Jensen Huang resigned effective immediately Thursday amid reports of extramarital relationships, with CFO Colette Kress stepping in as interim CEO. NVDA plunged as much as 14% at the open before closing down 4.3%, shedding roughly $490 billion in market value from its October record near $243. The analyst reaction was brutal: Bernstein cut to Market Perform and halved its target to $200 from $400, Evercore went In-Line with a target of $186 from $465, Cantor trimmed to $250 from $350, and Needham to $200 from $300 — the nine-firm average fell about 37% overnight to roughly $217. Shares were up about 2.7% in Friday premarket.
Cerebras posted adjusted EPS of 12 cents against an expected loss of 14 cents, with core revenue of $230.9 million versus $214.7 million consensus, up 70% year over year. Cloud revenue surged 272% to $144.9 million, Q4 core guidance of $310–330 million towered over the $271.2 million Street number, and full-year core revenue guidance went to $940–960 million. CEO Andrew Feldman confirmed Microsoft as its third hyperscaler customer alongside AWS and Oracle, with revenue starting in Q1 2027. The stock jumped 17% after hours and was up roughly 13–15% in Friday premarket.
The Commerce Department is finalizing a rule blocking Chinese AI firms from renting restricted Nvidia capacity in third-country data centers, requiring licenses for Blackwell-class chips shipped to Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Brazil, Norway and South Africa. Alibaba sank 8% Thursday and another 3.5% Friday, Tencent slid about 3%, Baidu fell 4% and PDD 3% — together Alibaba and Tencent have lost roughly $75 billion this week. Model developers Z.ai and MiniMax each dropped at least 8%, while Shanghai-listed chip designers like Cambricon rallied.
Applied Materials delivered Q4 revenue of $10.409 billion versus $10.30 billion expected and adjusted EPS of $4.16 against $4.05, with revenue up 53% year over year and non-GAAP gross margin at 50.6%. Q1 guidance of $11.1 billion plus or minus $500 million cleared the $10.89 billion consensus. Management guided wafer fab equipment demand up more than 30% year over year in 2027 — the loudest capex signal of the week.
Analyst Sebastien Naji upgraded AMD to Outperform from Market Perform, citing custom AI program wins and projecting data-center AI revenue will surpass the server CPU business in Q4. Shares climbed 5.86% Thursday as investors handicapped share-gain opportunities out of Nvidia's leadership vacuum. The consensus target sits near $652, about 18% above current levels.
CoreWeave reported Q3 revenue up 168% to about $3.66 billion, lifted full-year guidance to $13–13.3 billion, and put backlog at roughly $132.5 billion, up from $104 billion three months earlier. CEO Michael Intrator said qualified demand runs 10 times available capacity through the end of 2027. Micron, a long-term supply partner with more than 75% of fiscal 2027 output already committed, jumped 13% on the read-through; Goldman reiterated a $1,250 target at Neutral versus a $1,463 consensus.
Cisco posted Q1 revenue of $18.5 billion, up 24%, with non-GAAP EPS of $1.40 versus $1.33 expected — what CEO Chuck Robbins called the strongest growth rates in over 15 years. The company lifted its FY27 AI infrastructure revenue goal to $9 billion from $7.5 billion on better hyperscaler visibility, with AI hyperscale moving to 12% of total revenue from 6%. Full-year guidance came in at $74.8–75.8 billion and EPS of $5.47–5.53.
With Nvidia mid-transition, analysts argued Broadcom is "very, very capable" of stepping in to fill some of the gap helping hyperscalers build custom AI accelerators. The average Street target of roughly $524 implies about 52% upside from current levels. No new financial disclosure here — this is pure narrative rotation inside the AI complex.
Despite CoreWeave's own strong print earlier in the week, the GPU-rental names were the worst-hit corner of the AI trade Thursday: CoreWeave fell 6.86%, IREN dropped 6.53%, and Applied Digital slid 5.36%. The Russell 2000 underperformed badly, down 1.66% to 2,799, signaling the pain was concentrated in leveraged, high-beta AI infrastructure rather than megacap tech.
October PPI hits at 8:30 a.m. ET, with headline expected at +0.4% month over month against a prior +1.3% and core at +0.3% versus +0.7%. The 10-year yield jumped 11 basis points to 5.11%, the dollar firmed, and bitcoin broke below $70,000 for the first time in nearly three months, dragging Coinbase, Robinhood and Circle lower. Futures were modestly higher into the print — Dow +0.10%, S&P +0.19%, Nasdaq +0.05%.
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