Nvidia Beats Big as Bloom Energy Lands AI Power Megadeal

Nvidia delivered another beat and added $80 billion of buyback authorization. Bloom Energy locked in a power supply deal with cloud builder Nebius worth up to $2.6 billion. The cluster of AI infrastructure prints landed against a tape where the equity risk premium is now negative for the first time since the dot com era.

Nvidia’s quarter and the $80 billion buyback

Nvidia reported non GAAP earnings per share of $1.87, ten cents above consensus. Revenue came in at $81.62 billion, $2.65 billion above estimates. The board added another $80 billion of buyback authorization on top of an already large program.

The print sits at the upper end of what analysts modeled going into the call. Data center remains the engine, with hyperscaler capex from the four largest US cloud buyers tracking above $300 billion in 2026 plans. Guidance held the trajectory.

The buyback math matters here. With a market cap above $4 trillion, $80 billion is a single digit percentage of shares. It is not a signal of value floor so much as a way to soak up stock based compensation dilution and return cash that the cloud customers keep sending in.

The stock initially slipped after the print despite the beat. That is the classic late cycle pattern: results land above expectations, the multiple compresses anyway, and the marginal buyer is no longer there to bid.

Bloom Energy and the AI power trade

Bloom Energy surged on news of an agreement with Nebius worth up to $2.6 billion in fees. Bloom builds solid oxide fuel cells that can run on natural gas, hydrogen, or biogas. The use case here is on site power for data centers that cannot wait years for grid hookups.

This is the second leg of the AI capex story. Building the chips is done. Powering them is the bottleneck. ERCOT, PJM, and the European grids all face multi year queues for new large interconnects. Behind the meter generation pulls the timeline forward.

The price tag tells you the urgency. $2.6 billion is roughly two years of Bloom’s prior revenue run rate. A single counterparty just committed to that scale, which says Nebius cannot get equivalent power from the grid in time and is willing to pay the premium that distributed generation carries.

Other names in the on site generation cluster will move on this. Watch Cummins, Caterpillar, Generac, and the small modular reactor names. The trade is no longer only about AI chips. It is about every watt that feeds them.

PayPal under new management

PayPal Holdings reported first quarter revenue of $8.4 billion, up about 7 percent year over year, in the first full quarter under new CEO Enrique Lores. The company also signaled a restructuring program.

The setup is familiar. A mature payments business with thin take rates, slowing user growth, and a stock that has spent four years compressing. New leadership tends to use the first ninety days for a kitchen sink quarter: write downs, layoffs, and a strategy refresh. That looks like the playbook here.

The harder question is whether the platform can compete with Apple Pay, Google Pay, Stripe, and the bank backed wallets without losing more transaction share. Revenue growth of 7 percent is not collapse, but it is also not the double digit print that would justify a rerating.

The macro counterweight

While the AI tape ran, broader market indicators kept flashing the same warning. The S&P 500 earnings yield sits near 3.12 percent against ten year Treasuries at 4.57 percent. That is a negative equity risk premium of more than 140 basis points.

Negative equity risk premium of this magnitude has only happened twice in modern data, around the dot com peak and briefly in 2024. Each episode preceded multi quarter drawdowns. It does not time the top, but it removes the structural reason to hold equities over bonds at the index level.

Corporate bankruptcy filings have climbed for four consecutive years. Construction and agriculture are taking the heaviest stress. Consumer confidence readings turned lower in the spring. None of these are crashing yet. All of them are trending the wrong way.

The split tape is the story. AI infrastructure names print blowout quarters while the median small cap and the median consumer name look stretched. The index level hides what the breadth shows.

What to watch

A few items worth tracking into the next data cycle:

• Behind the meter power deals like the Nebius and Bloom contract. Each one is a signal that grid constraints are biting and that hyperscalers will pay a premium for kilowatts they can build on site.
• Hyperscaler capex guidance in the second half of 2026. The current $300 billion plus run rate is the floor for Nvidia and for the power names that feed it.
• US ten year yields. With the earnings yield this thin, every 25 basis points up on the long end forces equity multiples lower at the index level.
• Bankruptcy filings outside the largest names. The trend in the small cap and middle market zone has been worse than the headline indexes suggest.

The pattern across all of this is concentration. A handful of AI exposed names are doing the heavy lifting on earnings, on capex, and on index returns. The rest of the tape is softer than the headline level implies. Both things can stay true at the same time, until they cannot.