AI Daily: Nvidia beats earnings expectations

Catch up on the top artificial intelligence news and commentary by Wall Street analysts on publicly traded companies in the space with this daily recap compiled by The Fly:

NVIDIA RESULTS: Nvidia (NVDA) reported Q3 EPS of $1.30 and Q3 revenue of $57.01B, both better than the expected $1.26 and $55.09B, respectively. The company also said it sees Q4 revenue of $65.0B plus or minus 2%, with consensus at $61.84B. GAAP and non-GAAP gross margins are expected to be 74.8% and 75.0%, respectively, plus or minus 50 basis points; GAAP and non-GAAP operating expenses are expected to be approximately $6.7B and $5.0B, respectively; GAAP and non-GAAP other income and expense are expected to be an income of approximately $500 million, excluding gains and losses from non-marketable and publicly-held equity securities; GAAP and non-GAAP tax rates are expected to be 17.0%, plus or minus 1%, excluding any discrete items.

Additionally, Nvidia reported Q3 Data Center revenue of $51.2B, up 25% from the previous quarter and up 66% from a year ago. The company sees $500B in Blackwell, Ruben revenue through 2026.

AI RULES: U.S. President Donald Trump is weighing signing an executive order as soon as this Friday that would give the U.S. government unilateral authority over regulating AI, including the formation of an “AI Litigation Task Force” overseen by the Attorney General, The Verge’s Tina Nguyen reports. According to a draft of the order seen by The Verge, the task force would be allowed to sue states whose laws are determined to hinder the growth of the AI sector, citing California’s recent laws on AI safety as well as a Colorado law that blocks “algorithmic discrimination.” Publicly traded companies in the AI space include Nvidia, AMD (AMD), Microsoft (MSFT), Apple (AAPL), Meta (META), Amazon (AMZN), TSMC (TSM), CoreWeave (CRWV), and Palantir (PLTR).

U.S. EXPORT LICENSE: Firebird, a U.S.-based AI cloud and infrastructure company, has received U.S. export authorization and is announcing its first $500M investment in Armenia. This is the initial phase of a multi-billion-dollar megaproject to bring high-capacity AI supercomputing infrastructure to the region. This milestone inaugurates a new chapter in U.S.-Armenia collaboration in advanced technology, innovation, and AI development. As first announced by Nvidia at its Paris GTC conference, Firebird will establish one of the region’s most advanced AI clusters, powered by Dell Technologies (DELL) PowerEdge high-performance AI servers and Nvidia Blackwell GPUs. The GPUs will enable research institutions, technology companies, and enterprises to train and deploy state-of-the-art AI models at scale, the company said. Phase one of deployment is scheduled to go online in the first half of 2026, positioning Armenia as a regional hub for AI innovation across a wide range of sectors, with an emphasis on the life sciences, robotics, and space sectors.

GAIN ACT: White House officials are asking Congress members to reject the GAIN AI Act, which would limit Nvidia’s ability to sell AI to China and other adversary countries, Mackenzie Hawkins of Bloomberg reports, citing people familiar with the matter. The Act would create a system giving Americans dibs on AI chips that are set to export. This could bar Nvidia and AMD from selling its best products to the Asian country.

AI INFRASTRUCTURE: AMD, Cisco (CSCO) and Humain announced plans to establish a joint venture aimed to support the development of Saudi Arabia’s position as a provider of AI solutions for regional and global customers. AMD, Cisco and Humain will serve as founding investors in the joint venture, which is expected to begin operations in 2026 with plans to combine Humain’s data centers with AMD and Cisco technology. AMD and Cisco will act as exclusive technology partners to the joint venture, contributing their portfolio of products and services to its development of up to 1 GW of AI infrastructure by 2030. The companies also announced the first phase of the project as a buildout of 100 MW AI infrastructure, with the intent to include Humain modern data center capacity, AMD Instinct MI450 Series GPUs and Cisco’s critical infrastructure.

CLOUD PARTNER GLOBAL: Humain, a PIF company delivering global full-stack artificial intelligence solutions, announced that it is entering into a strategic partnership with Global AI, an American sovereign AI infrastructure company headquartered in New York and an Nvidia Cloud Partner. The partnership seeks to accelerate the expansion of AI infrastructure globally. Together, the companies plan to deliver large-scale AI data center and compute capacity in the United States. Tareq Amin, CEO of Humain, said, “I believe Saudi Arabia is firmly on track to become the third pillar of global AI infrastructure. Our commitment towards developing compute capacity in the U.S. secures HUMAIN and Global AI a strategic foothold. This integrated presence gives us the strength and scale to fuel the future of global AI innovation.” The campus will be designed for high-density compute, supporting advanced AI workloads, large-scale model training, and secure inference operations. The off-premises, air-gapped architecture will include liquid-cooled NVIDIA AI infrastructure and comprehensive data-sovereignty controls, creating globally competitive infrastructure for enterprises, public-sector entities, and AI model developers.

AI ACCELERATORS: Amazon Web Services, an Amazon company, and Humain announced at the U.S.-Saudi Investment Forum their plans to provide, deploy and manage up to 150,000 AI accelerators in a data center facility known as an “AI Zone” in Riyadh. As part of the expanded partnership, AWS will become Humain’s preferred AI partner globally, and the two companies will collaborate to bring AI compute and services from Saudi Arabia to customers worldwide, the parties stated. “The first-of-a-kind AI Zone in Saudi Arabia will support cutting-edge AI training and inference workloads with access to the latest NVIDIA GB300 AI infrastructure and AWS’s Trainium AI chips. The infrastructure will support a broad range of compute-intensive AI workloads, including model training and running inference for AI applications. This will enable customers to rapidly move from concept to production while responsibly leveraging NVIDIA infrastructure and AI software seamlessly integrated with AWS infrastructure and services. This industry-leading, accelerated computing infrastructure-delivered with the security, scale, and reliability required to run AI workloads with confidence-will establish Saudi Arabia’s first AI Zone as among the most modern and innovative in the world,” they said.

NEXT-GEN AI COMPUTE POWER: At the U.S.- Saudi Investment Forum held in Washington, D.C., HUMAIN, a PIF company delivering full-stack artificial intelligence solutions, announced the signing of a landmark framework agreement with xAI, the U.S.-based frontier AI company known for its rapid advancement in cutting-edge AI systems and founded by Elon Musk. This strategic agreement lays the foundation for a long-term collaboration aimed at designing, building, and operating a new generation of low-cost, hyperscale GPU data centers in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia as well as the deployment of xAI’s Grok models across the country, the company says. Under the scope of the agreement, HUMAIN and xAI will jointly develop a network of world-class GPU data centers, anchored by a flagship 500 MW+ facility, which is set to become one of the most advanced AI compute hubs globally. This will be in addition to xAI’s existing superclusters and represents the first large-scale compute deployment for xAI outside of the United States. As part of HUMAIN’s mission to build world-class AI infrastructure, this partnership advances its capability to deliver scalable AI compute and digital services. The facility will provide a critical platform for training, deploying, and scaling frontier AI models, HUMAIN explains. In addition to building the required infrastructure, HUMAIN and xAI will collaborate to deploy xAI’s Grok models throughout the nation. This includes the integration of Grok into HUMAIN’s agent platform, HUMAIN ONE, unlocking real-time intelligence, autonomous workflows, and next-generation AI copilots across government, enterprise, and society.

AI ECONOMICS: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has tapped Rolf Harms, who wrote the white paper “Economics of the Cloud” in 2010, as an adviser on AI economics to help rethink the company’s business model for the AI era, Business Insider’s Ashley Stewart reports, citing a memo the CEO sent top Microsoft executives this month. “We need to rapidly rethink the new economics of AI across the company — just as we once did with the cloud,” Nadella wrote in the memo. “This platform shift is all about building a new AI factory and family of Copilots and agents that drive diffusion and usage across the full stack.”