Bloomberg Tech
2026-08-13 · Hosted by Caroline Hyde, Ed Ludlow · Bloomberg / iHeartMedia
Executive Summary
Tech stocks rallied on the back of blowout AI infrastructure earnings, with CoreWeave up as much as 17% and on track for its best day since June 2025, and Super Micro Computer up 12-13% after guiding to as much as $15.5 billion in current-quarter revenue — above even the most bullish estimates. Rosenblatt's Sajal Doggrove raised his Super Micro price target to $51 from $45, citing margin inflection despite an ongoing DOJ investigation into alleged diversion of Nvidia chips to China. Nebius jumped as investors cheered a major Microsoft/New Jersey data center contract delivered on schedule.
Key Stories & Changes
1. CoreWeave and Super Micro Earnings Ignite AI Infrastructure Rally
CoreWeave shares up as much as 17%, on track for best single-day since June 2025, after third-quarter sales guidance beat Street expectations
Operating income and margins improving; company able to extract strong pricing even on older Nvidia chips (some from 2020 still selling through 2029 per commentary on the earnings call)
Super Micro Computer shares up 12-13%; guided to as much as $15.5 billion in current-quarter revenue, above even the highest Street estimates
Rosenblatt's Sajal Doggrove: revenue has compounded at a ~60% CAGR over five years and 75%+ over the past two years; raised price target to $51 from $45
Gross margins, which averaged 15% historically, fell below 10% amid tariffs and supply constraints, but have been above 10% for the past six months and are modeled to reach 11% next year (Street is below 10%)
Enterprise "one-stop building block" sales mix rising from under 5% of profit to an expected 20%+ by year-end, aiding margins
Legal overhang persists: U.S. prosecutors charged Super Micro and a founder in March with illegally diverting Nvidia gear to China; investigation ongoing despite a completed capital raise and filed 10-Qs
CRWV: CoreWeave — +17% — Best day since June 2025 on strong Q3 sales guide and margin improvement
SMCI: Super Micro — +12-13% — Guided to $15.5B revenue, above bullish estimates; breakout after six-seven quarters of misses
NBIS: Nebius — Sharply higher — Microsoft/New Jersey data center contract delivered on schedule despite NIMBY concerns
2317.TW: Hon Hai (Foxconn) — N/A — Net income +35% to ~$1.9B, topping estimates on AI demand
2. Morgan Stanley: AI Compute Still Structurally Under-Supplied
Michelle Weaver (Morgan Stanley U.S. Thematic Research): compute remains "very constrained"; 25% of S&P 500 companies can now quantify AI adoption benefits, up from 14% a year ago
Median AI user spends less than $11/month on tokens — "token maxing" culture declining among power users, but typical spend remains modest
Biggest bottleneck is labor (electricians, specialized data-center labor), followed by power: an estimated 40-gigawatt shortfall through 2028, with a 10-20% shortfall even after accounting for innovative time-to-power solutions
NIMBY/anti-data-center sentiment grouped into three buckets: power-bill concerns, environmental (water/air) concerns, and local quality-of-life concerns; New York was first state to pass a data-center moratorium
Weaver sees no signs of oversupply risk within the next few years given persistent bottlenecks
Expects a "hybrid state" where closed and open models coexist; 63% of companies already use both, and U.S. firms show hesitancy toward foreign open-weight models on security/regulatory grounds
3. Bank of America Commits $250 Billion to U.S. Infrastructure Build-Out
New $250 billion commitment through July 2027, inclusive of (not additional to) its existing $1.5 trillion ten-year sustainable-initiatives pledge
Spans lending, capital markets, and advisory — not solely balance-sheet deployment
Follows a wave of similar bank commitments (JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley) and Nvidia's $500 billion financing initiative with six Wall Street firms announced this week
4. Silicon Data Raises $30.5 Million to Build Independent AI Compute Benchmarks
CEO Carmen Lee: firm aims to be the "independent referee" for AI compute pricing and performance, backed by Gavin Baker/Valor Equity, CME, F-Prime (Fidelity), Benak, DRW, and Jump Trading
CME plans to launch GPU futures on October 5, cash-settled against Silicon Data's H100 and B200 (new-cloud on-demand) indices
Use case: GPU owners hedge rental-rate volatility by shorting futures; compute consumers lock in future pricing by going long
A100 and H100 prices have been stable over the past 20 days, down about 20% since January; older chips retain economic value via secondary/smaller-workload use
Three signals Lee flagged as early indicators of AI infrastructure oversupply: falling spot/rental prices, a steeply backwardated forward curve (vs. today's contango), and falling residual/secondary-market server values
5. Corporate & Startup Moves
AI startup Cognition in early talks that could value the firm at $40 billion, less than three months after raising $1 billion at a $26 billion valuation
Chinese AI startup Manus resumes independent operations after Beijing forced Meta to unwind a planned $2 billion acquisition over tech-control concerns
OpenAI executive Brad Lightcap departing to start a new venture after joining in 2018
Uber divested its stake in Serve Robotics amid disagreements over delivery-robot deployment; exclusive Waymo AV partnership runs through early 2028
Thrive Capital raising $3.5 billion across four new early-stage funds, including a $1.35 billion expansion fund targeting the US, Europe, Israel, and India
Foundation Capital's John Chen: firm invests in "exceptional people" pre-product/pre-revenue; cited Cerebras (incubated in-house, went public ~3 months ago) as an example; sees AI enabling "the great reorg" toward smaller, more capable teams alongside new AI-native use cases
Google's Made By Google event unveiled the Pixel 11 lineup, citing a "severe memory shortage" for higher prices and lower base memory; centerpiece is an agentic Gemini assistant; also introduced non-diagnostic insulin-resistance tracking via AI and biometric sensors
AI music startup Suno (valued above $5 billion) faces lawsuits from Universal Music Group and Sony Music over copyright infringement, after Warner and BMG settled; concerns raised about "AI slop" flooding streaming platforms
Trends Identified
1. Neo Cloud and AI Infrastructure Earnings Are Driving the Broad Tape
CoreWeave, Nebius, and Super Micro all posted results that beat even bullish forecasts on both revenue and forward guidance, and the market rewarded them sharply. Bloomberg's Ryan Blastellica noted the strength extended to hardware and optical names like Lumentum, reinforcing that the AI infrastructure trade "remains very strong" and is lifting sentiment across the broader tech tape, even as Nvidia itself continues climbing on the read-through.
2. Supply, Not Demand, Remains the Constraint on AI Growth
Morgan Stanley's Weaver and Silicon Data's Lee both independently described a market where demand is outpacing available compute, power, and labor rather than the reverse. Capital is increasingly available — via bank commitments, Nvidia's $500 billion financing consortium, and fresh VC funds — but physical bottlenecks (electricians, grid capacity, community pushback) are what will actually govern the pace of build-out through at least 2028.
3. Compute Is Becoming a Financialized Asset Class
The combination of Nvidia's $500 billion financing framework, Silicon Data's new benchmarking indices, and CME's planned October 5 GPU futures contracts signals that AI compute is being formalized into a tradeable, hedgeable asset class much like commodities. This gives both GPU owners and consumers new tools to manage price risk, but also introduces new interdependencies between chipmakers, cloud providers, and financial markets.
4. Legacy Chip Utilization Undercuts the "Rapid Obsolescence" Narrative
Multiple guests — CoreWeave executives (via Bloomberg reporting), Rosenblatt's Doggrove, and Silicon Data's Lee — pointed to sustained high utilization and stable pricing for older Nvidia chips (A100s, even older 40-series parts), with sell-through commitments extending years into the future. This challenges the bearish view that depreciation will quickly erode Neo Cloud economics. ---
Sentiment Analysis
Overall Market Sentiment: Bullish on AI Infrastructure
Guests and hosts were unanimously upbeat about the earnings-driven AI infrastructure rally, though several flagged supply bottlenecks and legal/regulatory overhangs as risks to monitor rather than reasons to be bearish.
Risk Factors Highlighted
Power shortfall: Morgan Stanley estimates a ~40-gigawatt power shortfall through 2028, with a residual 10-20% gap even after time-to-power innovations.
Labor bottleneck: A severe shortage of electricians and specialized data-center labor is described as the single largest constraint on build-out speed.
Super Micro China investigation: DOJ probe into alleged illegal diversion of Nvidia chips to China remains unresolved despite a completed capital raise.
NIMBY/regulatory pushback: State-level moratoriums (New York first) and community opposition to data centers could spread ahead of the midterms.
Regulatory wildcard on open-weight models: Potential U.S. restrictions on foreign open-weight model providers create business-continuity risk for enterprises that have already invested in fine-tuning them.
Suno copyright litigation: Universal Music Group and Sony Music lawsuits over copyright infringement threaten the AI music startup's business model.
AI content quality ("AI slop"): Rapid growth in AI-generated song volume raises concerns about diluting platforms like Spotify and YouTube.
This episode was covered in today's [The Market Signal — 2026-08-13](https://marketsignal.beehiiv.com/p/the-market-signal-2026-08-13), a cross-source synthesis of multiple podcast reports.