Dan Hanbury, global equity portfolio manager at Ninety One, which holds Nvidia as its second-largest holding in its global strategic equity fund, cautiously welcomed Nvidia's share price jump in Thursday's premarket trade. "As a holder, it's great to see an early positive reaction but of course as we know those reactions can reverse further into the day," Hanbury told CNBC's "Squawk Box Europe." "Our reading of the numbers is they are very strong. Clearly, we can get caught up in the quarterly noise of a company like this but if we just put those [numbers] in context … only three years ago they were delivering $15 billion of data center revenue, we're now looking at consensus forecasts into next year of $280 billion," Hanbury said. "That is phenomenal growth that these guys are delivering."
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Karen McCormick, chief investment officer at London-based venture capital company Beringea, spoke with CNBC's "Squawk Box Europe" about some of the recent moves to bulk-up on AI and scale, particularly following Nvidia and Microsoft 's recent push to invest up to $15 billion in OpenAI rival Anthropic. "It's always a little bit intimidating to contradict Jensen Huang right after he has made phenomenal earnings results but in terms of the almost incestuousness of the valley and the AI companies, it is more than we have seen in the past," McCormick said. "I mean, if you think about traditionally, we might have called something like this vendor financing, where your vendor is helping to support the business," McCormick said. "In this case we are just doing it with hundreds of billions of dollars and the ecosystem itself is now so intertwined that it's almost a little bit nerve-wracking because if we are in a bubble and if any of that bubble bursts, what is going to happen to all of the related businesses?"
'Nowhere near as bad as 1999'
The culmination of circular dealmaking, debt issuances and high valuations added pressure to the market ahead of Nvidia's much-anticipated results, despite other Big Tech firms posting solid quarterly earnings.