Hey Superheroes,
It was a week defined by bonds before it was defined by earnings. The U.S. 10-year Treasury yield touched 4.81% on Wednesday 2 September, its highest level since November 2023, as a global bond selloff deepened on renewed inflation concerns. The China-U.S. yield gap neared a record high as the Treasury selloff widened. That rout hit the ASX hard. The ASX 200 fell 0.97% to 8,978.4 on Wednesday as the bond selloff and oil spike hit technology, gold and mining stocks together but by week’s end, risk appetite had returned with Bitcoin rallying past $81,000 as Fed rate-hike odds fell to a coin flip.
Then yields took a breather. Wall Street snapped a three-session losing streak on Wednesday, with the S&P 500 up 0.46%, and posted its best session in a month on Thursday as Fed Governor Christopher Waller said he would be inclined to support holding rates in September if inflation data cooperates. Fed funds futures odds of a September hike fell to 50.4% from 63.2% the day before, and the 10-year yield eased to around 4.77%.
Oil remained elevated throughout. Brent traded near $95 a barrel, its highest in nearly six weeks, after the U.S. launched fresh strikes on Iranian targets near the Strait of Hormuz and Iran responded with missiles toward US bases in the region. The ASX 200 rebounded 0.46% to 9,020.1 on Thursday as gold and bank stocks recovered.
Two quick calendar notes: U.S. August non-farm payrolls are due at 8:30am ET today (around 10:30pm AEST tonight) and have not been released at time of writing. Also, U.S. equity and bond markets are closed Monday 7 September for the Labor Day holiday, crypto markets trade as usual. Equities resume Tuesday 8 September.
Here’s what else moved this week.
Snowflake’s earnings boost: three straight quarters of accelerating growth
Snowflake (NYSE:SNOW) has spent most of 2026 fighting the perception that AI would commoditise its data platform. This week’s result was the clearest rebuttal yet.
The numbers
Snowflake reported last quarter revenue of $1.55 billion, up 35% year on year, with product revenue of $1.49 billion up 37%, both ahead of analyst estimates. Non-GAAP adjusted EPS came in at 62 cents against a 45 cent estimate. Shares surged more than 22% in after-hours trading on 2 September.
The guidance
Management raised its full year product revenue forecast to $6.07 billion from $5.84 billion, and lifted its full year adjusted operating margin target to 14.5% from 13.5%. For Q3 it guided to 37 to 38% product revenue growth, meaning the acceleration is expected to hold.
What the numbers don’t tell us
It marked the third consecutive quarter of accelerating product revenue growth. One quarter of acceleration is noise. Two is a trend. Three is a pattern, and it suggests AI-linked data workloads are translating into durable demand. The size of the after-hours move also reflects how much of the prior share price had discounted a slowdown that simply did not show up.
Nvidia hugs the open source AI ecosystem: a $12.9 billion deal for Hugging Face
Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) has spent years building the hardware layer of the AI stack. This week it made its most significant move yet into the software and developer layer.
The deal
Nvidia confirmed on 3 September a definitive agreement to acquire Hugging Face for approximately $12.9 billion, comprising an $11.9 billion purchase price to shareholders and an equity retention pool of up to $1 billion for Hugging Face staff joining Nvidia. The transaction is expected to close in the first half of 2027, subject to regulatory approval.
What Hugging Face is
Hugging Face is the closest thing AI development has to a universal library. Its platform hosts three million models, 500,000 datasets and roughly 18 million developers. When an AI team needs a pre-trained model or wants to publish their own, Hugging Face is typically where they go. Owning it gives Nvidia a presence at the very start of the AI development workflow.
What Nvidia said
CEO Jensen Huang said Hugging Face will remain an open platform and will not require Nvidia compute, adding that developers will keep the ability to choose their own models, frameworks and clouds. The open-platform commitment is strategically important: if Hugging Face became an Nvidia-only environment, much of its value to the developer community would evaporate.
What the numbers don’t tell us
The deal is Nvidia’s second largest after its $20 billion purchase of Groq’s assets. Hugging Face reportedly generates around $150 million in annualised revenue, meaning Nvidia is paying roughly 86 times revenue. That valuation indicates Nvidia may believe owning the developer ecosystem creates structural demand for its chips that goes well beyond what the revenue line today suggests. Regulators will have their own view of that logic.
Some other things we’re shining the Spotlight on:
Bitcoin reclaims $81,000 as institutional flows rebound
Bitcoin slid below $78,000 early in the week as rising bond yields and oil prices weighed on risk assets, before reclaiming $81,000 on Thursday after Fed Governor Waller signalled support for holding rates in September. Spot Bitcoin ETFs swung from $236 million in outflows at the start of the week to over $101 million in net inflows as sentiment shifted. Corporate treasury buyers also returned, with major holders adding more than $500 million in BTC to balance sheets.
Broadcom triples AI revenue, market shrugs at guidance
Broadcom (NASDAQ:AVGO) reported fiscal Q3 revenue up 86% to $29.6 billion with AI chip revenue up 221% to $16.7 billion. Shares still fell after the company guided to Q4 revenue of $34.8 billion, below the $35.03 billion analysts expected, even as it flagged full year AI revenue of US$58 billion and projected AI revenue could reach approximately US$115 billion in 2027. A miss by $230 million on a $34.8 billion guide is the kind of thing that only matters when the bar is impossibly high.
Corporate Travel returns to ASX after a year, falls 80%
Corporate Travel Management (ASX:CTD) resumed trading on 3 September after more than a year in suspension, with shares plunging as much as 82.6% to $2.80 before closing down around 80% at $3.15 against a last traded price of $16.07. The suspension dated back to August 2025 after the company failed to lodge financial statements amid an investigation into accounting irregularities and customer overcharging in its UK business. Trading resumed following lodgement of the FY26 preliminary final report, which showed a return to statutory profitability, but the market’s verdict on the governance history was immediate and severe.
