Live: NVIDIA Down 1.5% Thursday Despite Good News from Meta Platforms, Microsoft

NVIDIA (Nasdaq: NVDA) shares are up 1.1% in after-hours trading as of 10:10 p.m. ET.

Futures are poised for strong gains tomorrow, which should be a boost to NVIDIA after shares dropped 2% in trading on Thursday. Here are the two biggest storylines that could move NVIDIA shares tomorrow. One of them has to do with why shares of Amazon are up 13% after reporting earnings!

1.) The Nasdaq Is Surging After-Hours

It’s been a great year for the Nasdaq, which is up 23% year-to-date. Thursday was a speed bump, with the Nasdaq dropping 1.47%. However, it’s looking like the index will make back those gains tomorrow.

Futures for the Nasdaq are up 1.24% in after-hours trading. The reason? Big technology stocks that reported tonight are soaring after earnings. Amazon reported tonight and is up 13% thanks to AWS growth that topped Wall Street expectations. Apple is up more than 2% thanks to Holiday guidance that’s very bullish.

Smaller technology stocks are soaring as well. Cloudflare (NYSE: NET) shares are up 9% after the company issued impressive guidance.

The wave of optimism around technology stocks is good new for NVIDIA.

2.) Amazon’s Guidance is Very Bullish for NVIDIA

As we noted earlier, Amazon shares are up 13% after the company reported better-than-expected AWS growth. One figure in Amazon’s earnings that should have NVIDIA investors excited is Amazon’s capital expenditure guidance for 2025. The company projected capital expenditures (centered mostly on AI data center spend) of $118 billion, but raised it to $125 billion.

Amazon also sadi they expect that amount will increase in 2026. That’s great news for NVIDIA, and most other stocks in the AI infrastructure trade.

Bloomberg just published a report that NVIDIA (Nasdaq: NVDA) is investing up to $1 billion in AI startup Poolside.

The investment is part of a broader raise from Poolside that could bring in up to $2 billion at a $12 billion valuation.

NVIDIA recently made news when it announced a partnership that could see the company invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI. In news related to that, it was also reported by Reuters yesterday that OpenAI has begun discussions on an IPO that could see the company raise $60 billion at a $1 trillion valuation.

Another recent investment from NVIDIA happened on Tuesday when the company invested $1 billion for a 2.9% stake in Nokia as part of a strategic 6G partnership.

As you can see, NVIDIA has been quite busy investing across the AI ecosystem. While recent investments focused on areas like mobile or robotics, Poolside specializes in creating AI models to improve coding processes and security for businesses.

Both Meta Platforms (Nasdaq: META) and Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) issued earnings last night and were quite bullish on data center spend that benefits NVIDIA (Nasdaq: NVDA).

Let’s look at some important quotes from each company and why they reflect ongoing booming demand for NVIDIA.

Meta Platforms

Meta Platforms only moderately raised guidance for capital expenditures this year. The company now plans to spend in a range of $70 billion to $72 billion, which was an increase from their prior outlook of $66 to $72 billion.

Yet, Meta Platforms CFO Susan Li had this to say on the company’s conference call:

“As we have begun to plan for next year, it’s become clear that our compute needs have continued to expand meaningfully, including versus our own expectations last quarter. We are still working through our capacity plans for next year, but we expect to invest aggressively to meet these needs, both by building our own infrastructure and contracting with third-party cloud providers.

We anticipate this will provide further upward pressure on our CapEx and expense plans next year. As a result, our current expectation is that CapEx dollar growth will be notably larger in 2026 than 2025. We also anticipate total expenses will grow at a significantly faster percentage rate a than 2025, with growth primarily driven by infrastructure costs, including incremental cloud expenses and depreciation.”

Wall Street currently expects Meta to spend $98 billion on capital expenditures mostly year, which is mostly going to AI data centers. It appears Meta is giving the signal that estimate is too low. Meta’s signaling of even higher expenses resulting from increased data center spend has sent the company’s shares down 12% in early trading today, but it’s good news for NVIDIA.

Microsoft 

Microsoft’s call was also very bullish on demand for their AI spending. The company had guided to $30 billion in capital expenditures last quarter, but ended up spending $34.9 billion. They also provided assurance on the long-term dynamics of AI demand:

“For Intelligent Cloud, we expect revenue of USD 32.25 billion to USD 32.55 billion or growth of 26% to 27%. In Azure, we expect Q2 revenue growth of approximately 37% in constant currency as demand remains significantly ahead of the capacity we have available. And while we’re accelerating the amount of capacity we’re bringing online, we will continue to balance Azure revenue growth with the growing needs across our first-party apps and AI solutions, our own R&D efforts and the end-of-life server replacements. Therefore, we now expect to be capacity constrained through at least the end of our fiscal year.”

Microsoft has struck a more cautious tone when discussing its AI buildouts compared to companies like Meta Platforms or Oracle, but last night’s call signaled an intent to invest heavily throughout this Fiscal Year (which ends next June). With concerns about Microsoft pulling out of data center projects causing several major sell-offs in AI infrastructure companies, the call was overall good news for NVIDIA investors.