Nvidia Delivers, Tariffs Loom, and Crypto Builds the Rails

Dear readers,

Yesterday we flagged Nvidia’s earnings as the ultimate stress test for the AI trade, with a trillion-dollar valuation riding on the outcome. The number came in loud and clear after Wednesday’s close: Nvidia crushed it. But by Thursday morning, tariff headlines out of Washington were already complicating the celebration — proof that even a flawless quarter can’t fully insulate hardware stocks from geopolitics. That gap between operational performance and policy risk is exactly why capital keeps finding new reasons to flow into crypto infrastructure instead.

Bitcoin’s Case for “Risk-Off” Status

Bitcoin is consolidating just below $80,000, up roughly 25 percent over the past 30 days, and the technical backdrop is turning more constructive by the week. CryptoQuant’s Bull Score has jumped from 30 to 80 within a single week, and a weekly close above $83,000 would technically confirm the return of a bull market.

The more interesting shift, though, is happening in how the asset is being framed rather than how it’s priced. At BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, conviction is building that Bitcoin is evolving into a genuine long-term “risk-off” asset. Short-term volatility still makes it trade like a speculative tech stock — and short-term holders have indeed locked in billions in profits recently — but its underlying drivers, the firm argues, increasingly point away from the direction of traditional equity markets. For strategic portfolios, that diversification case is starting to matter more than the daily chart.

The Banks Build Crypto’s Plumbing

If Bitcoin is the headline, the real institutional money is quietly going into the infrastructure underneath it. A consortium of global banks — Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Santander among them — is preparing a joint venture for global stablecoins, starting with the U.S. dollar before expanding into the euro and other G7 currencies. In London, the Bank of England is getting a new statutory mandate to actively promote innovation in stablecoins and digital money, a regulatory green light that wasn’t there a year ago.

Native crypto players are moving just as fast: Ripple’s RLUSD stablecoin has crossed the $2 billion market-cap mark. For investors sizing up the sector, the value proposition is shifting away from token speculation and toward the payment networks and tokenization rails that will eventually carry institutional money flows.

Nvidia’s Record Quarter, Shadowed by Tariffs

Nvidia’s fiscal second-quarter results, released Wednesday, were about as clean a beat as a company its size can deliver: adjusted earnings of $2.22 a share against analyst estimates of $2.09, and revenue of $96.2 billion versus expectations of $92.38 billion. Shares surged 7.4 percent in premarket trading Thursday, and Raymond James raised its price target to $352 from $330 while holding a Strong Buy rating.

Should investors sell immediately? Or is it worth buying Nvidia?

Even so, the macro overhang hasn’t lifted. The Trump administration is reportedly weighing sweeping new tariffs on semiconductors, servers, and laptops aimed at forcing production back onshore — the exact kind of supply-chain exposure that investors like Michael Burry are positioning against with sizable short bets on Nvidia and other hardware names. A record quarter, in other words, didn’t make the policy risk disappear.

Salesforce Shows Software’s Advantage

Salesforce offered a useful contrast on the same earnings calendar. The company posted $5.90 a share against a $3.27 estimate, with revenue of $11.35 billion, up 11 percent year over year — a reminder of how much operating leverage a high-margin cloud business carries once scale kicks in. Shares soared 13 percent in after-hours trading Wednesday.

The lesson for investors hunting AI exposure without tariff risk is straightforward: software and data platforms currently offer a cleaner risk-reward setup than hardware manufacturers whose margins depend on where their chips are actually assembled.

Jackson Hole Comes Into View

Attention now shifts to the Jackson Hole Economic Policy Symposium, running from today through Saturday, August 29. Kevin Warsh delivers the keynote Friday morning — his first Jackson Hole address as Fed chair — and his read on the latest inflation data will set the tone for markets into September. If inflation proves stickier than hoped, expect the rotation toward scarce, decentralized assets like Bitcoin to gain further momentum, while rate-sensitive hardware names face an additional headwind on top of the tariff overhang.

The Takeaway

This week made the split inside tech unmistakable. Nvidia and Salesforce both beat expectations comfortably, but only one of them carries tariff and supply-chain risk baked into its business model — and the market is starting to price that difference. Layer in banks racing to build stablecoin infrastructure and BlackRock rethinking what “risk-off” even means, and the broader signal is consistent: capital is diversifying away from pure hardware bets, toward software cash flow on one side and crypto’s payment rails on the other. Jackson Hole will decide how urgently that rotation continues.

Best regards,
The StocksToday.com Editorial