Dan Ives, Partner and Senior Managing Director at Yorkville Ives & Co., took to CNBC on July 27, 2026 to push back on the growing chorus of tech skeptics. His central message: the recent pullback in high-growth names is a digestion period, and the AI investment cycle is nowhere near its late stages. “We’re third inning of the AI revolution and it’s just further validation from earnings,” Ives said.
The backdrop matters. The Nasdaq 100 is trading at 22 times forward P/E, a nearly 10% discount to its ten-year average, and sits 8% below June 2026 highs. Volatility has ticked up modestly, with the VIX at 18.70 as of July 23, 2026, still inside the normal range. Ives’s framing is that this is exactly what a healthy consolidation looks like inside a multi-year buildout.
The NVIDIA Thesis: One Chip, 12-to-1 Demand
NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA | NVDA Price Prediction) sits at the center of Ives’s argument. “There’s one chip in the world fueling the AI revolution, and that’s Nvidia,” he said, adding that “Demand to supply today is 12 to 1 for their chips. Physical AI hasn’t even started to play out.”
The most recent numbers give that view some weight. In Q1 FY2027, NVIDIA posted revenue of $81.61 billion, up 85.2% year over year, and non-GAAP EPS of $1.87 versus a $1.77 estimate. Data Center revenue reached $75.25 billion, up 92% year over year, with Data Center Networking climbing 199% year over year to $14.80 billion. Management guided Q2 FY27 revenue to $91.0 billion, plus or minus 2%, excluding China Data Center compute. Total supply commitments now stand at $119.0 billion, disclosed in the company’s Q1 FY27 8-K filing.
CEO Jensen Huang described the moment as “the buildout of AI factories, the largest infrastructure expansion in human history, is accelerating at extraordinary speed.” NVIDIA shares closed at $206.84 on July 24, and the stock is up 11.04% year to date. Forward P/E sits at 24, with a consensus analyst target of $302.83.
The Hyperscaler Capex Arms Race
Ives frames hyperscaler spending as rational. “For every dollar spent on capex, there’s five, six multiplier across the rest of the tech,” he said, and “We’re only 15% through what the broader spending is going to be in terms of AI.”
The 2026 spending picture supports the scale of that argument:
- Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) plans roughly $200 billion in capex in 2026, with AWS revenue of $37.59 billion in Q1, up 28%.
- Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) reported Q3 FY26 capex of $30.88 billion, up 84.4%, with an AI business surpassing a $37 billion annual revenue run rate, up 123% year over year.
- Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META) raised its FY2026 capex guidance to $125 billion to $145 billion and signed a multi-year deal with NVIDIA for millions of Blackwell and Rubin GPUs.
- Alphabet spent $44.92 billion on capex in Q2 alone, up 100% year over year, and Ives noted the company recorded its first negative free cash flow in 22 years as a direct result of AI buildout spending.
What Ives Wants Investors to Watch
The real validation of the cycle, in Ives’s view, arrives through cloud growth and enterprise adoption metrics due this earnings season. Prediction markets are aligned near term: Polymarket assigns a 91% probability that Microsoft beats its next quarterly earnings, and 95.3% probability for Amazon.
Risks remain. NVIDIA continues to guide with no Data Center compute revenue from China assumed, and hyperscalers are increasingly tapping debt markets to fund the buildout. Ives’s 12-to-1, 5-to-6x, and 15%-complete figures are his estimates, not audited metrics. The pushback that matters most for his thesis is whether cloud revenue growth continues to justify the capital being deployed.
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