US markets opened on a slightly firmer footing today, catching a bit of a breather after the hectic Treasury sell-off that had investors sweating earlier in the week. Donald Trump chipping in that the war would end “very quickly” barely caused a ripple on the trading floor, though oil did take a bit of a knock. West Texas Intermediate futures slid 2.5% to $101.81 a barrel, while the international Brent benchmark dropped 2% to sit at $108.
The broader equities picture was relatively upbeat, with the S&P 500 ticking up 0.2% by 10:20 a.m. Eastern, the Dow inching 0.1% higher, and the tech-heavy Nasdaq advancing 0.4%.
A lot of this calm stems from the bond market finally settling down. The intense sell-off that had previously pushed long-term US Treasury yields to 19-year highs showed real signs of stalling today. The 10-year yield eased back 1.1 basis points to 4.655%, and the 30-year note, which spiked dangerously to 5.19% the day prior, softened a touch to 5.175%.
Right now, the entire street is basically holding thumbs for Nvidia. The absolute behemoth of the AI trade is slated to drop its Q1 earnings after the bell, and expectations are sky-high. Consensus is scheming we’ll see a 78% surge in revenue—the fastest growth clip in a year—alongside an 82% jump in adjusted earnings per share.
Nvidia’s stock is already hovering at $222, up 0.9% in anticipation. That optimism is highly contagious across the semiconductor sector, pulling up peers like Micron and Broadcom. Intel went on an absolute tear, surging nearly 7%, which helped drag the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index 2.1% higher.
Ben Snider, Goldman Sachs’ chief US equity strategist, reckons Nvidia is single-handedly responsible for about 20% of the S&P 500’s returns this year. He expects the chipmaker to carry roughly that same weight for the rest of the calendar. Investors across the board are treating the stock as the ultimate bellwether for where AI infrastructure is heading next.
Buying Up the Board
Looking strictly at earnings misses the wider, far more aggressive play Jensen Huang is orchestrating behind the scenes. Nvidia isn’t just selling the shovels for the AI gold rush; they are systematically buying up the mines, the transport routes, and the refineries. Over the past 16 months, the company has ploughed a staggering $90 billion into strategic investments and partnerships.
Digging into SEC filings and PitchBook data, the Financial Times highlighted that Nvidia threw $47 billion at investments and partnerships in the year up to January 25 alone. In the four months since, they’ve locked in another $43 billion in targets. They’ve parked capital in more than 145 companies spanning the entire AI ecosystem, from foundation model developers to cloud operators and massive infrastructure builders.
To put that hectic spend into perspective, it accounts for roughly 40% of their operating cash flow over the recent fiscal year. Contrast that with Alphabet. Traditionally the biggest spender among the mega-cap tech players when it comes to startups, Google’s parent typically allocates only around 6% of its cash flow to dealmaking. Nvidia is playing an entirely different game.
This isn’t just blind venture capital. Huang’s playbook is highly conditional. A core principle of these tie-ups is ensuring strict compatibility with Nvidia’s proprietary NVLink interconnect technology. They are aggressively pushing these portfolio companies to adopt their open-source Nemotron AI models, effectively locking the next generation of AI innovators into the Nvidia architecture from day one.
Beyond the equity stakes, they are throwing down another $95 billion purely to bulletproof their supply chain and manufacturing capacity. We are talking about dominating the optical components market by dropping $2 billion a pop into Coherent and Lumentum, alongside a massive $3.2 billion play for Corning stock options. They are squeezing the hardware supply chain so tightly that competing platforms might soon struggle just to source the physical glass and fibre needed to build alternative data centres.