Nvidia credit risk gauge hits new peak as SoftBank readies record bond issue

Nvidia's supply commitments surged to $279B, driven by memory needs, impacting its gross margins (75% in Q2, expected to drop to 71%-72%). Micron, a key memory supplier, reported strong fiscal Q3 results ($41.46B revenue, $28.24B net income) and high margins (83%-87%). Micron's HBM4 memory is critical for Nvidia's AI chips, creating a supply bottleneck. Micron's CEO noted HBM's high wafer consumption limits conventional DRAM supply, affecting industries like smartphones.

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang highlighted memory and silicon photonics as AI bottlenecks, with Micron, Coherent, and Tower Semiconductor positioned to benefit. Micron leads in high-bandwidth memory, Coherent supplies photonics components, and Tower Semiconductor manufactures wafers. NVIDIA expects 70% revenue growth, and analysts note supply constraints and pricing power in these sectors.

Iambic Therapeutics, backed by Nvidia and Qatar's sovereign wealth fund, filed for a US IPO. The biotech company develops drugs using AI, with its lead candidate in early-stage trials for solid tumors. Iambic has raised $461.8M and plans to list on Nasdaq as 'IAM'.

Amazon's AWS division plans to buy over 3 million Nvidia GPUs by 2029, including 2 million Blackwell Ultra, Rubin, and Rubin Ultra GPUs. This follows a previous commitment of over 1 million GPUs. Amazon has approximately 1.58 million employees, with a smaller share working in AWS data centers. The deal includes 100,000 GPUs for US government AI workloads. AWS revenue grew 37% year over year to $42.2 billion in Q2.

Nvidia (NVDA) agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, gaining access to its vast AI ecosystem with 3 million models and 18 million developers. The deal highlights a trend of tech giants acquiring strategic startups to accelerate their AI and robotics capabilities, as building these internally would take years. Other potential acquisition targets include AI safety and security startups, proprietary data providers, and robotics companies.

Nvidia is investing an additional $1.5 billion in SB Energy, bringing its total equity commitment to $3 billion ahead of SB Energy's planned $50 billion IPO. SB Energy, a SoftBank-backed energy and data center company, aims to raise $5-7 billion on Nasdaq under the ticker SBE. The Ohio campus, leased to OpenAI, requires exclusive use of Nvidia chips and has a capacity of 4.25 gigawatts, expandable to 8 gigawatts.