GDP Thicc, Mortgages Cheap, and Nvidia’s Cope Sermon Send Stocks Higher

This morning got off to a bumpy start after Wall Street woke up, looked at Nvidia’s earnings report again, and in unison thought, “Wait just a dang second!” Sure, Nvidia had an insane quarter… $46.7B in revenue, up 56% year over year, beating estimates.

But when you actually use your brain for 5 full seconds, everyone realized data center sales came in just shy of expectations. And since Nvidia’s entire AI empire essentially runs on its data center GPUs, that little miss was enough to send the stock down nearly 4% after hours. Cue the “AI bubble” panic (for the millionth time this month).

But Jensen Huang isn’t your average CEO. He’s the kind of guy who can roll into a press conference wearing a leather jacket and talk the market back to all-time highs. Which is exactly what he did. Huang reassured everyone that demand for Blackwell AI GPUs is still “extraordinary,” and he even tossed in a nugget about Nvidia getting “fired back up” to sell into China’s $50B AI market once Trump’s export bans stop pissing in their Cheerios. Absolute giga-chad move.

On top of that, it didn’t hurt that Jensen could point to how Nvidia’s auto business quietly surged 69% to $586M thanks to its DRIVE Thor platform. Self-driving cars may still be running stop signs in San Francisco, but the money’s real. By the opening bell, NVDA shares had clawed back most of the losses. And just like that, the broader market flipped green with it. The S&P 500 ticked up 0.2% and hit fresh intraday records above 6,500. The Nasdaq added 0.6%, while the Dow crawled along at 0.2%.

To be fair, Jensen saying “relax, look over here” was only part of the story. US GDP grew at a thicc 3.3% clip last quarter, a massive rebound from the 0.5% dip in Q1, driven by consumer spending and a tariff-induced drop in imports. Mortgage rates slid to fresh 2025 lows (6.56% on the 30-year) even as Trump and Powell’s crew look one heated headline away from settling their beef on Judge Judy.

And speaking of Trump, he finally got Mexico to RSVP to his “Fortress North America” alliance. After months of Dwight Schrute-style nagging (“We need to form an alliance!”) Mexico gave in and agreed to hike tariffs on Chinese goods. I guess you could say Chinese automakers are about to find fewer friends at the southern border.

Elsewhere, Best Buy checked all the boxes on earnings, revenue, and same-store sales… and still got dumped to the side of the road. Shares slid 4% after the retailer guided flat for the year. Tesla had an even rougher go, with European sales collapsing 40% in July while the rest of the region’s EV market was up 33%. Unfortunately, everyone’s eating Elon’s lunch, breakfast, and dinner and leaving him with the bill. And to end on a positive note… Snowflake took home the championship belt, ripping 22% after Q2 numbers came in hotter than a McDonald’s apple pie.

So the day started with investors second guessing Nvidia’s data center miss, but Jensen spun it into a bullish sermon on AI demand… and the market bought it. Toss in a surprise GDP beat, falling mortgage rates, and Trump forcing Mexico to pick sides, and suddenly Thursday felt like another all-time-high kind of day (probably because it was).

If you read all of this, congrats for having a 10 second attention span (better than me). As always, here’s our heatmap for today.

At the time of publishing this article, Stocks.News holds positions in Tesla and McDonald’s as mentioned in the article.