Leadership and the investigation. The board said it is searching for a permanent CEO and will consider internal and external candidates [1]. Investors will be listening for any update on that search and on the board’s investigation. Altimeter’s Brad Gerstner and Atreides’ Gavin Baker have asked the board to keep a possible Huang return among its options (our report), and an online petition backed by Elon Musk and others makes the same request (our report). The decision rests with Nvidia’s 10 directors.
China and export rules. The outlook already assumes no data center compute revenue from China, and shipments of Hopper data center products to China were less than 1% of Data Center revenue in the July quarter [2]. Customers headquartered in China and Hong Kong were 8.2% of revenue in that quarter by billing location (what the filings show) [10]. Any comment on export licenses or new congressional proposals would bear on that line.
The Vera Rubin ramp and supply. Nvidia said in August that Vera Rubin racks were running at CoreWeave, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Nebius [3]. Its supply commitments rose to $279 billion from $119 billion a quarter earlier, “primarily related to the procurement of memory,” and it said elevated memory and system prices had tempered consumer PC sales [2]. How memory costs feed into the 74% gross-margin guide is one of the numbers analysts will compare.
Balance sheet and capital return. Accounts receivable rose to $63.1 billion, or 60 days of sales from 45, which Nvidia attributed to extended payment terms on large multi-quarter agreements with investment-grade customers [2]. It returned nearly $26.0 billion through buybacks and dividends in the second quarter and had about $99.0 billion left under its repurchase authorization [3]. It also disclosed guarantees capped at $105 billion tied to SB Energy’s Ohio campus leased to OpenAI [2].