Power Lunch 9/3/26

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**Brian Sullivan** (1:05)
Stocks recession highs with a Dow up more than 600 points. Welcome to Power Lunch, everybody. I am Brian in Washington, DC, alongside Kelly at CNBC, and we have a big hour on deck with two exclusive interviews. First, Equinix, a company at the center of the multi-trillion dollar AI data center.
They just expanded their long-time collaboration with NVIDIA. Their CEO is here, Kelly.

**Kelly Evans** (1:28)
And Victoria's secret shares are sinking today, even after an earnings beat. Still, the stock has rallied 200 percent in the past year, as CEO Hilary Super's turnaround gains momentum. But with sales just shy of expectations, Wall Street's asking whether the bar has risen too far. In fact, Hilary Super will join us next Friday. Let's get right to the top story of the day though, which is, of course, about NVIDIA and some of the other chip stocks that are on the move. Good thing Christina Parts-Nevelest is here on set to break it all down for us. Christina, where do we begin?

**Christina Partesanevelest** (1:58)
Let's start. You were talking about it in the last hour, but it's still so relevant. NVIDIA making this acquisition of Hugging Face just shy of $13 billion. And maybe some are wondering, first of all, what's Hugging Face? It's a platform where you can download open weight models. The models are essentially free, but once you download them, then you would customize them and obviously would cost money to run it.
And 200,000 companies use this platform. Everyone from Intel, AMD, Google, smaller firms. And so this right away is an opportunity for NVIDIA to gain access to all of these companies, all of the 18 million developers on this platform. NVIDIA we know as the AI hardware guru, what everything is built on, the CUDA software that everyone uses. And now with this acquisition, NVIDIA is moving up the stack and gaining access to a much larger pool of people, even though the CEO was on earlier this morning, promising that they were going to remain neutral, because I think the quote is that it's the Switzerland of AI in regards to hugging face. So they're not going to push their products on these 200,000 companies that use hugging face.

**Kelly Evans** (3:04)
It's fascinating. And so we have, on the one hand, they're kind of scaling up, maybe making a move to become almost a rival to open an AI in Anthropic one day. Then you have Broadcom.
Again, seemingly well positioned as we continue to have all this demand for AI, yet that stock is selling off after its report last night. And a lot of these AI infrastructure, the hardware names have been on a, I don't know, they've kind of moved sideways, if not lower over the past couple of months.

**Christina Partesanevelest** (3:28)
Yeah, there's a connection too with the hugging face and Broadcom. Specifically Broadcom, Hawk Tan, the CEO yesterday on the call, was taking shots at NVIDIA.
There was two quotes that stood out. One, he was saying the jalapeno open AI chip outperforms Grace Blackwell's GPU. And then he also went on to say that if you co-develop any type of chip with Broadcom, you will outperform any GPU. Wow. I bring that up because that shows that competition is ramping up on the custom chip side. And so with NVIDIA, tapping into hugging face and gaining access to those 200,000 companies, it's a way to hedge or diversify away from their customer base right now where they're building their own chips. For Broadcom, part of the issue is there was some comments just about the guidance, but Broadcom, Google was its number one customer, Google is now shifting to number three, and then they're relying on Anthropic and OpenAI, two massive companies that are propping up a lot of this market in the AI sense, but two unprofitable companies. And so there's concern about that diversity with customer mix.