By Teresa Rivas | Wednesday, August 27

And Then There Was One. Nvidia isn't only the last of the Magnificent Seven stocks to report earnings this season. It's also the largest, with a $4 trillion-plus market cap that dwarfs basically every other company -- and entire countries. The market spent the day inching higher in breathless anticipation, which was enough for the S&P 500 to score its 19th record high close of 2025.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average added 0.3% while the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq Composite both gained 0.2%

In the end, Nvidia beat top- and bottom-line expectations, while offering roughly in-line revenue guidance for the third quarter. For a shareholder base that’s become accustomed to blowouts, it was a disappointment. Nvidia shares were lower in after-hours trading following the release. 

That said, it’s not surprising that the market spent the day focused on the event. Nvidia stock has gained more than 30% year to date and accounts for well over 7% of the S&P 500. It’s the poster child for the artificial intelligence trade, and it's often seen as a barometer for how investors are feeling about AI’s explosive growth -- and how much they’re willing to pay for it. 

The answer so far has been ‘a lot.’ As Deutsche Bank recently noted, Nvidia’s market cap accounts for 3.6% of global gross domestic product. Its value is higher than the entire stock markets of major European countries like Germany and France; only China, India and Japan, along with the U.S., have stock market capitalizations still ahead of Nvidia. 

With a high valuation and even higher expectations, it stands to reason that Nvidia is giving back some ground after not blowing the Street away with its forecast. 

While it will inevitably weigh on the broader market if the stock opens lower on Thursday, as well, investors need not be overly worried. As Fundstrat Head of Research Thomas Lee puts it, "Nvidia is a stock that has shown every dip has proven to be profitable." 

That may ultimately wind up being true of the rest of the market too. 

Read real-time coverage of the Nvidia results from Barron's Tae Kim here. 

DJIA: +0.32% to 45,565.23
S&P 500: +0.24% to 6,481.40
Nasdaq: +0.21% to 21,590.14

The Hot Stock: Albemarle +7.5%
The Biggest Loser: Paramount Skydance -6.5%

Best Sector: Energy +1.1%
Worst Sector: Healthcare -0.1%

Keeping the Lights On

So Nvidia, as expected, sold a ton of chips. But they have to run on electricity from somewhere. To quote Homer Simpson, “Excuse me, Professor Brainiac, but I worked in a nuclear power plant for ten years and I think I know how a proton accelerator works."

Homer was famously ignorant of how the reactor where he was employed operated, a situation first played for laughs in the 1990s, a time when Americans were particularly antsy about their safety following high profile problems at power plants at home and abroad. But artificial intelligence’s vast and growing power needs means that nuclear power is having a kind of renaissance, one that’s benefiting the owners of shuttered nuclear assets. 

Nonetheless, given the time and expense required to build a new plant -- not to mention local resistance -- it means that plenty of older reactors (not unlike the fictional Springfield location where Homer worked) are being quickly refurbished and pressed back into service. 

That's turning “reactors that were once unprofitable albatrosses into potential profit-drivers for the handful of companies that own them,” as my colleague Avi Salzman reports today. More from his article: 

One such refurb won approval this week in Iowa. Florida-based renewable energy giant NextEra Energy plans to bring back a reactor at a site known as the Duane Arnold energy center near Cedar Rapids, Iowa. It will be the third potential restart of a mothballed nuclear facility to be announced since the start of 2024.

Already Constellation Energy has said it plans to restart a reactor at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 2027, and privately held Holtec International is on the brink of restarting a plant known as Palisades in Michigan…

The nuclear restarts are good news for the companies that own the plants—the nuclear subsidies, which were extended in the tax law, should make them profitable. And reactor owners have been able to make special deals with tech companies like Microsoft and Amazon to sell them power for their AI data centers—a source of revenue that wasn’t around when Duane Arnold initially closed down.

Never let it be said that The Simpsons isn’t still relevant after all these years.