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Today in AI — August 26, 2026

Editorial

Editorial

— 3 min read
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Today in AI — August 26, 2026

It was an earnings-day closer for the books: Nvidia doubled to its biggest-ever quarter, security vendors are riding an AI-threat supercycle, and the PC and cloud stacks both showed how the boom is really shaping demand.

Industry

  • Nvidia turned in its largest quarter on record, with revenue up 106% year over year to $96.2 billion as data-center revenue jumped 117% to $89 billion — proof of an AI-spending inflection point, with net income more than doubling to $59.7 billion and third-quarter guidance landing above estimates. Yet shares slipped after hours: investors wanted more after The Information reported supply constraints would slow growth next year, and management tied $103 billion in commitments to building out an OpenAI site.
  • CrowdStrike's stock jumped more than 11% after hours on a record fiscal second quarter that CEO George Kurtz called "the best in the company's history," powered by the AI-security wave. Revenue rose 26% to $1.47 billion, beating the $1.44 billion expected, with record net new annual recurring revenue of $333 million. Kurtz credited an "Mythos moment" — Anthropic's frontier model, which can exploit previously unknown software flaws — for turning AI adoption into mass-market security demand, and lifted the full-year revenue outlook above consensus.
  • Salesforce shares climbed as much as 13% after hours as the company posted Q2 revenue up 11% to $11.35 billion and net income surging 87% to $3.5 billion, beating estimates and guiding third-quarter revenue above analyst forecasts. The beat lands a day after Salesforce teamed up with Anthropic to launch "Claudeforce" for sales teams — putting its Agentforce AI suite at the center of the rebound narrative.
  • AI assistant startup Instinct is reportedly raising a $250 million Series B co-led by Index Ventures and Benchmark at a $2.5 billion valuation, bringing its total funding toward $350 million. It's the latest big venture bet on a general-purpose consumer assistant, a sign that the race to own an AI front-end is drawing marquee money.
  • HP's Q3 revenue rose 12.5% to $15.7 billion, aided by an 18% jump in PC revenue to $11.8 billion — yet the stock fell more than 9% after hours because unit shipments dropped 16%. The split maps the AI-PC story in one chart: customers are paying more for AI-capable machines and lifting average selling prices, while overall unit demand is weak. Printing revenue slipped 2% to $3.9 billion.

Tools

  • Nvidia expanded its NVLink Fusion rack-scale platform with NVHBM, a custom high-bandwidth memory that moves the memory controller off the chip and into the HBM stack — delivering up to 30% more memory bandwidth, 15% lower power draw, and freeing up to 25% of compute-die area versus standard HBM4E. Amazon's Annapurna Labs will be the first to build on it, starting with next-generation Trainium4 chips, so Amazon silicon and Nvidia GPUs can share one rack-scale architecture.
  • IBM unveiled its first dual-architecture mainframe processor at Hot Chips, designed to run Arm-native Linux alongside z/OS on the same core — the first milestone to emerge from its April collaboration with Arm. Built on a 2nm node with 11 cores running above 5.7 GHz plus AI inference accelerators for in-transaction fraud detection, the chip aims to bring Arm's 22-million-developer software ecosystem to IBM's mission-critical Z and LinuxONE systems.

Nvidia just doubled to a record $96 billion quarter and security vendors are profiting from the "Mythos moment" — does this mean the AI-capex cycle is peaking, or is the buildout only getting started? Tell us in the comments.

Sources: Nvidia Newsroom · Reuters · The Information · CrowdStrike · CNBC · Salesforce · CNBC · Gate.com · Techmeme · HP Newsroom · Wall Street Journal · NVIDIA Blog · NVIDIA Newsroom · IBM Newsroom · Arm Newsroom

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