Last month, Nvidia delivered its latest blockbuster quarter, smashing through Wall Street’s earnings expectations. The market’s reaction: an aloof, Larry David-like “eh.” Shares in the world’s most valuable publicly traded company have slid 3.3% in 2026.

Today marks the company’s biggest chance to reignite investor enthusiasm, which has been curbed by the market’s fatigue with the AI trade. Through Thursday, the semiconductor giant is hosting the GPU Technology Conference, its annual showcase that’s been called AI’s Super Bowl. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, set to deliver a keynote at 11 a.m. PT today, has confidently promised “a chip that will surprise the world.”

Seeing Upside

An especially crucial factor to address in what Huang has referred to as “the largest infrastructure buildout in human history” will be AI’s changing hardware demands.

Generative AI models that respond to prompts, like ChatGPT and Claude, are primarily trained on specialized graphics processing units (GPUs), which are Nvidia’s bread and butter. But recent months have seen the rapid rise of agentic AI, which runs on its own or with limited human intervention: think autonomous vehicle technology and specialized coding agents, the latter of which sent software company shares into a tailspin earlier this year. Agentic AI also has different hardware needs, relying heavily on the general computing power of central processing units (CPUs), which aren’t Nvidia’s traditional focus. Bank of America analysts estimate the CPU market could more than double to $60 billion by 2030. Growing demand for CPUs has already created “a quiet supply crisis,” according to analysts at Futurum.

This is where Nvidia, which launched a data center CPU called Grace in 2021 and has begun producing its next-generation Vera, could capitalize. Industry watchers expect this week’s conference to see the debut of agentic-optimized CPUs, as well as CPU-only racks (Nvidia’s CPUs are normally deployed alongside GPUs). Futurum wrote that Nvidia, which struck a major CPU deal with Meta last month, is “aggressively moving beyond GPUs.” Success would contribute to some analysts’ belief that the world’s most valuable company is actually undervalued:

• “We do see an upside bias for the stock on the [GPU Conference], although it is hard to see [Nvidia] being able to provide thesis-altering commentary,” UBS analysts wrote. Their 12-month price target of $245 suggests a 36% premium over the stock’s $180.25 Friday close.
• That view is practically nihilistic compared to the bulls at Tigress Financial. Nvidia’s growth is fueled by $3 trillion to $4 trillion in AI infrastructure spend by 2030, the firm’s analysts wrote, raising their 12-month target to $360.

Forward Progress: As of Friday, Nvidia trades at 22.8 times its projected earnings, roughly the same as the S&P 500. FactSet projects the year-over-year earnings growth for the broader index in the first quarter will be 11.6%, compared with 86% in the semiconductor sector.

With redemption requests in retail-focused private credit funds at an all-time high, the country’s largest bank is getting ahead of what Wall Street worries might be its next financial crisis.

JPMorgan has begun marking down the value of some loans used as collateral by private credit firms. Morningstar’s Sean Dunlop tells The Daily Upside that while the move creates a vicious cycle for liquidity, JPMorgan stands alone in its ability to mark down loans name by name without waiting for a borrower to actually default.

Wrong-Way Risk

The bank’s markdowns have been largely confined to loans to software-related companies and haven’t resulted in margin calls. Instead, JPMorgan is proactively reducing the lines of credit (specifically net asset value, or NAV, loans) that it provides to these funds. “By reducing the available credit line now, the bank avoids the ‘wrong-way risk’ witnessed during 2020, where funds aggressively drew down on their credit lines exactly when their underlying creditworthiness looked the most questionable,” Dunlop says.

Most of JPMorgan’s peers don’t have NAV loan agreements that let them proactively revalue assets; they would need a trigger event first, such as a missed interest payment.

“Even with these proactive haircuts for JPMorgan’s borrowers, most private credit operators should still have breathing room before facing margin calls,” Dunlop says.

The recent meltdown is specifically tied to artificial intelligence concerns: For months, investors have been dumping stocks of software companies they fear won’t be able to keep up with the robots. Smaller, specialized technology private equity firms with private credit may be more at risk, says Ken Leon, director of equity research at CFRA.

“If major banks have been doing their homework, they will know there’s a world of difference with some of the different types of software companies out there,” he adds:

• In a research note Thursday, Leon said that leading firms with private credit concentration are Apollo Global Management, Ares Management and Blue Owl Capital, though more diversified firms like Brookfield Asset Management, Blackstone and KKR & Co. also have significant exposure.
• “Some of the concerns have been extreme in terms of what impact AI disruption may have on some of the credits in these funds, which means that we’re likely to see probably less volatility and maybe even more disclosures on the quality of those credits,” Leon adds.

Wall Street Worries: Some experts are more concerned. Former Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, who led the firm during the financial crisis, told Bloomberg this month that “we’re getting close to the end of late stages of cycles” on private credit. “We’re due for a kind of reckoning.”

The term “alternative energy” has become a misnomer during the biggest oil disruption in history. “Contingency” might be better. But “necessity” also looks increasingly accurate.

With the Strait of Hormuz effectively sealed and oil prices around $100 per barrel by week’s end, global power players are rediscovering a love for solar, wind and other clean alternative energy sources that can’t so easily be blockaded. So there’s a national security case for clean energy. Yes, another national security case for clean energy, outside of climate change.

Where the Wind Blows

In a report last week, analysts at BloombergNEF projected that global solar installation growth this year, previously expected to be flat from last year’s record 655 gigawatts in added capacity, could widen if oil and gas supply disruptions continue. Global investment in clean energy already jumped to a record $780 billion last year, according to the International Energy Agency. That outpaces investment in oil and gas infrastructure and continues a ramp-up in clean energy investment in the name of energy independence after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 and the start of a US-led trade war.

The current supply shock has regular people rethinking their energy mix just as much as world governments:

• Homeowner requests for quotes on solar installations jumped 17% in the first 11 days of the conflict compared with the 11 days prior, according to online clean energy marketplace EnergySage. Meanwhile, Edmunds says searches for EVs and hybrids have also ticked up.
• Wall Street has taken note: The iShares Global Clean Energy ETF jumped more than 5% last week, exceeding the oil-and-gas-focused Vanguard Energy ETF’s 1.3% gain as the fossil fuel industry lagged uncharacteristically far behind oil prices.

Take Your Lumps: On the other hand, the conflict in Iran has pushed some countries to increase their reliance on an energy source far dirtier than oil and gas: coal. In fact, the price of coal on the Rotterdam market has climbed roughly 20% in the past month, reaching its highest point in the past 12 months.