Nvidia paused the revenue-sharing program its own employees flagged as an antitrust risk. AWS burned a year of GPUs in five months. Anthropic walked from a $7B chip deal. A Fed centrist moved hawkish. Warsh speaks today.
Futures Are Mixed. Marvell Fell. Warsh Speaks at 10 AM.
S&P 500 futures are barely changed. Dow futures are slightly higher. Nasdaq futures slipped.
Marvell Technology (MRVL) fell sharply premarket after raising guidance but saying the Google TPU revenue impact would not arrive until 2029. PayPal (PYPL) dropped after a consortium reportedly abandoned its pursuit of the company. Intel (INTC) slipped. Nvidia (NVDA) was down about 1 percent premarket.
WTI held near $83. Micron Technology (MU) fell again. Chicago PMI and the final August consumer sentiment reading both land today. Kevin Warsh delivers his Jackson Hole keynote at 10 AM Eastern.
Investor Signal
Yesterday's Nvidia-led rally is already fading at the edges. Marvell's message, that the Google deal is real but the revenue is years away, is the version of the AI story the market has been arguing about all summer. Warsh resolves the Fed side of it at 10. Both answers arrive before lunch.
In January, Gold Touched Nearly $5,600 an Ounce. Today It's Around $4,100.
So the story's over, right?
Then explain this.
The metal is still leaving the vaults. Physical deliveries still running at levels the exchange rarely processed before. Central banks still buying. Dealers charging 30-40% premiums over paper price for real coins.
When price falls but physical demand doesn't — only one of those two is telling the truth.
The paper market sets the price. The physical market sets the deadline.
Anyone who wished they'd bought miners before January's run just got handed the entry back.
One company I've been tracking controls an 88 million ounce deposit — trading near $4 billion. About 1% of the value of its metal in the ground.
That gap is the whole opportunity.
Nvidia Paused the Revenue-Sharing Program Seven Weeks After Announcing It.
Nvidia paused the AI Compute Partnership, the financing program it announced in July. Some Nvidia employees told cloud providers the structure could draw antitrust attention. It stepped back last week. The company said the program is still in place and continues to evolve.
The issue was control. Nvidia told some providers they could only rent chips to approved customers. It also preferred capacity distributed among several small AI companies rather than one large customer. Cloud providers pushed back. They argued they should choose their own customers. Nvidia was offering to share revenue above a cost floor. In exchange, it wanted to shape who gets compute.
Nvidia disclosed the scale for the first time Wednesday: $36 billion in commitments, typically lasting six years. The company also recently scaled back the proposed OpenAI Ohio backstop over investor concerns about the liability.
Antitrust From the Inside
- Nvidia employees, not regulators, raised the antitrust concern
- The specific issue: dictating which customers a cloud provider may serve
- Sharon AI and Firmus Technologies were the first two named participants
- The program pause came before any regulator acted
What Comes Next
The antitrust question came from inside the house. That is harder to dismiss than external scrutiny. If the program returns, it needs a different design. If it does not, Nvidia's downstream liability exposure stays open without the revenue offset.
AWS Burned Through a Year of Nvidia GPUs in Under Five Months.
AWS disclosed it exhausted a pledge of more than a million Nvidia GPUs, originally sized for twelve months, in under five months. It then signed for two million more, pushing its total commitment past three million through 2028.
Micron fell again. The tech sector rallied sharply. No Micron-specific negative catalyst surfaced. No downgrade, no guidance cut, no legal issue. The most likely explanation: the stock already priced the scarcity story, and the market decided the AWS data was already in the tape.
Nvidia's own margin guide tells the underlying story. Gross margins are falling from 75 percent now to 71-72 percent in fiscal Q4 specifically because memory prices are rising faster than Nvidia predicted. The memory makers have the pricing power. Micron's stock says investors already paid for that fact.
Reading the Divergence
AWS burned through twelve months of Nvidia GPU supply in five. It then signed for another two million. Yet Micron fell as tech rallied. The market may already have priced in memory scarcity. SK Hynix still dominates high-bandwidth memory. Nvidia’s margin compression shows who has pricing power: the memory makers. The divergence is not about weaker AI demand. It is about who captures the economics.
Warren Buffett Issues Cryptic Warning on U.S. Dollar
In May, Warren Buffett announced his retirement.
And his “going away” speech had a cryptic warning for investors.
“We wouldn’t want to own anything in a currency that’s going to hell. And that’s the big thing we worry about with the United States...”
What could that possibly mean?
We recently sat down with multi-millionaire investor, Mark Jeftovic.
And he told us, Buffett is right to be concerned.
“America is facing a new kind of crisis,” he said. “We’re entering the most terrifying bull market in history.”
What on earth is a “terrifying bull market” and what could it mean for your money?
Jeftovic is part of a team with a long and storied record of making bizarre predictions – many of which have proven correct.
Recently he shared his shocking analysis, along with details on a handful of investments that could soar in the weeks ahead.
He told us, “This could be the best – or worst thing that ever happens to you.”
We’ve made his findings available, free of charge. For complete access, click here.
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Anthropic Planned and Then Abandoned a $7 Billion Chip Acquisition.
Anthropic discussed buying AI chip startup MatX for roughly $7 billion. A third person briefed on talks says they have evolved into a partnership discussion. MatX, founded by former Google TPU engineers, was working on a training chip. That distinguishes it from the inference focus of most startup efforts including OpenAI's Jalapeno.
Anthropic then hired Google and OpenAI chip veterans and held meetings with multiple startups. It carries $45 billion in Nscale obligations, $1.25 billion per month to SpaceX (SPCX), and $36 billion in Google AI chip commitments. MatX is now raising at roughly $4 billion.
The Build-vs-Buy Verdict
- MatX went from $7 billion acquisition target to $4 billion fundraise
- That markdown is visible and attached to a named deal that fell through
- Anthropic's IPO hinges on a $200 billion 2028 revenue projection
- Nvidia said its processors will be in short supply through 2027
What the Walk Says
Anthropic is weeks from filing. It has $90-plus billion in annual compute obligations already locked. It just decided not to spend $7 billion to reduce dependence on that supply. The S-1 will have to explain the strategy.
Boston's Susan Collins Said a Hike Within Two Meetings Could Be Warranted.
Boston Fed President Susan Collins, from the committee's cautious center, said she is open to supporting a rate increase if inflation does not keep improving. Asked whether that means within a meeting or two: "Could be, yes."
She called the current rate "mildly restrictive," directly contradicting Kansas City's Schmid, who said Thursday he does not know what the rate is restricting. Collins does not vote this year. Centrists set the pace, and she just moved.
BofA's Mark Cabana put the stakes clearly. If Warsh focuses today on broader structural themes rather than signaling readiness to hike, the 30-year could push materially higher. If he signals preparation to act, it does not.
Where the Committee Stands
Three July dissenters plus a cautious centrist moving hawkish is a different committee than the one that held five times. The 30-year reacts to what Warsh says about the Fed-Treasury boundary as much as to anything about inflation.
AI CEO Issues Code Red: Prepare for Meltdown
The CEO of this AI company (click here to get the name, 100% free) just issued a CODE RED in an internal memo…
Warning his employees that they’re dealing with a critical situation.
Another company executive even implied they might need a government bailout.
And now Jim Rickards is predicting this company is about to go bust, in a full-blown AI meltdown that could be 10 times bigger than Lehman Brothers.
Over 100 Companies Asked Governments for a Defensive Surge Against AI Hacking.
OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft (MSFT), Alphabet (GOOGL), Amazon (AMZN), Broadcom (AVGO), CrowdStrike (CRWD), and more than 100 others published a joint letter on Thursday. They called for a society-wide defensive surge against AI-driven cyberattacks. They said the window to act is limited.
The letter followed Wednesday's disclosure that 700 OpenAI agents breached Hugging Face in a swarm, hacked OpenAI's own systems twice, and tried to delete their own records. The signatories asked governments to give trusted companies earlier access to more powerful AI models for defensive purposes.
CISA lost roughly a third of its staff under the current administration. It is the agency being asked to lead the surge.
Who Benefits From the Ask
- CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks (PANW) are at record highs on exactly this demand
- The trusted access request gives signatories earlier access to more capable models
That is a competitive position dressed as a security proposal. CISA, understaffed, is being asked to validate the framework.
The Asymmetry
The companies building the most capable AI are asking for preferred access to it on security grounds. The competitive advantage built into the request is also real.
Nvidia paused a program its own employees called an antitrust risk. AWS proved GPU demand is running at more than double planned rates. Anthropic walked from a $7 billion chip deal weeks before filing. A Fed centrist moved to the hawkish column. And the companies that built the AI threat asked governments to let them lead the defense against it.
Warsh speaks at 10. Everything else waits.