Huang Is Out, Anthropic Is Listing, and the AI Trade Faces Its Test
The companies that build artificial intelligence systems sell picks and shovels to everyone else, so their results read like a scan of the whole industry. Two of the biggest tests arrive within days of each other. Nvidia reports Tuesday after the close, and Anthropic is heading for the Nasdaq, with shares expected to start trading as soon as Thursday or Friday.
The first report after Huang
Jensen Huang resigned on Thursday, Nov. 12, effective immediately, after co-founding the chipmaker in 1993. Chief financial officer Colette Kress now holds the interim chief executive job while keeping her own.
Kress has explained Nvidia's numbers to investors for 13 years, and the company hasn't said who will speak on the call. Results arrive at about 4:20 PM ET on Nov. 17.
The board's probe concerns Huang's ties to a former Megaspeed executive, and the FBI is investigating the affair. What the chipmaker loses has its own story.
In August, the company guided to third-quarter revenue of $108B, plus or minus 2%, with a gross margin of 74%. MarketBeat's consensus sat at $108.8B of revenue and $2.47 in earnings.
Nvidia's Revenue Guide Keeps Climbing
Nvidia quarterly revenue, $B: fiscal second quarter reported, third quarter guidance
Bar chart. Revenue ($B). Q2 Reported: Revenue ($B) $96.2. Q3 Guided: Revenue ($B) $108.
Source: Source: 247wallst
That guide assumed no data center compute revenue from China. The next quarter's forecast will be the first one set without Huang.
Suppliers are buying the IPO
In an updated filing, Anthropic set the terms for its share sale, offering 825M shares of Class A common stock at $70 to $78 each and raising up to $64.35B. The company's Nov. 10 announcement calls it a proposed offering, and the registration statement has not yet become effective.
Google, Nvidia, AMD, Broadcom, Micron, Microsoft, and TSMC are putting in a combined $26B through a private placement, a direct sale of stock to chosen investors, at the IPO price. Every one of them sells chips, memory, or cloud capacity to Anthropic, so its biggest suppliers are also becoming shareholders.
The business underneath is growing fast and losing enormous sums. Anthropic generated $33.24B in revenue for the nine months ended Sept. 30, up roughly 1,200% from a year earlier.
It also booked a $104B net loss over that stretch, most of it from changes in the fair value of convertible notes and derivative liabilities. The commitments came a week after a selloff in AI stocks, when the Nasdaq Composite shed about $2.5T in value following the US midterm elections. The AI money crunch has its own story.
Where the margins are slipping
Cisco posted record revenue of $18.5B, up 24%, its fastest revenue growth in over 15 years. Product gross margin on a generally accepted accounting principles basis fell to 61.8% from 64.5% a year earlier.
The networking company raised its expectation for AI infrastructure revenue from hyperscalers, the biggest cloud providers, to $9B in fiscal 2027, more than double the fiscal 2026 total.
Cerebras Systems grew core revenue 70% to $230.9M, slower than the 103% growth it logged in the second quarter. The chip challenger said on its Thursday conference call that Microsoft, one of the world's top cloud providers, signed a deal in October, with revenue beginning to show up in the first quarter of 2027.
Cerebras guided to fourth-quarter core gross margin of 47% to 49%, above the 42.1% analysts expected. Chief executive Andrew Feldman pointed to long lead times and higher prices on rival graphics processing units, or GPUs, as an opportunity for his hardware.
The AI Infrastructure Earnings Wave Keeps Building
Latest reported quarter revenue in billions of dollars: Cerebras $0.23B, Cisco $18.5B, CoreWeave $3.66B
Line chart. Revenue ($B). Cerebras: Revenue ($B) $0.2. Cisco: Revenue ($B) $18.5. CoreWeave: Revenue ($B) $3.7.
Source: Source: Cerebras, Cisco and CoreWeave quarterly reports
What the backlog shows
CoreWeave booked revenue of $3.66B, up 168% from $1.36B a year earlier. The rental cloud operator lifted its full-year outlook to between $13.0B and $13.3B, now sees $1.275B to $1.375B in adjusted operating income, and still recorded a net loss of $709M.
Its revenue backlog, the contracted work not yet delivered, now stands at $132.5B, up from $104B in June. Anthropic, one of its customers, plans a Nasdaq debut this month.
Backlog and revenue growth prove demand, not future revenue or profit. CoreWeave's backlog still has to become delivered work before it counts as revenue, and Cisco's margin slipped even as its sales hit a record.
Nvidia's report on Tuesday and Anthropic's debut could show which layer of the AI trade keeps its pricing power. For now, the industry is posting record sales alongside falling margins and billion-dollar losses.
