What’s News in Markets: Nvidia’s Next Chapter, Coreweave’s Bullish Backlog, Microsoft’s Global Outage

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

This episode is supported by Anthropic, the team behind Claude.

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Every business wants to move faster, few can afford to be wrong.

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That's why the brands you trust also trust Claude.

Imani Moise (0:13)

Hey, listeners, it's Saturday, November 14th. I'm Imani Moise for The Wall Street Journal, and this is What's News in Markets, our look at the biggest stock moves of the week, and the news that drove them. Let's dive in.

Consumer prices are up, bond prices are down, and the CEO of one of the world's most valuable companies is out. There were a lot of headlines to parse this week. Let's start with inflation. A hotter than expected CPI report showed consumer prices rose four-tenths of a percent in October. That added to fears that the Federal Reserve could pick up the pace of interest rate hikes, sending Treasury yields soaring.

The benchmark 10-year Treasury yield climbed back above 5 percent. One Fed official even floated the possibility of a half-point increase in December. The last few hikes were a quarter of a percent.

Through all that, stocks managed to do pretty well. The Nasdaq gained 2.3 percent, while the S&P 500 rose 2.5 percent, and the Dow added about 2.1 percent.

For years, Jensen Huang was one of Nvidia's greatest assets. But this week, he became a liability. Shares of the AI chip giant fell nearly 13 percent this week, wiping out more than $570 billion from its market value. Nvidia announced Huang was resigning as CEO on Thursday, after reports revealed he was involved in multiple extramarital affairs, including at least one with an employee and another with an alleged Chinese spy. Now investors are trying to figure out what Nvidia will look like without the man who built it into one of the world's most valuable companies. The bull case? Nvidia's business is still booming. Demand for its AI chips continues to outpace supply, and the company is sitting on nearly $100 billion in cash. Some analysts think a new CEO could actually be positive for shareholders by scaling back Huang's risky investments in AI companies and returning more of that money to investors. But there's a bear case too. Those investments helped fuel demand for Nvidia's chips. Pulling back could slow the company's growth, especially as rising interest rates make it harder for AI companies to borrow money. And on top of that, Democrats preparing to take control over the house in January are already planning investigations into the company that spanned national security, technology, and China. Shares of Nvidia rivals were up. Micron jumped about 13 percent, AMD advanced nearly 19 percent, and Intel gained 6 percent.

Nvidia's troubles weren't enough to keep investors from the broader AI trade. Take Nvidia customer Coreweave, for example. Its shares surged 14.5 percent this week after reporting stronger than expected revenue and a backlog of nearly $133 billion in future business. Coreweave is a cloud computing company that buys chips from Nvidia, installs them in data centers, and rents out the computing power to AI developers like OpenAI and Microsoft. So its upbeat outlook helped reassure investors that demand for AI infrastructure is still going strong. That rebound is pretty stunning when you look back on where markets were just a week ago. Last Thursday, a historic sell-off wiped $2.5 trillion off the NASDAQ. But by Wednesday's close, the tech-heavy index had recovered nearly all of those losses.

And finally, Microsoft gave some workers an unexpected break from their inboxes this week.

SPEAKER_2 (3:43)

This outlook outage has been so nice. I got to leave work early.

SPEAKER_1 (3:46)

Since Outlook is down, it only seems fair to shut down Gmail and Slack too in solidarity.

Imani Moise (3:50)

This is our snow day as an adult.

SPEAKER_2 (3:53)

The crazy thing is there's someone out there freaking out over the fact that Microsoft Outlook mail isn't working.

Imani Moise (3:58)

A massive outage knocked out services including Outlook, Teams and Copilot. With hundreds of thousands of users reporting problems across more than 70 countries.

And while some workers celebrated the disruption, it was a major headache for both businesses and governments. Shipping giant Merck couldn't send some emails and notifications. Congressional staff on Capitol Hill lost access to Outlook services. And even companies like OpenAI and Anthropic reported problems with Microsoft integrations. Microsoft 365, which includes workplace tools like Outlook and Teams, generated nearly $28 billion in revenue last quarter. That's about 30 percent of Microsoft's total revenue. Shares were down about 1.3 percent for the week.

And now you know What's News in Markets this week. You can read about more stocks that moved on the week's news in our live markets coverage on wsj.com. Today's show was produced by Anthony Bansi with supervising producer Melanie Roy. I'm Imani Moise. Have a great weekend and see you next Saturday.