Weekly Roundup: AI Earnings Rip, Fed Fumbles, and a Lake Gets Renamed

Let's be honest: this was an AI earnings week dressed up as a macro week. Yes, Jackson Hole happened. Yes, Fed Chair Kevin Warsh spoke. And yes, he said approximately nothing actionable, which is apparently his whole personality now. Markets wanted rate clarity. Warsh delivered vibes. But while Washington types were playing coy, corporate America was doing the heavy lifting.

The headliner was obviously $NVDA. Nvidia reported Q2 revenue of $96.2 billion (beating the $92.38 billion estimate), guided Q3 to $108 billion, and CEO Jensen Huang projected 70% revenue growth next fiscal year against a Wall Street consensus of 45%. The stock surged 8.7% the following session, adding over $400 billion in market cap in a single day. The lone catch: buy-side whispers were closer to $138 billion for Q3, so the guidance technically disappointed the most aggressive bulls. Classic Nvidia: beat the street, frustrate the obsessives. Still, information technology was the only S&P 500 sector in the green that day, up 3.4%, with Nvidia responsible for the majority of index point gains. Concentration risk? Absolutely. Profitable? Also yes.

Elsewhere in the AI earnings parade, $CRM surged on its expanded partnership with Anthropic, launching a product called ClaudeForce that integrates Claude directly into Salesforce's data and CRM stack. One Bloomberg report clocked the after-hours pop at 19%. And $CRWD jumped 15% after a massive Q2 beat, with net new annual recurring revenue up 34% year-over-year. If you were long cybersecurity heading into this week, you had a good Thursday. Meanwhile, $OKTA raised its full-year revenue outlook to 10 to 11% growth and retired its remaining $350 million in convertible debt entirely in cash, which is the corporate finance equivalent of flexing at the gym.

On the macro side, core PCE came in at 3.3% year-over-year with headline PCE at 3.7%, both above forecast. Kansas City Fed President Jeff Schmidt called inflation stubborn and sticky, which is Fed-speak for we are not cutting anytime soon. The 10-year Treasury yield hitting sensitive levels added to the tension, with markets repricing rate cut expectations lower for the remainder of the year. Consumer sentiment also slipped, with the University of Michigan index falling slightly below consensus. None of it was catastrophic, but none of it was encouraging either.

And then there was the lake. President Trump signed an executive order renaming Lake Michigan to Lake Trump, which generated approximately 10,000 jokes on social media and zero basis points of market movement. It did, however, briefly trend above Nvidia on search, which says something about where American attention lives these days. The governors of Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Indiana, and Minnesota issued a joint statement declining to recognize the rename. Constitutional scholars noted the federal government does not actually control state-named bodies of water. The lake remains Lake Michigan in every practical sense. Markets were unmoved. Meme accounts were delighted.

The week's broader takeaway: AI infrastructure spending is not slowing down, the Fed is not your friend right now, and the macro data is just uncomfortable enough to keep traders nervous without being bad enough to force action. Nvidia alone added more market cap in one day than most S&P 500 companies are worth in total. That is either exciting or terrifying depending on your cost basis.