NVDA’s August 26 earnings call framed AI spend as a supply-chain and financing race: record $96.2B quarterly revenue, 66.2% operating margin, and a jump in supply commitments from $119B to $279B to lock in memory for Vera Rubin and Rubin Ultra. The newest battleground is the neo-cloud layer, where CRWV, NBIS, and IREN are competing on contracted power, debt, and customer prepayments rather than just revenue growth. CRWV still has the scale lead, but NBIS and IREN are using customer funding, lower leverage, and faster AI revenue growth to argue for more upside. The final ranking splits by risk: CRWV for lowest execution risk, IREN for most upside, NBIS as the middle case.
NVDA’s August 26 earnings showed record quarterly revenue of $96.2B, up 18% q/q and 106% y/y, with the last four y/y growth rates at 62%, 73%, 85%, and 106%.
NVDA operating expenses rose 55%, about half as fast as revenue, while operating income jumped 124% and operating margin hit 66.2%, versus 34% for GOOGL and about 17% for AMD.
NVDA EPS more than doubled, with about 15% of that growth coming from $7.8B in gains on investments in other AI companies, up from $2.2B a year earlier.
NVDA more than doubled supply-capacity commitments from $119B to $279B, mainly to secure memory for Vera Rubin this year and Rubin Ultra in 2027.
NVDA split data-center revenue into hyperscale and ACIE; ACIE means AI clouds, industrial and enterprise, and includes healthcare, financial services, automotive, robotics, government, sovereign AI build-outs, and AI cloud providers.
ACIE grew 138% y/y versus 102% for hyperscale, the first time hyperscalers were not the fastest-growing segment, signaling AI build-out beyond MSFT, AMZN, GOOGL, and META.
CRWV is the biggest neo-cloud being discussed: 51 AI data centers across North America and Europe, 1.5 GW of active power, and 4.2 GW under contract.
CRWV’s 4.2 GW contracted power is enough for over 30,000 Blackwell racks or more than 2.2 million Blackwell GPUs, assuming 72 GPUs and about 120 kW per rack.
CRWV reported quarterly revenue of $2.6B, up 112% y/y, but backlog reached $104B, up 246% y/y, driven by multiyear contracts with OpenAI, NVDA, MSFT, and META.
CRWV and NVDA signed a formal $6.3B partnership under which NVDA will buy any unsold cloud capacity through April 2032, and NVDA also invested another $2B in CRWV stock at $87 per share.
CRWV spent $9.4B on capex last quarter against $2.6B of revenue, carries about $35B of loans plus $16B of lease obligations, and paid $640M of interest, about 25% of revenue.
NBIS has the strongest balance sheet and fastest growth in the group: $582M of revenue last quarter, up 454% y/y, with $37.5B of contracted work, $8B of cash, and about $2B of net debt.
NBIS raised contracted power from 4 GW to 5 GW by end-2026, expects 800 MW to 1 GW active power by year-end, and says it is selling every watt.
NBIS got its first Vera Rubin NVL72 systems, was said to be first to get Groq 3 LPX inference chips in volume, and runs training via Aether plus inference via Token Factory; inference workloads more than tripled last quarter.
NBIS expects over $9B in customer prepayments this year, with roughly 70% of deals last quarter funded by prepayments covering 50% to 60% of equipment costs, reducing reliance on high-interest debt.
IREN’s AI cloud revenue reached $70.5M last quarter, up from $33.6M the prior quarter, and passed Bitcoin mining revenue for the first time.
IREN has a 5-year $9.7B deal with MSFT and a separate $3.4B deal with NVDA, plus a pipeline of more than 5 GW from land and power contracts originally built for Bitcoin mining.
IREN posted a $684M loss last quarter, mostly a non-cash impairment from writing off Bitcoin hardware as sites convert to AI, while total revenue fell from $145M to $137M.
By active power, CRWV costs about $62M per MW versus more than $350M per MW for NBIS and IREN, but by total contracted power IREN is cheapest at about $3M per MW, versus $12M for NBIS and $22M for CRWV.
On enterprise value, CRWV’s debt is about as large as its market cap, so EV is roughly 2x market cap; NBIS’s EV is 7.4x its year-end run rate versus 4.9x for CRWV and 4x for IREN.
The final ranking is CRWV for lowest execution risk, IREN for most upside, and NBIS as the middle case; if forced to pick only one, IREN is the pick.