Hello world, its Wednesday, November 11th, 2026
Nvidia’s board hired a former Manhattan US attorney to investigate its own CEO, and a Republican senator asked Jensen Huang to step down. CoreWeave had a much better Tuesday, beating estimates and raising guidance. Anthropic put a price range on its IPO, TSMC agreed to buy shares in it and in OpenAI, and AMD’s 6th Gen EPYC is now shipping.
Let’s get into it. --Austin & Vik
Latest episode: Intel’s Earnings Disaster: Bad Luck, Bad Planning, or Both? — listen on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Full transcript: daily.semidoped.com.
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Nvidia’s board hires a prosecutor to investigate Huang
Nvidia’s independent directors hired Joon Kim, a former acting US attorney for the Southern District of New York, and his firm Wachtell Lipton to run the investigation into Jensen Huang that the board announced on Sunday. The statement was one sentence long. It said nothing about scope or timing.
The political pressure grew the same day. Senator Kevin Cramer, a senior Republican on the Senate Banking Committee, said Huang should resign because of the risk of extortion. Separately, Reuters reported that Northwestern Polytechnical University, a military-linked school on the US Entity List, bought two H200 chips in October through a local reseller and rented H200 servers through Chinese computing contracts.
Choosing an outside prosecutor and a top Wall Street law firm suggests the board does not want this to look like a review run by Huang’s longtime friends. Nvidia reports earnings on November 17, and House committee chairs have asked Huang for a closed-door briefing.
Source: Nvidia · CNBC · Politico · Reuters via Straits Times (H200)
Vik: The Jensen saga continues. People seem to think this will eventually blow over for Jensen, and we will go back to focusing on Nvidia chips instead of their CEO. We’ll continue to report on the ongoings till then because the CEO of a company which is 8% of the S&P500 holds an important position in the world.
Austin: I’ve always said Nvidia needed a better succession plan. Even though I don’t foresee succession anytime soon, I’m sure the plan is getting much more attention from the board. News stuff aside, looking forward to the earnings call next week.
CoreWeave beats, raises, and gets a reprieve
CoreWeave’s third-quarter revenue rose 168% to $3.66 billion, ahead of the $3.55 billion analysts expected. It raised 2026 revenue guidance to $13.0 billion to $13.3 billion and lifted adjusted operating income guidance 26% at the midpoint. Backlog reached $132.5 billion, up from $104 billion in June.
CoreWeave says it expects about $9 billion in customer prepayments and deposits in the next three months, which helps answer the biggest question about the company: how it pays for the buildout. It still lost $709 million in the quarter, and net interest expense was $846 million. The stock rose about 13% in premarket trading and lifted other neoclouds with it.
Capex guidance is now $37 billion to $39 billion for 2026. The CFO said that if CoreWeave only builds for contracts already signed, 2027 capex would stay about flat while revenue grows a lot.
Vik: CoreWeave’s beat and raise has quelled investor concerns about their costs, and stock price rose. But CoreWeave bond yields have climbed above 16%, putting them still firmly in the junk bond category with high default risk.
Anthropic sets its IPO terms
Anthropic’s amended S-1 sets an IPO price range of $70 to $78 a share for 825 million shares, which would raise up to about $64 billion. Reuters says the range values the company at up to $1.4 trillion. The stock will trade on Nasdaq as ANT.
The filing is also a compute ledger. Anthropic now lists about $900.9 billion of committed spending, almost all of it compute and infrastructure. Its Microsoft commitment rose to at least $47.2 billion through mid-2033. Its largest Lambda deal, about $34.9 billion for Nvidia GPU capacity, can now be cancelled by either side because Lambda missed a deadline to secure the facility lease. Anthropic says it does not plan to cancel.
Source: Anthropic S-1/A · Anthropic · MLQ.ai
Vik: $900B of committed spending on infrastructure but the increasing pressure against building datacenters might pressure actually securing the leases. What happens if large amounts of the contracted capacity gets cancelled by either party due to unavailability of facilites?
TSMC buys into Anthropic and OpenAI
TSMC’s board approved up to $500 million for Anthropic shares at the IPO price and up to $500 million for OpenAI preferred stock. It also set up a separate investment company with up to $500 million to back semiconductor and related ecosystem companies.
Neither AI lab buys chips from TSMC directly. Their demand reaches TSMC through Nvidia, AMD, Google and Broadcom. The stakes give TSMC a piece of the companies at the top of its demand chain, with no supply terms attached.
The same meeting approved about $40.9 billion in new capital appropriations for advanced nodes, advanced packaging and fab construction, and raised the quarterly dividend to NT$9 from NT$7. TSMC co-COO Kevin Zhang told Nikkei Asia that demand for its leading-node silicon is “insatiable.”
Source: TSMC · Reuters · Focus Taiwan
Vik: This is a rare move for TSMC. Will they buy into more AI stonks through their investment company? Buying into the model layer makes sense for them, but I wonder if they will buy in the supply chain.
Austin: Large investors get time with management. Could be a savvy way to get facetime to pressure test actual end demand. I know they already talk, but it’s different when it’s a large shareholder.
AMD’s 6th Gen EPYC is shipping
AMD’s 6th Gen EPYC processors, built on Zen 6, are now shipping in systems from server makers. Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud instances are coming soon, and Meta is the lead customer as it prepares to deploy them at scale. The top chip, the EPYC 9996, has 256 cores at 600 watts and lists at $14,904.
AMD is pitching the CPU as its own AI product, sold separately for GPU host nodes, agent sandboxes and general-purpose servers. AMD claims up to 3.7 times the performance of an Nvidia Vera system and 2.2 times an Intel Xeon 6980P system on a standard integer benchmark, though the Vera number is AMD’s own estimate. The chips are built on TSMC’s 2nm process, which AMD started ramping in May.
Source: AMD · AMD (2nm ramp) · ServeTheHome · TrendForce
Vik: I’ve held the view for a long time that AMD’s CPU SKUs are brilliantly suited to various parts of agentic AI requirements. The fungibility of chiplet supply between Ryzen and Epyc gives them the chance to actually supply into the CPU demand. High hopes for AMD!
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Industry Chatter
These are just unconfirmed industry whispers.
SpaceX Kessel rack (a mini version of Kyber) — SemiAnalysis says SpaceX is designing Kessel, a custom Vera Rubin NVL72 rack that swaps NVLink cable cartridges for a passive 84-layer PCB midplane. SpaceX would buy chip packages from Nvidia and source the rest itself, skipping Nvidia’s compute boards (SemiAnalysis on X).
Nscale IPO — The Telegraph reports that Nvidia-backed Nscale is considering pushing its planned $35 billion New York listing into 2027 after the AI infrastructure selloff (Reuters via Investing.com).
Sector Watch
Packaging and servers
ASE — The world’s largest chip packager posted its fourth straight monthly revenue record in October at NT$88.6 billion, up 47% from a year ago, with packaging and test up 58% (Source: ASE 6-K).
Inventec — The server maker expects GPU and ASIC server shipments to grow at a high double-digit rate in 2027, but says shortages of memory, CPUs, hard drives and passives could hold back fourth-quarter shipments (Source: Taipei Times).
China chips
Alibaba — Alibaba said its chip design unit T-Head has filed for a Hong Kong IPO after the exchange cleared the spinoff; size and timing are not set (Source: Alibaba filing).
Demand signals
OpenAI — OpenAI’s third-quarter revenue rose about 50% to roughly $10 billion while its operating loss widened to $10.9 billion, according to investor documents seen by the Wall Street Journal (Source: Reuters).
South Korea — Korean chip exports more than quadrupled from a year ago in the first ten days of November to $16.6 billion, half of all exports (Source: Yonhap).
Also worth a read:
Austin’s latest on Chipstrat, AMD Q3 FY26, Annotated
Vik’s latest on Vik’s Newsletter, Why AI Data Center Constraints Make Efficiency More Valuable
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