccinated school-age child in West Texas has died in a measles outbreak that has sickened at least 124 people in Texas and spread to neighboring New Mexico, local health officials said yesterday. State health officials said many people infected in the outbreak were children who were not vaccinated against measles or whose vaccination status was unknown. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said a second person had also died. They are the first people to die from measles in the US in a decade.

Trump administration plans more federal worker layoffs. Senior officials released a memo yesterday directing government agencies to prepare plans for a reduction in force, which would mean terminating employees and eliminating the roles they had been in. The cuts could be deep: At his first Cabinet meeting of this term, President Trump suggested the EPA could cut 65% of its staff. The meeting was attended by Elon Musk, who is not a Cabinet member but is the face of Trump’s cost-cutting drive. The layoffs, which would impact employees with civil service protections, will likely draw legal challenges.—AR

The often-divided Supreme Court appeared to find itself in what Justice Neil Gorsuch called “radical agreement” during oral arguments yesterday, in a case over the standards for proving discrimination in the workplace against people from a majority group (e.g., straight, white, or male).

That’s good news for Marlean Ames, who alleges that her employer denied her a promotion and demoted her for being straight. Both the promotion she applied for and the role she held before demotion were given to gay people she claims were underqualified. Meanwhile, her employer claims she wasn’t given the job because she was abrasive and the department was reorganized.

Even if the justices decide the case unanimously in Ames’s favor, the high court wouldn’t be ruling that she was discriminated against (they’ll leave that question open for a lower court). Rather, SCOTUS is looking at the legality of some courts requiring members of a group that hasn’t historically suffered from discrimination to provide extra background evidence to prove that discrimination occurred, since reverse discrimination is presumed to be rare.

Big picture: Ames claims the outdated requirement impedes her and other individuals’ equal rights protections, a sentiment that echoes the 2023 argument that led SCOTUS to strike down affirmative action in college admissions. And while Ames’s case does not directly relate to workplace DEI initiatives, legal experts say it could open the floodgates for anti-DEI reverse discrimination lawsuits.—MM

More like AppHatin’: Investors are dumping shares of AppLovin, the mobile advertising company that surged more than 700% last year, after two short sellers announced positions against it this week over fraud concerns.

AppLovin’s stock fell 12% yesterday after Culper Research and Fuzzy Panda released their reports:

• They accused the company, which helps app developers with marketing, of boosting revenue by 1) exaggerating the prowess of its AI software, AXON, 2) auto-downloading the games it advertised without users’ consent, and 3) copying data from Meta.
• In a blog post, AppLovin CEO Adam Foroughi called the allegations “false and misleading” and said the company “is subject to App Store policies.”

AppLovin has largely attributed its success to AXON. Most of the stock’s 2024 gains happened in November after a banger earnings report that sang the software’s praises. Fuzzy Panda, however, condemned AXON as “the nexus of a House of Cards.”

Meanwhile…AppLovin outperformed Wall Street’s expectations last quarter, with ad revenue soaring 73% to nearly $1 billion. Last year’s rally ballooned AppLovin’s market cap north of $100 billion on less than $5 billion in full-year sales, which gives the company a relatively high valuation-to-revenue ratio, the newsletter Bear Cave noted last week.—ML

Podcasts are unlikely to be a modern refuge for smooth talkers with a face for radio because, increasingly, “wherever you get your podcasts” means YouTube. More than 1 billion people watch podcast content on the video site each month, putting it well ahead of Spotify and Apple’s Podcasts app in the race to be the top podcast destination, according to Bloomberg.

What’s turned your favorite podcasters (Neal and Toby included) into de facto YouTubers? YouTube’s parent company, Alphabet, told Bloomberg it was no accident but the result of its investments in the genre, which now has its own tag to help the site’s algorithm serve up the content to podcast fans. It’s been building for a while: In 2022, as Spotify shut down its in-house podcasting studio and laid off staff to curb expenses, YouTube began offering podcasters up to $300,000 to make video versions. Spotify has embraced video, too—it said in June that ~170 million people had watched a video podcast there, and it debuted new ways for creators to monetize their videos in January.—AR