A billionaire venture investor told his audience on Wednesday that the biggest companies on earth are seeing earnings growth with “literally zero” to do with AI. That same day, NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA | NVDA Price Prediction) closed at $216.85, sitting on a 945% gain over five years and a 24% gain over one year.
I have owned Nvidia for over 15 years, and I have never seen a wider gap between what one of the loudest voices in venture is saying and what the market is pricing. Chamath Palihapitiya’s Aug. 20 posts collide directly with the earnings numbers rolling out of Redmond and Santa Clara. The next test arrives fast: Nvidia reports Q3 2026 after the close on Aug. 26.
Three Posts, One Morning
Palihapitiya’s Aug. 20 sequence went in this order. At 11:59 UTC, he asked where AI tokens were going: “Yet, high value tasks don’t seem to be increasing…so where are all these tokens going??”
Six minutes later, he warned that data center backlash in Texas, Pennsylvania and Ohio “is a powder keg and has the potential to unwind 200-300 basis points of annual GDP if it metastasizes,” adding that “The collective leadership of frontier AI has failed miserably in doing the basics.”
Later that evening, he wrote of the Global 2000: “Their earnings growth has literally zero to do with AI or anything remotely close…”
What Microsoft Actually Reported
Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) sits inside the Global 2000, and its most recent quarter tells a specific story. Q4 FY2026 revenue reached $90 billion, up 18%. Azure surpassed $100 billion in annual revenue and grew 41%. Commercial remaining performance obligations, the committed backlog, expanded 84% to $678 billion.
Satya Nadella tied that growth to AI: revenue reflected “strong demand across both the Azure platform and our first-party AI applications and services.” Microsoft 365 Copilot has over 30 million paid seats, with net seat additions more than doubling quarter over quarter. Full-year FY26 capex hit $115.95B, well above the prior year.
Nvidia’s Q1 FY2027 earnings report, filed with the SEC on May 20, showed revenue of $81.615 billion, up 85% year over year. Data Center revenue was $75.246 billion, up 92%. Networking alone jumped 199%. Total supply commitments stand at $119.0 billion.
Your 401(k) Is Already In This Trade
The S&P 500 tracker held across retirement accounts, SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (NYSEARCA:SPY), closed at $762.60 on Aug. 20, up 20% over one year and 12% year to date. Nvidia carries a market cap of $5.25T and Microsoft $3.57T. If Palihapitiya is right that AI has no earnings connection at the largest firms, index weights currently priced on the opposite assumption would need to reset (we profiled seven of the picks-and-shovels suppliers behind that spending, from power to cooling, in a free report you can grab here). If Nadella and Jensen Huang are right, those weights get validated by the earnings report.
Recent weeks have been choppy. Nvidia is down 4% over the past week. Microsoft is down 3% over the same span, and its year-to-date change sits essentially flat. Read that as context.
Eight Minutes To “Yay”
Here is where the story got strange. Eight minutes after the “literally zero” post, Palihapitiya quote tweeted an announcement from @8090_Factory reading “1,000+ MCP connections live in Software Factory” with the single word “Yay.” MCP, the Model Context Protocol, is the plumbing that lets AI agents connect to enterprise systems. Cheering that milestone while questioning enterprise AI ROI is a tension worth watching, though our sources confirm only the quote tweet, not any ownership or founder role at 8090.
Aug. 26: The Question That Matters
Nvidia’s Q2 FY27 guide sits at $91.0 billion, plus or minus 2%, with expected non-GAAP gross margin of 75.0%. If you own an S&P 500 index fund, you already own this question. Keep an eye on the stock next Wednesday. Does AI spending show up in the buyers’ earnings, or only in the sellers’? Palihapitiya has staked out a view. The earnings report gets to answer.
Contact [email protected] for any questions or corrections.
Top Gaining Stocks
Top Losing Stocks