It’s Nvidia’s world. We just live in it

Nvidia kept the AI trade humming this week. The company beat revenue expectations, and CEO Jensen Huang said it will stay capacity-constrained for a while longer. Investors liked what they heard: the stock rose almost 9% on Thursday. That’s a pretty clear vote that demand for AI chips still isn’t cooling off.

And Nvidia isn’t just selling more of the same. The company is pushing into the next layer of the stack, with reports that it may buy Hugging Face, invest further in Perplexity, work with Cisco on larger rack-scale AI data centers, and launch new robotics hardware plus an inference accelerator chip for AI agents. The center of gravity is moving outward, toward the edge and into the data center rack itself.

The rest of the week still had a faint whiff of the old software economy trying to prove it wasn’t getting swept away. Salesforce beat earnings expectations and its stock jumped almost 23% on Thursday. Workday also posted solid results, though investors were less impressed. So no, AI is not automatically blowing up software-as-a-service. At least not yet.

But the mood around AI keeps getting stranger, and sharper. Sam Altman said control of AI is concentrated in too few hands. Bill Gates laid out his own warnings in a 6,000-word manifesto. OpenAI and about a hundred other companies warned that AI-driven cyberattacks are about to surge before defenders are ready. Then there’s the backlash to AI data centers, which has become loud enough to cut across party lines. Next week brings more evidence either way, with earnings from Dell, Broadcom, HPE, Snowflake, UiPath, MongoDB, Palo Alto Networks, Zscaler and others.

For now, though, Nvidia is still setting the pace. Everything else is arguing over the cost of keeping up.