Good morning.
The total addressable market has officially left the atmosphere. Anthropic is likely to tell IPO investors that its potential revenue opportunity tops $30 trillion, edging past the $28.5 trillion SpaceX claimed in its own filing, the Wall Street Journal reported. For scale, Uber told the market in 2019 that it was chasing $6 trillion, per Reuters, a number that at the time was treated as heroic.
Uber wanted every car trip on Earth. Anthropic wants every hour of work on Earth. At this rate, the next S-1 just quietly annexes the moon.
Semiconductors
Nvidia's Big Night Arrives With Something Spicy Already on the Stove
The chip everyone benchmarks against is about to find out how much heat it can take.
Nvidia (NVDA) reports fiscal second-quarter results after today's close, with analysts looking for roughly $92.2 billion of revenue and adjusted earnings near $2.09 a share, close to a doubling from a year ago, according to Visible Alpha consensus cited by TradingKey. The setup is strange. The company is on track to roughly double both sales and profit, and the stock spent the run-up shedding seven straight sessions, its longest losing streak since September 2022, before rebounding Tuesday to lead the S&P 500 higher.
The timing got sharper this week. OpenAI published benchmark results for Jalapeño, its first custom inference chip, built with Broadcom (AVGO), claiming it delivered more work per watt and lower latency than Nvidia's current GB300 systems across several open-weight models.
Feeling the Burn
Custom silicon has been the AI industry's slow-simmering threat for two years, and it has mostly stayed on a back burner because designing a competitive accelerator is hard and programming one is harder. Jalapeño matters less as a product than as a proof that a frontier lab can go from blank sheet to shipping benchmark in a year and a half, using its own models to tune the firmware. OpenAI's hardware chief told Bloomberg Tech the chip targets performance-per-watt gains "somewhere in the region between 1.8 to 4x" versus existing options, and that a second generation is already deep in development.
"It's the full stack control that we're really looking for."
By the numbers: Nvidia's valuation has cooled to roughly 18 to 19 times forward earnings even as growth stayed near triple digits, Bloomberg equities reporter Carmen Reinicke said on Bloomberg Tech Tuesday, and the seven-session slide erased more than $400 billion of market value before the bounce. The company has also cleared consensus for eight straight quarters, which is precisely why a beat alone no longer moves anyone.
Heat Check: The interesting question tonight is not whether Nvidia beats. It is what Jensen Huang says about gross margins, which have been running with a seven handle while memory costs climb, and about the web of investments Nvidia has made across its own customer base. A supplier that finances its buyers, and whose largest buyers are now taping out rivals, is running a more complicated kitchen than the headline growth rate suggests.
Consumer
Dick's Trips Over the Sneakers It Bought Last Year
There is no graceful way to fall down in footwear you paid $2.4 billion for.
Dick's Sporting Goods (DKS) fell 30% Tuesday, its worst day since 2023, after fiscal second-quarter earnings missed and the company cut its outlook for Foot Locker amid what it called a "challenging athletic footwear and apparel marketplace." Bloomberg went further, calling it the steepest single-day drop in the retailer's history.
The split inside the results is the whole story. The legacy Dick's nameplate posted 4.9% comparable sales growth, helped by the World Cup. Foot Locker's comps fell 3.6%.
Two Businesses, One Shoelace
Dick's bought Foot Locker in 2025 to buy international reach and scale against its competitors. What it also bought was exposure to lifestyle footwear, a category that swings on sneaker fashion cycles rather than on whether kids sign up for soccer. That volatility is now sitting inside a company whose core business is refreshingly boring and reliably growing.
"There was a pretty abrupt pullback in that lifestyle footwear market."
The revisions were not small. As CNBC laid out, full-year net sales guidance came down to $21.9 billion to $22.2 billion from $22.1 billion to $22.4 billion, and consolidated operating income guidance dropped to a range of $1.45 billion to $1.55 billion from $1.69 billion to $1.81 billion. Quarterly adjusted earnings landed at $3.53 a share against the $3.76 analysts surveyed by LSEG expected, on revenue of $5.59 billion versus $5.65 billion. CEO Lauren Hobart said the company is "taking a more cautious view of the balance of the year" while remaining confident in the long-term Foot Locker opportunity.
Retro Fit: Foot Locker's problem is that its shelves lean on legacy silhouettes and retro product, which is a wonderful business right up until the moment the cycle turns. Dick's has a year of integration behind it and a compressed window to prove the deal thesis before the market stops grading it on potential. Watch the holiday quarter, when sneaker demand either shows up or doesn't.
International Economics
Canada Drops the Gloves and Matches Washington Dollar for Dollar
Mark Carney said he would answer in kind, and it turns out he meant it line by line.
Canada will impose counter-tariffs of 15% to 50% on roughly 700 categories of US products, hitting about $20 billion of goods, NBC News reported. The top 50% band doubles existing duties on American steel and aluminum and extends new levies to furniture, clothing, milk and consumer electronics, per Bloomberg. A 25% tier covers appliances, cheese, dairy and fish, with 15% applying to assorted machinery parts. The measures take effect September 8.
The headlines crossed mid-morning Tuesday and the loonie promptly gave back its gains.
Penalty, Meet Matching Penalty
Ottawa is responding to Washington's move to place 50% duties on roughly $28 billion of Canadian goods after trade talks stalled. Canada paired the retaliation with a domestic aid package for affected businesses, which is the part worth reading closely. Relief programs are not what you build for a two-week standoff.
There is also a clock in the background: a threatened 50% US tariff on autos is scheduled to land January 1, and the September 8 start date leaves a fortnight of room for someone to blink.
Retaliation that arrives with a support package attached is not a bargaining chip. It is a budget line, and budget lines imply the fight has been priced for duration.
Border Control: For markets, the transmission runs through input costs and consumer goods rather than through any single index level. Furniture, apparel and electronics are the categories where a 50% duty shows up on a shelf tag rather than in a footnote, and North American supply chains do not reroute in three weeks. The autos deadline is the one to circle.
The Tape
Two Nanometers of Separation: Apple unveiled the M6, its first 2nm processor, in a Mac mini starting at $899, alongside a Mac Studio running from $2,499 with the M5 Max and $5,499 with the new M5 Ultra, with pre-orders open now and shipments from September 22.
Taxing Deceleration: Intuit (INTU) beat on the quarter and then guided fiscal 2027 revenue to $23.28 billion to $23.51 billion, growth of 9% to 10% against the 14% it just delivered, the company said, and the shares sold off after hours.
Artificial Artificial Intelligence: Amazon (AMZN) is closing Mechanical Turk on September 30, retiring the human-powered task platform Jeff Bezos once described with that phrase, twenty-one years after launch, CNBC reported.
What You May Also Like
Ring Cycle: Smart-ring maker Oura is seeking up to $3 billion in a US listing at a valuation above $16 billion, potentially as soon as September, Bloomberg reported.
Autobahn Autopilot: Waymo will begin phased testing in Munich within weeks and aims to open driverless rides to the public by the end of 2027, its first EU market, per CNBC.
Freight Expectations: Autonomous trucking startup Gatik raised a $200 million Series D led by the Qatar Investment Authority and Koch Disruptive Technologies, its largest round, on more than $600 million of contracted revenue, TechCrunch reported.
Just For Fun
Elite private schools are now advertising tuition discounts to families earning $500,000, because when boarding runs close to $80,000 a year, even the affluent flinch.
OnlyFans says 5,076 creators have earned more than $1 million on the platform since 2016, a millionaire count that would embarrass several actual hedge funds.
After the Bell
Somewhere in Santa Clara this afternoon, a very large company will report a very large number, and the market will spend four minutes deciding whether a very large number is large enough. Everyone claims to be positioned. Nobody wants to be the one explaining the position tomorrow morning. Bring snacks.
That's the tape. We'll see you at the open. — AllThingsWallSt
