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👉 Week in Review — Too Long; Didn’t Read:
Key Earnings Announcements:
Nvidia guided to $675B in 2028 revenue.
Salesforce’s AI-specific revenue crossed $4 billion.
Crowdstrike believes AI agents will be a massive tailwind for the business.
Investor Events / Global Affairs:
Fed Chair Kevin Warsh sent rate-hike expectations soaring at Jackson Hole.
The world’s biggest technology companies unveiled their next generation of AI chips.
The U.S.–Canada trade war escalated.
Economic Updates:
The Fed’s favorite inflation gauge remains above target.
The latest GDP report showed surprisingly strong consumer spending and corporate profits.
Let’s dive right in!
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👉 Key Earnings Announcements:
Nvidia guided to $675B in 2028 revenue, Salesforce’s AI-specific revenue crossed $4 billion, and Crowdstrike believes AI agents will be a massive tailwind for the business.
Nvidia (NVDA)
Key Metrics
Revenue: $96.2 billion, an increase of +106% YoY
Operating Income: $63.73 billion, an increase of +124% YoY
Profits: $59.69 billion, an increase of +126% YoY
Earnings Release Callout
“AI has reached its inflection point. It’s doing useful work. Its tokens are productive and profitable. Now, compute is revenue.
And demand is accelerating. This time last year, one lab alone was driving the buildout; today, we have a golden age of new AI labs and startups, multiple frontier labs scaling in parallel, a thriving open-model ecosystem and physical AI coming online — with strong momentum across the U.S. and around the world. The AI infrastructure buildout is at full steam. Vera Rubin, now in full production, was built to power exactly this moment.”
My Takeaway
NVIDIA reported another record quarter as global AI infrastructure spending continued to accelerate. Revenue more than doubled YoY to $96.2 billion, while operating income climbed 124% as the company maintained a 75% gross margin despite the massive increase in scale.
Data Center remained the overwhelming growth engine, generating $89.0 billion in revenue, an increase of 117% YoY, driven by the continued ramp of Blackwell Ultra. Hyperscale revenue more than doubled to $48.7 billion, while AI Clouds, Industrial and Enterprise revenue surged 138% to $40.3 billion as AI-native companies, enterprises and sovereign customers expanded infrastructure deployments.
Edge Computing revenue increased 27% to $7.2 billion, supported by strong demand for Blackwell workstations, partially offset by softer consumer PC sales amid elevated memory and system prices. Less than 1% of Data Center revenue came from Hopper products shipped to customers in China, highlighting how little China contributed to the quarter's overall growth.
Management focused heavily on the transition from Blackwell to Vera Rubin during the earnings call. NVIDIA began production shipments of Vera Rubin earlier this month and has already received purchase orders from every major hyperscaler, AI cloud and system OEM. Management expects Rubin to represent roughly 20% of Data Center revenue next quarter and believes it could become the fastest product ramp in NVIDIA's history. The executive team also noted that customer forecasts imply demand could support roughly twice as much growth next year, although NVIDIA currently expects fiscal 2028 revenue to grow approximately 70% because supply remains constrained. This forward guidance is what sent their stock soaring by double-digits on Thursday.
Looking ahead, management expects third-quarter revenue of $108.0 billion alongside a gross margin of approximately 74%. NVIDIA is assuming no Data Center compute revenue from China in its guidance. Management also warned that surging memory costs could pressure gross margins further, with margins expected to bottom between 71% and 72% in the fourth quarter before improving.
Very long NVDA.
Salesforce (CRM)
Key Metrics
Revenue: $11.35 billion, an increase of +11% YoY
Operating Income: $2.33 billion, compared to $2.33 billion last year
Profits: $3.53 billion, an increase of +87% YoY
Earnings Release Callout
“We just delivered one of our best quarters ever, outperforming across every key metric.
AI is delivering value across every layer of our platform. We’re seeing incredible demand for our AI and data products, with ARR about to cross $4 billion. And with AIforce, our trusted enterprise harness, we’re unlocking the data, workflows, business logic, actions, and governance inside Salesforce and making it available to every agent, model, and interface. This is how we are turning AI into customer success at unprecedented scale."
My Takeaway
Salesforce reported a record quarter as momentum across Agentforce, Data 360 and Slack helped accelerate new bookings and current remaining performance obligations. Revenue increased 11% YoY to $11.35 billion while cRPO climbed 14% to $33.5 billion. GAAP profits jumped sharply, although results benefited significantly from gains across Salesforce's strategic investment portfolio.
Agentforce Apps generated $7.19 billion in subscription and support revenue, growing 8% on a constant-currency basis, supported by momentum in Slack and continued resilience across Sales and Service. Data 360, Headless Platform and Other revenue increased 20% to $3.62 billion, driven by Data 360 and Informatica, which contributed $456.0 million to total quarterly revenue.
Salesforce's AI products continued scaling rapidly. Agentforce and Data 360 annual recurring revenue reached nearly $3.9 billion, up more than 210% YoY, while Agentforce ARR exceeded $1.5 billion. Slack also posted its fastest quarterly net new annual order value growth since the acquisition, while Slackbot users increased more than 150% sequentially.
Management emphasized that these improvements are beginning to translate into broader organic growth. Net new annual order value growth was the strongest in four years, while customer attrition remained near record lows. The executive team said strong bookings across Agentforce, Data 360 and Slack are keeping Salesforce on track for organic revenue growth to reaccelerate during the second half of the year.
Looking ahead, management expects third-quarter revenue between $11.42 billion and $11.50 billion alongside approximately 14% cRPO growth. Salesforce also raised full-year revenue guidance to between $46.1 billion and $46.4 billion, with $100.0 million of the increase attributed to stronger organic performance and another $200.0 million expected from the pending acquisitions of Contentful and Fin.
Long CRM.
Crowdstrike (CRWD)
Key Metrics
Revenue: $1.47 billion, an increase of +26% YoY
Operating Loss: -$33.2 million, compared to -$105.5 million last year
Profits: $5.3 million, compared to a net loss of -$70.2 million last year
Earnings Release Callout
“CrowdStrike delivered the best quarter in our history, with record net new ARR, accelerating Falcon Flex adoption, and strong momentum across our platform. We are seeing customers consolidate more of their security stack with CrowdStrike as they respond to the rapidly expanding AI attack surface, making AI security one of our largest market opportunities.”
My Takeaway
CrowdStrike reported what management called the best quarter in company history as accelerating demand for its cybersecurity platform drove record net new annual recurring revenue.
Revenue increased 26% YoY to $1.47 billion, while ending ARR reached $5.84 billion, up 25%. More importantly, net new ARR surged 51% to a record $333.0 million, exceeding the high end of management's previous guidance by more than $45.0 million.
Falcon Flex was one of the biggest drivers of the quarter. Ending ARR from customers using Flex exceeded $2.29 billion, growing 101% YoY, while CrowdStrike added more than 935 Flex accounts during the quarter — more than it added over the previous three quarters combined. Customers moving from traditional subscriptions into Flex generated an average ending ARR uplift of more than 40%, helping CrowdStrike deepen adoption across its broader platform.
Momentum also broadened across CrowdStrike's newer security businesses. Cloud ending ARR surpassed $905.0 million, Next-Gen Identity grew 33% YoY, and Next-Gen SIEM approached $700.0 million in ARR while growing 60%. AI Detection and Response was another standout, with ending ARR nearly tripling sequentially as enterprises increasingly looked to monitor and secure the rapid proliferation of AI agents across their networks.
Management focused heavily on AI as a structural cybersecurity tailwind during the earnings call. CEO George Kurtz said CrowdStrike has seen more than 400% growth in Claude usage and more than 100% growth in custom-agent usage across sampled customer endpoints in recent months. The executive team believes this growing agentic attack surface is accelerating demand across endpoint, identity, cloud and AI security, while Falcon Flex is making it easier for customers to consolidate those workloads onto a single platform.
Looking ahead, management expects third-quarter revenue between $1.523 billion and $1.529 billion and ending ARR of approximately $6.2 billion. CrowdStrike also raised its full-year revenue outlook to be $6.0 billion and increased its full-year net new ARR growth outlook by 630 basis points to 34% at the midpoint.
Long CRWD.
👉 Investor Events / Global Affairs:
Fed Chair Kevin Warsh sent rate-hike expectations soaring at Jackson Hole, the world’s biggest technology companies unveiled their next generation of AI chips, and the U.S.–Canada trade war escalated.
Fed Chair Kevin Warsh Takes the Stage at Jackson Hole
Fox Business
Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh used his first Jackson Hole address as chairman to make one thing very clear: the Fed is not ready to declare victory over inflation.
Warsh reaffirmed the central bank’s 2% inflation target and argued that policymakers need to be confident inflation is moving back toward that level “clearly and at sufficient speed.” He also signaled a philosophical shift in how the Fed communicates with markets, criticizing the regular use of forward guidance and arguing that policymakers should preserve more flexibility rather than effectively pre-committing to future interest-rate decisions.
Markets heard the speech as decidedly hawkish. The probability of a September rate hike jumped from roughly 35% before Warsh spoke to about 56% afterward, while the 2-year Treasury yield surged nearly 13 basis points to 4.36%. With inflation still well above target and the economy remaining relatively resilient, Warsh essentially put incoming jobs and inflation data back in the driver’s seat heading into September.
“There should be no misunderstanding: The Fed's price-stability objective of 2 percent... is a firm, fixed target. ... Price stability is not self-executing.”
Hot Chips 2026 Showcases the Next Generation of AI Hardware
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