11AM Hour: AI's "Bar Mitzvah Moment," Beef Price Backlash & Former Philadelphia Fed President 8/24/26

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**David Faber** (0:51)
Good Monday morning and welcome to Squawk on the Street. I'm David Faber with Leslie Bicker. We're live from Post 9 at the New York Stock Exchange. Carl and Sara both have the morning off.
The latest on the AI trade coming up, the Dean of Evaluations, or at least that's what he calls himself. Aswath Damodaran is with us. He'll explain why he thinks we're in the midst of a quote, AI bar mitzvah moment.

**Leslie Bicker** (1:12)
Plus beef blowback, why cattle farmers are pushing back against President Trump's beef import plan. The head of the National Cattlemen's Beef Association joins us to explain.

**David Faber** (1:23)
And New York City Mayor Mamdani's plan to open city-owned grocery stores is facing a new court challenge. We're going to explain why.
Okay. Let's give you a look at markets.

**Leslie Bicker** (1:35)
That was a segue from the beef import story, you know?

**David Faber** (1:37)
Exactly. Exactly. Sure. It's a national story.
There's a look at what's really important story. Of course, we do have the NASDAQ seeing some weakness this morning. Overall, many of the chip-related names are down for a variety of reasons. Certainly, concern about mounting opposition to the building of data centers across the country is also being factored in by investors. You can see the Dow is up, but the S&P also has about a quarter of one percentage point loss this morning. Speaking of chips, let's start out with news from NVIDIA this morning. Christina Partzanopoulos has that for us. Christina.

**Christina Partzanopoulos** (2:13)
NVIDIA is putting its Grok 3 LPX chip into full production. If you're confused by the name, just know it's built for one job, making AI respond fast. Think of it, the rack essentially as a team. NVIDIA's AI systems comes as a full rack called Vera Rubin. The GPUs that we talk about do the heavy lifting, the various CPUs coordinate the work, and this new Grok 3 LPX adds to that rack to make it generate answers dramatically faster especially on open weight models. The kind anyone can download and customize freely. Nebius in the press release is going to be the first cloud to adopt it, but of course in these releases, no numbers, no timelines provided. NVIDIA though is making the same bet on the software side too, and it's pretty aggressive. Days ago, it agreed to pay roughly $6 million to license poolside technology and hire more than 100 of its engineers according to the Wall Street Journal. This isn't necessarily like a passive stake. These engineers go straight into Nemotron, which is NVIDIA's own open weight model. Now, among the largest ever built, to push it ahead as fast as possible. Why do this? The goal is a strong American open model to rival China's, one that makes AI cheaper to run. Cheaper AI means usage, more usage means more compute, and more compute means more demand for NVIDIA's chips.
NVIDIA doesn't need to profit on the models themselves. It profits on everything that runs on them. The Grok chip going live today is the hardware half of that same bet, the speed layer for the open models.
NVIDIA now wants to build itself. For all that though, look at the share price, down about 2.5%.
Stock just can't catch a bit. It's fallen wet for the seven straight days, its longest losing streak since September 2022 Down almost 7% over that stretch. As Mizuho's Jordan Klein put it in a note this morning, buyers are in just no rush ahead of Wednesday's night and Wednesday night's results. Why try to be a hero ahead of that print?

**David Faber** (4:02)
Well, speaking of it, I mean, you're going to be talking a lot more about it between now and then, Christina, I have a feeling. But do we have any key expectations there in terms of what we'll all be looking at with Nvidia? Assuming, as usual, they report a very strong number.