Here we go... The market ho-hums Nvidia's latest blockbuster earnings... The big IPOs are coming... SpaceX and OpenAI are racing to go public... Late-stage behavior...
It was another blowout quarter for Nvidia (NVDA)...
As we noted last night, AI bellwether Nvidia reported first-quarter results after yesterday's market close. It delivered another blockbuster quarter...
Both earnings and revenue beat Wall Street's estimates, with sales soaring 85% year-over-year to $81.6 billion. It was Nvidia's third straight quarter of accelerating revenue growth.
Specifically, Nvidia's data-center revenue surged 92% to $75 billion in the first quarter, marking a new record for the company.
On the company's earnings call, Nvidia Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress said that "hyperscalers" – companies like Alphabet (GOOGL), Amazon (AMZN), Meta Platforms (META), and Microsoft (MSFT) – accounted for half of all data-center revenue in the quarter.
And Nvidia expects that incredible growth to continue. CEO Jensen Huang said in the quarterly press release...
The buildout of AI factories – the largest infrastructure expansion in human history – is accelerating at extraordinary speed.
That's even without any forecast growth in China, a focus since Huang was part of the U.S. delegation to visit the country last week. Huang told CNBC last night that Nvidia has "largely conceded" a presence in China to its competitor Huawei.
A few years ago, China accounted for nearly 20% of Nvidia's total data-center revenue. But sanctions from both China and the U.S. have largely locked Nvidia out of the Chinese market. And even though the U.S. has slowly allowed it to begin selling less specialized chips to China, Nvidia's financial forecasts do not include any revenue from China.
There's been enough of a market for Nvidia's products everywhere else...
Thanks to its latest strong results, Nvidia also announced a new $80 billion stock buyback plan – on top of the $39 billion left under its current repurchase plan. And it raised its quarterly dividend payout to $0.25 per share, from the previous level of $0.01 per share.
Here's the thing, though...
If this were a "blind taste test" without a name attached to the glowing earnings report and forecast, you might expect that shares of the company would have soared today.
But Nvidia shares lost 1.7%, even as the major U.S. indexes all finished a little higher.
What gives? Well, after nearly four years of an AI-driven stock market boom and a recent surge in AI and tech stocks (and not much else), how much juice is left for Nvidia, which is already a $5.3 trillion company?
We're cautious about the "best of times" continuing.
Broadly for the market, interest-rate and inflation risks are things again. Bond investors are signaling that the Federal Reserve should be hiking rates as its next move, if anything. And in AI, regulation might be in the offing. Bottlenecks in infrastructure could also be ahead.
With Nvidia in particular, the stock has gained roughly 1,900% since a bear market bottom in October 2022 and has rallied 43% off its 2026 lows in the past month and a half alone.
Don't get me (Corey McLaughlin) wrong, things can get much crazier and euphoric from here... and quite possibly will. In that case, there will be tremendous gains to be had before an inevitable bust follows. (This is why we say "Know what you're getting into.")
We've been skeptical of Nvidia meeting high expectations in the past, but the company continues to deliver – raising and jumping its own bar.
As our colleague James Royal wrote in an article for our parent company MarketWise on Nvidia's earnings report today, the company's latest quarterly operating margin (65.6%) is "better than any recent set of annual figures." And Nvidia is trading at a price-to-earnings ratio of just 26.4 times...
That's not expensive for a company growing sales the way Nvidia is, and doing so while maintaining its margins...
Nvidia's growth will have to slow at some point, but that point doesn't appear to be now.
At the very least, Nvidia shares are due for a breather, and today was certainly that – a ho-hum reaction. At the worst, given the "divergence" between AI and tech stocks and everything else, a significant top could be afoot.
We'll keep watch over the next few days and weeks for signals, because how Nvidia shares fare is part of a larger picture we're looking at.
Some more 'late stage' behavior...
We're seeing more and more headline IPOs.
SpaceX... OpenAI... Anthropic...
All of these large private companies, and a growing number of smaller ones, are planning to go public in the months ahead.
While that's often a big payday for early investors, it's less lucrative for the public buying shares of these IPOs.
In the case of SpaceX – Elon Musk's rocket, satellite, Internet, social media, AI, and defense company – Musk is seeking to list the company in possibly the largest IPO ever with the goal of raising $75 billion at around a $1.75 trillion valuation.
The deal could make Musk a trillionaire, with the company making as much as 30% of shares available to retail investors.
A U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission prospectus published yesterday said a portion of the SpaceX shares in its offering would be sold directly through brokerages like Robinhood, Fidelity, and Charles Schwab.
This, in theory, allows retail investors to be part of an initial IPO "pop" in shares. Since 1980, stocks have spiked by an average of 19% from their offering price on the first day of trading. But it's also likely to make for a wild ride in shares – in either direction.
The biggest loser...
We can see retail or institutional investors finding reasons to take profits after the IPO, with public investors left wondering what to do next. As James explained in another article on the subject of the SpaceX IPO earlier this year...
You must be cautious when anyone cuts you in for a "can't miss" deal normally reserved for the elite. If it's such a great opportunity, then why are you being invited to profit, too?
As the saying goes, "If you look around the table and can't figure out who the sucker is, it's you."
As Nick Koziol wrote back in April, it's also not hard to imagine the "meme stock" crowd becoming obsessed with a new name to play with. Even if it's one with questionable fundamentals, to say the least...
Our colleague Mike DiBiase, editor of Stansberry's Credit Opportunities, sent me an article from the Information yesterday with some numbers about SpaceX that caught his attention.
For starters, since SpaceX was founded almost 25 years ago, the company has lost $37 billion, by far the largest loss among tech IPOs over that span.
Recently, the strongest part of the business is its Starlink Internet service, which made about $11 billion in revenue in 2025. But the company posted a net loss of $4.28 billion last quarter, and AI operations account for more than $6 billion in losses.
Yet the IPO is valuing the company at nearly $2 trillion, among the top 10 companies by market cap in the world, including Musk's Tesla (TSLA).
SpaceX may change the world and bring people to the moon or Mars. It may even be worth investing in down the road. But ask yourself: Is this a company you want to spend new money on as it seeks public capital right now?
The same goes for OpenAI...
The ChatGPT creator is reportedly seeking to go public by the fall with a nearly $1 trillion valuation.
As we've written before, ChatGPT is no doubt an incredible, world-changing technology. It kicked off an AI-fueled bull market... and is making companies and people think differently about the way they do business and live. But is OpenAI profitable? Not so much.
CEO Sam Altman has even said the company may not be profitable until at least 2029, yet it has been at the center of the AI boom. And it has made more than $1 trillion future spending promises that have juiced shares of several chip and AI-infrastructure stocks.
As we shared in these pages back in February, Stansberry's Investment Advisory lead editor Whitney Tilson says OpenAI reminds him of WeWork...
And, for anyone familiar, WeWork is not the company anyone wants to be compared with.
The shared-workspace provider had a similarly unproven business model, had a mission to "elevate the world's consciousness," peaked at a $47 billion valuation in 2019, went public in 2021 to raise capital after earlier funding fell through, and filed for bankruptcy by 2023.
OpenAI "sounds eerily similar," Whitney says. He ticked off several reasons, like the "much-too-young, inexperienced, weird yet charismatic CEO with a cult-like following" that WeWork had. Then there was the "ridiculous valuation" and "to top it all off, management had a plan to bail out early investors by foisting this turd on the public via an IPO."
Reports emerged last week that OpenAI is planning a fourth-quarter IPO this year.
Any sort of pullback on funding for OpenAI would leave a massive hole in the AI ecosystem.
The company won't be cash-flow positive until at least 2029. And in the meantime, it could burn through $115 billion in cash. So it relies on raising funds in the private market to fuel its growth.
Now, OpenAI appears to be racing to raise public funds alongside SpaceX and before rival Anthropic (which has better fundamentals). As the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday...
Bankers at firms including Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have been helping the artificial-intelligence giant on a draft IPO prospectus it plans to file confidentially with regulators soon, possibly as early as Friday, some of the people said.
The goal is for OpenAI, led by Sam Altman, to be ready to go public as early as September, some of the people said.
A year ago, a group of colleagues and I were kicking around the idea of what would mark a "top" for the AI boom. I said an OpenAI IPO, and I wasn't the only one.
My reasoning was sentiment based – if there's enough public appeal for shares in a company in the sector du jour, with an unproven business model that won't be profitable for many, many years, greed is winning out over reason...
Well, here we are – closer than ever.
New 52-week highs (as of 5/20/26): Atlas Energy Solutions (AESI), Arm Holdings (ARM), Omega Healthcare Investors (OHI), Roivant Sciences (ROIV), and State Street SPDR Portfolio S&P 500 Value Fund (SPYV).
In today's mailbag, feedback for Ten Stock Trader editor Greg Diamond... Do you have a comment or question? As always, e-mail us at feedback@stansberryresearch.com.
"I am a relatively new subscriber and mainly just wanted to say a big thank you to Greg for all the charts and detailed explanations of them. Even though I've only made a small amount of money on one trade, I totally see where this market is going and know that eventually we will make a lot of money! Thank you for everything." – Subscriber Terry T.
All the best,
Corey McLaughlin with Nick Koziol
Baltimore, Maryland
May 21, 2026
