You’d have a chip on your shoulder, too. Santa Clara-based chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices reported a record $7.7 billion in second-quarter revenue after the bell Tuesday, a 32% year-over-year increase that bested analysts’ expectations.

The company also projected third-quarter sales of $8.7 billion, topping Wall Street estimates of $8.3 billion. Earnings of 48 cents per share narrowly bested the 47-cent estimate of analysts surveyed by Zacks Investment Research. Yet the stock fell 5% in after-hours trading in what’s becoming a rite of chipmaker reporting days, when good is seen as not good enough.

Promise and Doubt

AMD entered Tuesday saddled with the expectations of a top draft pick (best of luck, Cam Ward). Analysts forecasted second-quarter revenue of $7.4 billion, or a 27% year-over-year increase, according to estimates compiled by S&P Global’s Visible Alpha. That would have matched the company’s first-quarter revenue, which represented a 36% increase as chipmakers have benefited from AI and tech giants like OpenAI, Meta and Microsoft announcing hundreds of billions in spending that will include increasing computing power.

The real hype around AMD has been its share price: Up 45% in 2025, the chipmaker’s stock is the sector’s top performer. Yep, that’s better than even Nvidia, the $4.3 trillion advanced semiconductor maker that is the world’s most valuable company; it has gained a comparatively puny 33% so far this year. But, according to John Peddie Research, mighty Nvidia captured a 92% share of the market for add-in board graphics processing units in the first quarter, up from 88% a year earlier. AMD, by comparison, lost market share, falling to 8% in the first quarter from 12% a year earlier. Lynx Equity Strategies cautioned in a note before Tuesday’s earnings that investors may be too optimistic about the role AMD’s MI350/MI355 and upcoming MI400X GPUs will play in massive chip upscaling at Meta and possibly Amazon Web Services (AWS). “We doubt if AMD has bagged share at AWS,” wrote Lynx’s KC Rajkumar, and “without AWS, AMD may be dependent on one key backer — Meta.” There’s still plenty of upside in the sector; it’s just unclear that AMD will capture it:

• The Philadelphia Stock Exchange Semiconductor Index is up 10.6% this year, slightly better than the Nasdaq’s 8.3% advance. Optimism has been fueled in recent weeks by some $340 billion in capital spending plans for this year laid out by Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft, with much of that expected to include chip-buying.
• But Lynx’s KC Rajkumar warned that “investors are yet to see tangible signs of MI350/MI355 adoption at hyperscale data centers this year.” Falling profits due to more stringent curbs on chip exports and trade uncertainty also hang over earnings.

Not Good Enough: It’s not just AMD. Investors have generally been hard to please for most chipmakers. Shares in UK chipmaker Arm have fallen roughly 15% since last Wednesday, even as it offered a third-quarter forecast in line with analysts’ estimates. Shares in Qualcomm, which beat analysts’ sales and profit estimates and offered a rosy forecast when it reported a day later, have since fallen 8%, with investors more worried about its exposure to the cyclical smartphone market and the forthcoming loss of Apple as its biggest modem customer.

There’s shooting for the moon, and then there’s this.

Nuclear energy firms enjoyed an across-the-board share-price surge on Tuesday after US Transportation Secretary and interim NASA Secretary Sean Duffy confirmed the space agency has fast-tracked plans to operate a small modular reactor (SMR) on the moon by the first quarter of 2030.

Moonrakers

NASA’s actually playing catch-up. Russia and China have already announced plans for a joint-base SMR on the moon by the mid-2030s, and Duffy said in a statement that could result in a “keep-out zone” that might inhibit the US’s own lunar nuclear ambitions. The plan is to launch an SMR capable of generating at least 100 kilowatts of energy. Here on Earth, that’s small potatoes, about enough to power a subdivision of roughly 80 homes. But on the moon, where sunshine for solar power is scarce and batteries quickly run dry, that small Earth step could be a giant leap for long-term lunar vacations and research trips. The idea isn’t exactly new, either: In 2022, NASA awarded multiple contracts to draw up initial designs for a moon SMR.

Hence, NASA’s fast track includes the appointment of an agency official to oversee the effort within the next 30 days and a request to commercial companies for proposals within the next 60 days. The chance at winning a lunar lottery ticket has investors declaring liftoff for the entire industry:

• Shares in Oklo, an SMR developer that plans on getting its first Earthbound reactor online by late 2028, surged nearly 10% on Tuesday. Meanwhile, competitors Nano Nuclear Energy and Nuscale Power saw stock pops of more than 7% and 5%, respectively.
• The Global X Uranium ETF, which tracks companies involved in uranium mining, climbed more than 2% on Tuesday, mirrored by a similar gain for the more broadly-focused VanEck Vectors Uranium+Nuclear Energy ETF.

BWXceptional: Of course, the nuclear sector was having a premier year before its ambitions got extraterrestrial, as ravenously power-hungry AI data centers create newfound demand for nuclear energy at home. For more proof of a nuclear revival, just look at the late-Monday earnings report from BWX Technologies, a leading supplier of nuclear reactor components and the primary nuclear contractor for the US Navy. The company reported a 9% increase in government operations revenue, a 24% increase in commercial operations revenue, and raised its guidance for the rest of the year. That proved enough to push its share price up more than 17% on Tuesday and for William Blair analyst Jed Dorsheimer to call the company “our most robust pure play in nuclear.” In other words, the company is practically glowing right now.

Describing it as a comeback would undersell it.

In its second-quarter earnings report on Tuesday, pharma giant Pfizer announced $14.7 billion in revenue, smashing consensus expectations by more than $1 billion. Then, for good measure, the drugmaker raised its profit guidance for the year, thanks to cost-cutting and strong demand for its business. Sure, the parade met a little rain as the president said in an interview on Tuesday that pharma-focused tariffs will likely be announced “within a week or two,” but it was a good day for Pfizer overall.

Extreme Pharma Makeover

In the face of declining demand for its Covid business — not to mention looming patent expirations for four of its marquee non-Covid treatments — Pfizer has been forced to reinvent and remake itself. So far, that has meant walking an oh-so-tricky tightrope of pairing a massive cost-cutting plan (with $7.2 billion to be saved by 2027) with an aggressive eye for pipeline-boosting acquisitions (the company also said Tuesday it has allocated $13 billion for dealmaking this year).

The turnaround plan has been in place since 2023, and Tuesday’s earnings offered a strong signal that the strategy is starting to work. But the same pandemic that buoyed Pfizer’s prominence also revealed pharmaceutical supply-chain vulnerabilities and issues in America’s domestic drugmaking capacity. The chief issue being that America has virtually no domestic drugmaking capacity. With that diagnosis (as well as the diagnosis that Americans pay too much for pharmaceuticals), the White House has a treatment plan: tariffs.

Which means Pfizer may have to enter another period of reinvention. In its earnings call Tuesday, the company made clear the new policy directives are hardly a surprise:

• Pfizer said its revised profit guidance for the year of $2.90 to $3.10 a share, up from previous guidance of $2.80 to $3 a share, already factored in the fresh wave of tariffs on imports from China, Mexico and Canada, as well as “further potential price changes this year” that have yet to come.
• Tuesday wasn’t the first time pharma tariffs have been floated. In early July, the president mused that tariffs of as much as 200% could be imposed on pharmaceuticals “very soon.”

Play Ball: The increased import duties come just a few days after the White House sent letters to 17 major drugmakers demanding “binding commitments” to slash prices for US patients. In July, Pfizer entered a partnership with Bristol Myers Squibb to do just that — allowing its blood-thinning treatment Eliquis to be sold directly to US consumers at a 40% discount (Eliquis remains Pfizer’s best-selling treatment, though its patent will expire in April 2028). The prospect of 200% tariffs and the order to slash prices will likely present yet another tricky tightrope for Pfizer and its industry peers. Or so says leading industry trade group PhRMA, which in a statement earlier this year called tariffs “counterproductive” to lowering prices.