Compass Briefings

Jensen just killed the CPU market. Nobody noticed.

There's a moment on every great earnings call where the CEO says something that sounds routine but is actually a declaration of war. Jensen Huang had one of those moments on Tuesday. NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) posted $82 billion in revenue, up...

The $400B Wiring Problem That Solar Can't Solve Alone

In 2009, a solar panel cost roughly $2.10 per watt. Today that number sits around $0.20. The learning curve did its job. Panels became commodities. Installers raced to the bottom on price. And the world celebrated because solar had finally beaten fos...

The $1.75T IPO that reprices everything

In the summer of 2004, Google went public at a $23 billion valuation. The IPO was chaotic, the bankers hated the Dutch auction format, and most serious investors thought the price was absurd. Within three years, Google had a $200 billion market cap. ...

The HVAC company hiding a semiconductor secret

In Tulsa, Oklahoma, a company best known for making commercial heating and cooling equipment is now one of the most interesting reads in the data center boom. AAON, Inc. (NASDAQ:AAON) just posted 42.5% revenue growth year-over-year. By most measures,...

The $64B Sensor Gap the Pentagon Can't Close Fast Enough

In February 2024, a Houthi anti-ship ballistic missile streaked toward a commercial vessel in the Red Sea. The USS Carney fired two SM-2 interceptors. Each one costs roughly $2.1 million. The missile it was trying to destroy? Estimates put its cost b...

The Chip Factory That Hyperscalers Are Quietly—Wait, Openly—Fighting Over

In the fall of 2023, a materials scientist at a mid-tier transceiver company in Shenzhen got a phone call that changed his week. His procurement team had been trying to lock down a supply agreement for indium phosphide wafers (the semiconductor subst...

The Bitcoin Miners Building Data Centers for a Post-Mining World

In the summer of 2021, a wave of bitcoin miners fled China after Beijing banned crypto mining overnight. Hundreds of thousands of machines needed new homes. The exodus rewired the geography of an entire industry. Texas, Georgia, and the Nordics becam...

The Wire That Connects Everything (And the Stock Nobody Owns)

In 1976, a small team of engineers in Hickory, North Carolina, started making coaxial cable for the nascent cable television industry. Their timing was perfect. Cable TV was about to wire America's living rooms, and somebody had to make the stuff tha...

The $400 Billion Mistake Inside Quantum's Hype Cycle

In 1947, a transistor the size of a pencil eraser sat on a lab bench at Bell Labs. William Shockley looked at it and saw the future. His colleagues saw a curiosity. The transistor would go on to eat the vacuum tube, eat the mainframe monopoly, eat an...

The $300B run rate nobody saw coming

Last week was one of those rare stretches where you sit back after Friday's close and think: the map just changed. Five of the biggest companies on earth reported earnings within days of each other. Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA), NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA), Alphabe...

The Quiet Avionics Firm Winning Defence's Most Boring War

In February 1998, a Cessna 402 slammed into a hillside outside Cali, Colombia. Investigators found the altimeter had been misread. The pilot was experienced. The instruments were not lying, exactly. They were just old, round, and hard to parse in the...

The $300B company nobody's pricing correctly

Last week was the most concentrated display of corporate firepower in recent memory. Five of the biggest technology companies on earth reported earnings within days of each other, and the message across all five was basically identical: the AI spendi...

The Factory Nobody Knows Is Building America's AI Chips

In the winter of 2021, a group of engineers in Bloomington, Minnesota stood in a fabrication plant that most of the semiconductor world had written off. The facility, originally built by Control Data Corporation in the 1980s and later operated by Cyp...

The Quiet Pivot Hiding Inside Bitcoin's Infrastructure

In the summer of 2021, China banned cryptocurrency mining overnight. Tens of thousands of machines went dark across Sichuan, Xinjiang, and Inner Mongolia. Hashrate (the total computing power securing Bitcoin's network) fell by more than half in weeks...

The Forgotten Plumbing That Keeps Every AI Data Center Running

In September 2023, a single fiber-optic cable fault in a northern Virginia data center campus knocked a major financial services firm offline for eleven hours. The outage cost an estimated $9 million in lost trading revenue. Nobody wrote about the ca...

The Quiet War Over Quantum's Coldest Real Estate

In 1911, a Dutch physicist named Heike Kamerlingh Onnes cooled mercury to minus 269 degrees Celsius and watched its electrical resistance vanish entirely. He had discovered superconductivity. It took another century for that discovery to become the f...

The $900M company arming jets the Pentagon forgot about

In 1987, a U.S. Air Force pilot flying a C-130 Hercules transport over the Pacific noticed something odd about his instrument panel. Half the gauges were steam-driven — mechanical dials connected to pitot tubes and gyroscopes, designs barely changed ...

The Robots Aren't Coming — They're Already Buying Chips

Three weeks ago, a mid-tier Japanese automaker quietly placed the largest single order for custom inference chips in its history. The chips weren't for cars. They were for the 1,400 robotic arms it plans to install across two plants by early 2027 — e...

The AI kings just showed their cards

Something shifted last week. Not in the numbers — though the numbers were extraordinary — but in the tone. The five biggest AI-adjacent companies on earth reported earnings within days of each other, and every single one of them sounded like a man wh...

The $300B machine nobody knows how to value

There's a moment on every great earnings call when the company stops reporting results and starts describing a different kind of future. Jensen Huang hit that moment about twelve minutes in, and he never really came back. NVIDIA's Q4 numbers are alm...

The $300B revenue company nobody prices right

There's a moment on every great earnings call when the CEO stops reporting numbers and starts describing a different world. Jensen Huang had that moment last week, and most analysts missed it. NVIDIA's Q4 numbers were extraordinary on their face — $...

The five calls that rewrote tech's rulebook

There's a moment in every market cycle when one company stops reporting earnings and starts reciting scripture. NVIDIA hit that moment last week. Jensen Huang walked analysts through $62 billion in data center revenue — up 75% year-over-year — and t...

The five biggest calls on Wall Street right now

There's a moment on every great earnings call where the CEO stops reporting and starts evangelizing. Jensen Huang hit that moment about four minutes in and never came back down. NVIDIA's Q4 numbers are almost beside the point now. Data center revenu...

Jensen, Jassy, and Satya walk into a bar…

Last week was the closest thing markets get to a State of the Union for the American tech economy. Tesla, NVIDIA, Alphabet, Amazon, and Microsoft all reported within days of each other. Taken one at a time, each was impressive. Taken together, they t...

Google just told you the ROI is real. Listen.

Let me tell you what actually happened last week on Wall Street, because the headlines got it wrong. Four of the most powerful companies on earth — Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Apple — reported earnings within 72 hours of each other. The financial...

The $462B Backlog Nobody's Talking About

Let me tell you what happened last week that most people completely missed. While the financial press was busy writing the same AWS-vs-Azure horse race story they've been writing since 2019, Alphabet's CFO Anat Ashkenazi sat down at a microphone and...

Middle East Mayhem + Warby Parker's 32% confidence score: The canary or the false alarm?

“I'd be remiss not to mention the mahyem in the Middle East right now. Absolute shit-show. It's going to cause havoc in the market, and things like the...”

The Week in Numbers Confidence is cracking. This week's earnings calls averaged a concerning 44/100 on our confidence metric—with three major retailers and healthcare plays delivering defensive tones and tempered guidance that should worry anyone ho...