As Wall Street braces for Nvidia's fiscal Q4 2025 earnings, with analysts expecting revenue of about $65.6 billion, up 65% year over year, with EPS of $1.52, reinforcing its central role in the AI infrastructure boom. However, just days before the report, startup Taalas unveiled its HC1 hardwired AI inference chip, which etches language models directly into silicon and reportedly delivers 17,000 tokens per second per user on Llama 3.1 8B, around 10 times faster than leading GPU solutions from Cerebras and Groq, while costing far less to manufacture and eliminating the need for high bandwidth memory. By driving inference costs down to fractions of a cent per million tokens for certain models, Taalas is challenging the economic logic behind the tens of billions hyperscalers invest each quarter in Nvidia data centre GPUs, which currently support gross margins of 70% to 80% on $187 billion in trailing revenue. If these cost advantages scale, demand for large GPU clusters could plateau or fragment, pressuring the AI capital expenditure cycle that has sustained Nvidia's historic growth, making this earnings call crucial not only for headline results but also for signals from CEO Jensen Huang on how the company plans to respond to ultra-low-cost, purpose-built silicon.
EQUITY
Market performance was sparse across sectors as the "AI displacement" narrative turned from a theoretical risk into a market shift, dragging the Dow Jones down 1.66% and the S&P 500 down 1.04%. The sell-off hit the software sector hard, with IBM plunging 13% and American Express falling 7.2%, while localised gains in chipmakers and takeover targets like PayPal provided the only silver linings in an otherwise defensive trading session ahead of the State of the Union address.
GOLD
Gold lost its steam after recently climbing above $5,200 following President Trump’s renewed tariff threats under different law after being blocked by the US Supreme Court, though the market has since experienced "whipsaw" volatility as traders digest these headlines. While a slowing U.S. economy supports the precious metals' broader constructive outlook, hotter inflation data and steady Treasury yields have kept investor conviction fragile.
OIL
Crude oil benchmark hovered near a six-month high as investors monitored the high-stakes nuclear negotiations between the United States and Iran. Prices remain supported by the underlying threat of military conflict and eventual shipping disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz, especially destructive to oil transport.
CURRENCY
The U.S. dollar index climbed above 97.8 as investors weighed the Supreme Court's rejection of previous emergency tariffs against President Trump’s immediate tariff implementation. The Japanese yen weakened to 155 per dollar following reports of U.S.-led rate checks and new Chinese export controls targeting Japanese firms. In contrast, the Chinese yuan rose to a nearly three-year high of 6.8975 as traders bet the new tax regime would result in a net reduction of tariffs on Chinese goods compared to previous levels.
