Four beats, three selloffs: the market has stopped paying for beats and started paying only for acceleration

The one thing

Six names in your coverage have reported inside the last 48 hours, and every one of them beat. The share-price outcomes have almost nothing to do with the beats.

Palo Alto topped estimates and fell 9.3%. MongoDB beat and fell 13.5% — on an Atlas growth rate that has now been flat for five straight quarters. Broadcom posted record revenue, record operating income and record free cash flow, with AI revenue up 221%, and is down 3.6% pre-market on a fourth-quarter guide roughly 0.6% below consensus. Meanwhile Dell, which raised its full-year outlook for a fifth consecutive quarter, closed +15.8%, and Snowflake — third consecutive quarter of accelerating product revenue growth — is +24.0% pre-market.

The dividing line is not the beat. It is whether the growth rate is going up. Dell and Snowflake raised the trajectory; Broadcom, MongoDB and Palo Alto delivered a great absolute number on a trajectory the market had already priced. That is a regime the AI trade has not been in before, and it is worth writing down while it is only 48 hours old.

Pre-market marks taken 07:52–08:21 ET on 3 September, roughly 08:52–09:21 BRT. This brief compiled at 10:20 BRT, ten minutes before the open, so these marks are about an hour stale and moving: a re-read at 08:25–08:27 ET had AVGO at $355.89 (−3.09%) and SNOW at $376.22 (+23.01%). Direction and magnitude hold; the exact levels will not.

Sector pulse — covered names with material news

Overnight & last session

Broadcom’s FY3Q26: record everything, and a 0.6% guidance miss

AVGO · 2 Sep, after US close

For the quarter ended 2 August 2026, Broadcom filed revenue of $29.6bn, +86% year over year, split $20.8bn Semiconductor Solutions and $8.8bn Infrastructure Software. GAAP net income was $13.1bn (diluted EPS $2.68); non-GAAP net income $16.4bn ($3.32). Free cash flow of $13.7bn was 46% of revenue. AI semiconductor revenue reached $16.7bn, +221% year over year and +54% sequentially. The Q4 guide is ~$34.8bn of revenue (+93%) with AI at ~$21.7bn (+236%), at a non-GAAP operating margin of about 66% of revenue. The dividend was set at $0.65, payable 30 September. Shares closed −0.66% at $367.24 before the print and were $354.06, −3.59%, pre-market at 07:52 ET. BMO lifted its target to $575 from $455 this morning; Macquarie upgraded to Outperform at $490, arguing “the Google insourcing risk seems priced in.”

The read: Broadcom guides on non-GAAP operating margin, not Adjusted EBITDA — the metric it carried for years and quietly dropped, which your Broadcom initiation already flags. Pair that discontinuity with this quarter: in June the company guided Q3 AI revenue to roughly $16.0bn and delivered $16.7bn, a beat against itself; the sell side had been at $17.2bn and never fully unwound it. Broadcom’s AI number has had two consensuses for three quarters running — the company’s and the street’s — and they have not converged. That gap, charted quarter by quarter, is a note in itself.

Anthropic named as Broadcom’s largest XPU customer for 2027

AVGO · Earnings call, 2 Sep evening ET

On the call, Hock Tan said Anthropic is “on track to become our largest XPU customer” in 2027 and to remain so into 2028, and attached capacity to it: roughly 1 GW of Ironwood deploying for Anthropic in 2026, about 5 GW of TPU v8i in 2027, and a further ~10 GW of potential deployment in 2028. Broadcom has six XPU customers, says it has secured supply for its FY2027 AI target and has line of sight to FY2028 supply. The long-term AI outlook stands at roughly $58bn in FY2026, $115bn in FY2027 and $230bn in FY2028.

The read: This is the first time a public filer has attached gigawatts and a customer ranking to Anthropic’s custom-silicon commitment — one day after your Anthropic initiation and the Frontier Labs sector deep dives went live. Two counterparties are now describing the same contracts from opposite sides of a relationship, and only one of them files with the SEC. See Story worth owning below.

Nvidia takes 90% of MediaTek’s record convertible — its largest direct investment outside the US

NVDA · Announced 31 Aug, priced 1 Sep

Nvidia subscribed $3.5bn of MediaTek’s $3.9bn overseas convertible bond — about 90% of the issue — alongside a partnership putting NVLink Fusion and the newly announced NVHBM into MediaTek’s custom AI chip business, plus PCs and automotive. MediaTek closed 10% higher on Tuesday 1 September; the TAIEX reached its highest level since 1 July that day. Nvidia’s own FY2Q27, reported 26 August, showed revenue of $96.2bn (+106%) with Data Center at $89.0bn (+117%) and a 75.0% GAAP gross margin; Vera Rubin began shipping in August and is guided to roughly 20% of Q3 data-centre revenue. NVDA closed +3.21% at $224.41 on 2 September and was −0.32% pre-market.

The read: Nvidia is financing a company whose custom accelerators compete with its own, and doing it through a convertible — so the exposure sits in an investment line rather than anywhere near revenue. Your Marvell study documents three customer warrants booked against revenue; Cerebras deducts warrants from revenue outright; this is the same circular-financing family in a third accounting location. A register of where AI vendor financing lands on the income statement — revenue contra, investment gain, or nowhere at all — does not exist anywhere, and you already hold three of the cases.

Snowflake accelerates for a third straight quarter and is re-rated 24% before the open

SNOW · 2 Sep, after US close

For the quarter ended 31 July 2026, Snowflake reported total revenue of $1.55bn, +35% year over year, with product revenue of $1.49bn, +37%. Net revenue retention was 126%; remaining performance obligations reached $9.00bn, +30%; 828 customers now generate more than $1m of trailing-twelve-month product revenue, +27%. Non-GAAP operating margin was 15.3% against a GAAP operating margin of −17.0%. The company raised full-year product revenue growth guidance to 36%. The stock had closed −4.37% at $305.84 ahead of the print and was $379.14, +23.97%, pre-market at 08:18 ET. Evercore ISI, UBS and Wells Fargo all raised targets this morning — to $430, $500 and $525 respectively. Michael Burry publicly called the stock “very overvalued” into the same move.

The read: The 32.3-point spread between Snowflake’s GAAP and non-GAAP operating margin is the widest in your SaaS coverage after Datadog’s 23.7-point gap, and the market just paid 24% for the non-GAAP side of it. Your Datadog study already established the template for pricing that divergence. The publishable question is narrow and answerable: across the eleven SaaS names, does the size of the GAAP/non-GAAP operating-margin gap predict the size of the earnings-day move? You have the spine to test it and nobody independent has.

MongoDB beats and falls 13.5% on an Atlas growth rate that has not moved in five quarters

MDB · 1 Sep, after US close

FY2Q27 revenue was $771.8m, +30% year over year, with Atlas revenue up about 29%. The customer base passed 70,600 with a record ~2,900 net additions, and non-GAAP operating margin improved to 24% from 15%. GAAP diluted EPS was $0.50; non-GAAP $1.90. The stock closed −13.54% at $375.40 on 2 September despite the beat, with coverage attributing the fall to Atlas growth being flat for a fifth consecutive quarter. Goldman Sachs raised its target to $520 from $453 anyway. It was +2.01% pre-market.

The read: Same shape as Broadcom, opposite end of the market cap — and the detail that makes it publishable is that total revenue growth accelerated to 30%, a multi-year high, while Atlas stayed at 29%. The acceleration came from Enterprise Advanced and other, not from the cloud product the whole thesis rests on. Note too that MongoDB discloses Atlas growth only as rounded, approximate language — “approximately 29%”, “more than 29%” — so the five-quarter plateau everyone traded on has to be reconstructed rather than read. Your MongoDB study was the first to take its annual income statement from SEC XBRL; this is the case for extending that to the KPI line, where the company’s disclosure is thinner than the market’s reliance on it.

Palo Alto tops estimates, falls 9.3%, and buys an AI IT-desk startup for $500m

PANW · 1 Sep, after US close

FY4Q26 revenue was $3.41bn, +34% year over year, with next-generation security ARR of $9.10bn, +63%, and RPO of $21.2bn, +34%. GAAP operating income was $172m — a 5.0% margin on revenue, a figure the release does not print — against a non-GAAP 29.6%; GAAP diluted EPS was −$0.35 while non-GAAP was $1.02. The sign flip sits entirely below the operating line: $441m of net other expense, of which $524m is a fair-value charge on convertible senior notes and capped calls, plus a $13m tax provision booked on a pre-tax loss. Shares closed −9.28% at $328.48 on 2 September; Goldman Sachs raised its target to $390 from $371 on the same results. Separately, Palo Alto paid $500m for Console, a Thrive-backed startup automating routine IT help-desk work. The stock was +1.28% pre-market.

The read: A positive GAAP operating margin and a negative GAAP EPS in the same quarter, and the driver is a mark-to-market charge on Palo Alto’s own convertible notes — an item that gets larger as its share price rises. The company’s equity strength is, mechanically, what pushed GAAP EPS negative. Your Palo Alto initiation was built on the mirror of this (“+31% revenue and a GAAP operating loss”); this quarter is the sequel and the second data point for the argument that PANW’s headline metric, NGS ARR, has drifted far enough from GAAP that the two tell opposite stories on the same day. Worth running audit_panw_prose.py over whatever you publish on it.

The levered periphery keeps derating while its cost of debt sits at SOFR+550

CRWV · 1–2 Sep

CoreWeave closed at $80.93 on 2 September, −1.12%, and was $80.19 pre-market — its lowest level since 3 August and more than 40% below the year-to-date high. Nothing new was announced; the derating is happening against unchanged disclosure. Its 2Q26 print showed revenue of $2,575m, +112%, adjusted EBITDA of $1,510m at a 59% margin, a net loss of $626m, and revenue backlog of about $104bn at 30 June, excluding more than $25bn of commitments added in early 3Q26. The $2.6bn delayed-draw term loan that closed on 10 August prices at SOFR+550bp, is rated Ba2 by Moody’s and BB+ by Fitch, and carries an approximately five-year maturity against customer contracts averaging about three years. That closing took CoreWeave’s 2026 debt and equity raised past $30bn. Carried forward from the 2 September edition: debt stood at roughly $35.1bn at 30 June ($31.4bn recourse plus $3.7bn non-recourse), 2026 capex guidance was raised to $35–39bn, and interest expense was $640m in Q2 and is guided to $860–940m in Q3 — against quarterly revenue of $2,575m.

The read: The cleanest tripwire on the radar, and it now has two independent mismatches, not one. First, tenor: CoreWeave widened the eligible-contract definition so a ~5-year loan could be written against ~3-year contracts — a duration gap disclosed in a press release rather than buried in a covenant. Second, rate of change: at the Q3 guide midpoint the interest line is growing about 40% sequentially against 24% revenue growth, so debt service is heading toward a third of revenue. Backlog compounds while the equity derates, which means the market is not disputing the contracts; it is disputing what is left after the debt is served. Watch the pricing on the next facility rather than the next revenue print — the spread CoreWeave pays is a cleaner real-time read on AI credit appetite than any hyperscaler bond, because CoreWeave has no software annuity to hide behind.

Oracle is the next test, one week out

ORCL · Preview, 2 Sep

Oracle reports FY1Q27 after the US close on Thursday 10 September, with management guided to 27–29% revenue growth and consensus near $19.13bn of revenue and $1.30 of GAAP EPS. The date itself is a resolution: yesterday’s edition had to carry it as unconfirmed, with aggregators split between 8–9 and 14 September; Oracle has since set it. It last printed FY4Q26 on 10 June: revenue $19.2bn (+21%), Cloud Infrastructure $5.8bn (+93%), and RPO of $638bn — up $85bn sequentially, of which about $75bn of the large AI contracts is prepaid or customer-supplied hardware. Full-year free cash flow was negative $23.7bn on reported capex of $55,663m. On that call the CFO put FY2027 net cash capital expenditure at around $70bn, including $20–25bn of customer prepayments and timing, implying reported capex nearer $90–95bn — and management stated it “does not expect to issue additional debt in calendar year 2026.” Elsewhere on the financing side: Alphabet raised $49.6bn of debt in June 2026 explicitly for AI infrastructure and compute, and Amazon raised roughly $37bn in US bonds plus €14.5bn in March.

The read: RPO of $638bn is a promise with no disclosed delivery schedule attached, and the market keeps annualising it anyway. Watch what happens on the 10th if RPO grows and the conversion commentary does not. Oracle’s capex guidance is also stated net of customer prepayments — a basis nobody else in the hyperscaler set uses, which quietly makes Oracle look smaller than it spends in every cross-company capex chart, including the one below.

Dell raises for a fifth consecutive quarter and adds 15.8% in a session

DELL · 1 Sep, after US close

FY2Q27, the quarter ended 31 July 2026, delivered record revenue of $47.0bn, +58% year over year, with Infrastructure Solutions at $31.8bn, +89%. Dell booked $60.9bn of AI server orders in the quarter, recognised $16.4bn of AI server revenue and exited with a record $95bn backlog. GAAP operating margin was 11.5% against a non-GAAP 12.6%; GAAP diluted EPS was $6.34, +273%, and non-GAAP $7.04. The full-year FY2027 outlook was lifted by $25bn to a point figure of $192.0bn — Dell publishes no range here — which the company states as 69% growth. Shares closed +15.81% at $492.20 on 2 September and were −1.48% pre-market. JPMorgan moved to $635, Bernstein to $650.

The read: Your Dell study is the live one, and it now needs the FY2Q27 rebuild pushed — the gross-margin bear case already inverted at this quarter, and orders of $60.9bn against $16.4bn recognised means the backlog is now growing at nearly four times the rate it converts. That ratio, not the revenue line, is the story: Dell is accumulating a claim on future GPU supply faster than it can turn it into margin, at a non-GAAP operating margin of 12.6%. Remember the row-drift trap in the Dell workbook — resolve rows by label plus anchor before this quarter goes into the model.

No material overnight news across Ads & adtech (5 names), Consumer platforms & commerce (5) or Space & mobility (2). SPCX was +0.05% at $140.64 pre-market. Macro backdrop for the open: futures mixed, oil higher on renewed US–Iran strikes with WTI +2.12% at $92.94 and Brent +1.90% at $97.45, and long-end Treasury yields at multi-year highs — a combination that has been compressing the highest-multiple semis all week.

Full-year capex guidance across the build-out

US$ billions, latest company guidance. Fiscal years and definitions differ — these bars are not strictly comparable. Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, TSMC and Intel are calendar 2026; Microsoft and Oracle are fiscal 2027; Micron is fiscal 2026 (ended August 2026). Meta includes principal payments on finance leases. Oracle is stated net of customer prepayments and Micron net of government incentives, while Intel is a gross figure. Ranges plot at their midpoint: Alphabet $195–205bn, Meta $130–145bn, TSMC $60–64bn.

Where each name stands

Blank or omitted fields are unverified, not zero. Six disclosures were withheld or absent at source and are noted in the rows: Vertiv orders and backlog, Cloudflare’s large-customer count and net retention, ASML net bookings, Roku streaming households, Netflix memberships, Shopify EPS. Nvidia’s EPS is omitted pending a check of its GAAP-to-non-GAAP reconciliation, where the two lines print in an unexpected order.

On the calendar

Story worth owning

Both sides of the Anthropic compute contract, disclosed by two companies that never have to agree

Broadcom last night put numbers on Anthropic that Anthropic has never put on itself: largest XPU customer in 2027, roughly 1 GW of Ironwood in 2026, about 5 GW of TPU v8i in 2027, up to 10 GW of potential deployment in 2028, inside a FY2027 AI revenue outlook of about $115bn. Anthropic is private and files nothing. Broadcom is describing the same commercial relationship to satisfy a completely different disclosure standard — and it is describing it in gigawatts, while every other AI commitment in the market is described in dollars.

Amazon’s 2Q26 release makes the same point from a third direction: $53.4bn of pre-tax non-operating income, primarily from Anthropic, running through a line that has nothing to do with AWS operations. Three public filers now carry a piece of the same private company, each on a different statement, none of them reconcilable to the others by design.

The work is to take every dated public statement about Anthropic’s compute — Broadcom’s gigawatts, the cloud partners’ announced commitments, Amazon’s carrying value, Anthropic’s own run-rate claims — convert them to a common unit, and publish the gap rather than the total. Your OpenAI study established the method when there is no audited source: arithmetic gates become provenance gates, and run-rate is not revenue. Your Frontier Labs study established the discipline: never total the compute-deal register. This is the same house method applied to the one AI lab where a public filer has just volunteered the supply side. It is defensible because every input is a dated public statement, it is publishable inside a week, and it directly extends two studies that went live yesterday. The angle nobody has taken is the honest one — not how big Anthropic’s compute is, but how far apart the disclosed versions of it are.

Sources

1. Broadcom Inc., Form 8-K exhibit 99.1 — Q3 FY2026 results, quarter ended 2 Aug 2026; released 2 Sep 2026. sec.gov
2. Broadcom Inc., “Broadcom Inc. Announces Third Quarter Fiscal Year 2026 Financial Results and Quarterly Dividend”, 2 Sep 2026. investors.broadcom.com
3. CNBC, “Broadcom’s stock drops 5% as weak guidance overshadows earnings beat”, 2 Sep 2026. cnbc.com
4. Yahoo Finance, “Broadcom stock slips as chipmaker’s strong results ‘not enough to keep investors happy'”, 2 Sep 2026. finance.yahoo.com
5. Benzinga, “Broadcom CEO Hock Tan Says Anthropic ‘On Track to Become Our Largest XPU Customer’ as Google TPU Orders Expand”, 2–3 Sep 2026. benzinga.com
6. Investing.com, “Earnings call transcript: Broadcom tops Q3 2026 estimates as AI sales surge”, 2 Sep 2026. investing.com
7. Snowflake Inc., Form 8-K exhibit — FY2027 Q2 results, released 2 Sep 2026. sec.gov
8. StockAnalysis quote pages for AVGO, NVDA, SNOW, MDB, PANW, DELL and CRWV — closes of 2 Sep 2026 and pre-market marks of 3 Sep 2026 (07:52–08:21 ET), with the analyst-action headlines cited above. Accessed 3 Sep 2026. stockanalysis.com/stocks/avgo
9. Dell Technologies, “Dell Technologies Delivers Second Quarter Fiscal 2027 Financial Results”, 1 Sep 2026. investors.delltechnologies.com · SEC exhibit 99.1
10. CNBC, “Dell surges 9% after lifting fiscal 2027 forecast on AI server strength”, 1 Sep 2026. cnbc.com
11. Palo Alto Networks, Form 8-K exhibit 99.1 — FY4Q26 results, 1 Sep 2026. sec.gov
12. MongoDB, “MongoDB, Inc. Announces Second Quarter Fiscal 2027 Financial Results”, 1 Sep 2026. prnewswire.com
13. TheStreet, “Stock Market Today (Sept. 3, 2026)” — futures, oil, US–Iran, SPCX pre-market. thestreet.com
14. 24/7 Wall St., “Semiconductor Stocks Slide as Global Bond Selloff Lifts Yields”, 1 Sep 2026. 247wallst.com
15. CNBC, “Qualcomm rival MediaTek jumps 10% after $3.5 billion Nvidia AI chip deal”, 1 Sep 2026. cnbc.com
16. Taipei Times, “Nvidia to invest US$3.5 billion in MediaTek”, 1 Sep 2026. taipeitimes.com
17. NVIDIA, “NVIDIA Announces Financial Results for Second Quarter Fiscal 2027”, 26 Aug 2026. nvidianews.nvidia.com
18. TSMC, Form 6-K — 2Q26 results and 3Q26 guidance, 16 Jul 2026. sec.gov · pr.tsmc.com
19. CNBC, “World’s biggest chipmaker TSMC’s sales surge 45% amid buoyant AI demand”, 10 Aug 2026 — July monthly revenue. cnbc.com
20. Investing.com, “Earnings call transcript: TSMC lifts 2026 outlook as AI demand stays hot in Q2 2026”, 16 Jul 2026 — source of the US$60–64bn 2026 capital budget. investing.com
21. Alphabet Inc., Form 8-K exhibit 99.1 — Q2 2026 results, 22 Jul 2026. sec.gov
22. CNBC, “Alphabet earnings takeaways: Q2 revenue beats, GOOGL stock sinks on 2026 capex hike”, 22 Jul 2026. cnbc.com
23. CNBC, “Amazon hikes 2026 capex to $220 billion due to higher memory costs”, 30 Jul 2026. cnbc.com
24. Amazon.com, Form 8-K exhibit 99.1 — 2Q26 results, 30 Jul 2026. sec.gov
25. Meta Platforms, “Meta Reports Second Quarter 2026 Results” — 2026 capex outlook $130–145bn. investor.atmeta.com
26. PYMNTS, “Microsoft Extends Data Center Lifespans to Soften AI Buildout Costs”, Jul 2026 — useful life 15→25 years, capex ~$175bn vs ~$190bn. pymnts.com
27. CFO Dive, “Microsoft holds the line on AI spending plans” — Amy Hood on the FY2027 change, call of 29 Jul 2026. cfodive.com
28. Oracle, Form 8-K exhibit 99.1 — FY4Q26 results, 10 Jun 2026. sec.gov · capex commentary from the call via investing.com
29. Oracle, “Oracle Sets the Date for its First Quarter Fiscal Year 2027 Earnings Announcement”. investor.oracle.com
30. CNBC, “AI trade faces test with next week’s Oracle earnings”, 2 Sep 2026. cnbc.com
31. CoreWeave, “CoreWeave Closes $2.6 Billion Loan Facility, Expanding Financing Flexibility for AI Infrastructure”, 10 Aug 2026. SEC exhibit 99.1
32. CoreWeave, Form 8-K exhibit — 2Q26 results, 11 Aug 2026. sec.gov
33. Intel, Form 8-K — 2Q26 results, 23 Jul 2026; 2026 gross capex “more than $20 billion” from the call. sec.gov · call transcript
34. Micron, Form 8-K exhibit 99.1 — FY3Q26 results, 24 Jun 2026; FY2026 capex ~$27bn net of incentives from the call. sec.gov · call transcript
35. Yahoo Finance, “Micron Technology Doubles Capex as AI Memory Shortage Deepens” — the “above $45bn” FY2027 figure this brief declines to plot. finance.yahoo.com
36. Business Wire, “Adobe to Announce Q3 FY2026 Earnings Results on Sept. 10, 2026”, 31 Aug 2026. businesswire.com
37. MacRumors, “Apple Event Announced for September 9: ‘Surprise and Shine'”, 26 Aug 2026. macrumors.com
38. Company results releases for the remaining coverage names in the standings table, each fetched from the company’s IR site or its SEC 8-K exhibit on 3 Sep 2026.

Figures are as reported by companies, exchanges and news services and have not been independently verified against filings, except where an SEC exhibit or IR release is cited directly. Guidance figures taken from earnings calls rest on transcript providers where the company’s own transcript was unavailable; these are marked in the sources. Pre-market and intraday prices are point-in-time marks from 07:52–08:27 ET on 3 September and will have moved by the open. Where sources disagree, both readings are shown rather than one being chosen silently. Prepared for internal research use at CoreValue Research. This is not investment advice, not a recommendation to buy or sell any security, and not a solicitation. — 07:00 BRT scheduled slot; actually compiled 3 September 2026 at 10:20 BRT, ten minutes before the US open.