Stock futures pushed higher Wednesday night as investors digested Nvidia’s latest quarterly beat, a development that appears to be restoring confidence in major technology stocks and providing a significant boost to the broader market.

Leading the pre-market rally, Nasdaq 100 futures jumped 1.4%, while S&P 500 futures rose 0.8%. Futures tied to the Dow Jones Industrial Average also participated in the upswing, adding 110 points, or nearly 0.3%. This bullish activity follows a regular trading session where all three major U.S. stock indexes rose across the board, snapping a four-day slide. Despite these midweek gains, stocks remain in the red for the week due to the depth of the recent pullback in several growth sectors.

The primary catalyst for this turnaround is Nvidia, whose shares jumped nearly 5% in extended trading after the chipmaker released highly anticipated quarterly results that beat Wall Street’s earnings and revenue expectations.

Nvidia reported record revenue for the third quarter ended October 26, 2025, of $57.0 billion, up 22% from the previous quarter and up 62% from a year ago.

For the quarter, GAAP and non-GAAP gross margins were 73.4% and 73.6%, respectively, while GAAP and non-GAAP earnings per diluted share were both $1.30.

Beyond the headline numbers, the market-moving company offered a stronger-than-expected fourth-quarter sales forecast. CEO Jensen Huang explicitly addressed concerns regarding product transitions, stating that demand for the company’s current-generation Blackwell chips is “off the charts.”

Nvidia’s upbeat guidance has likely lifted investor sentiment around the broader AI trade, which had weakened in recent sessions amid growing fears regarding elevated valuations, debt financing, and potential chip depreciation. The robust results boosted a slew of stocks across the AI ecosystem in the after-hours session, lifting chipmakers like Advanced Micro Devices and Broadcom, as well as power infrastructure companies such as Eaton.

However, analysts remain cautious about the future trajectory; David Russell, TradeStation’s global head of market strategy, noted that while Nvidia’s numbers remain extremely strong, there are inevitable questions regarding whether the company has already reached its high-water mark in terms of growth and market share.

Fed Divide and the “Higher for Longer” Threat

While the corporate outlook brightened, the macroeconomic landscape became more complex following the release of the Federal Reserve’s October meeting minutes on Wednesday afternoon. The documents revealed disagreements between Fed officials over whether a slowing labor market or persistent inflation posed the bigger threat to the U.S. economy.

This divide is reflected in their outlook for the upcoming December decision, with many officials calling for no more interest rate cuts this year. Consequently, traders are drastically repricing their expectations; per the CME FedWatch Tool, there is now only a 33% likelihood that the Fed will cut its benchmark overnight borrowing rate by a quarter percentage point in December, a figure significantly lower than bets placed just a month ago.

Why Delayed Payrolls Spark Bond Volatility

Investors will be looking for clarity on the macroeconomic front on Thursday morning when the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases the September nonfarm payrolls data. This release carries significantly higher risk for the bond market than a standard report due to the “data fog” created by the U.S. government shutdown.

The delay has introduced a unique mechanism for volatility known as the “Stale Data” Paradox. Because the September data is being released in late November, traders must decide in real-time whether the numbers reflect the current economy or a past reality that no longer exists. This creates an asymmetric risk profile for bond yields:

• The “Old News” Discount: If the report shows surprisingly strong job growth, bond bears may argue the data is “stale”—a snapshot of the economy before recent cooling trends took hold. This could lead to a muted reaction where yields do not rise as much as the headline number would typically warrant, confusing algorithmic trading models.
• The “Confirmation” Trap: Conversely, if the data is weak, the market is likely to treat it as highly relevant confirmation of the “slowing labor market” narrative cited by dovish Fed officials in the minutes. This would validate fears of a recessionary trend, potentially triggering a violent rally in Treasuries (sending yields sharply lower) as traders aggressively price back in a December rate cut.
• Liquidity Gaps: The uncertainty over how the Fed will weight this “backlogged” data has thinned liquidity in the Treasury market. With fewer market makers willing to commit capital ahead of such an ambiguous print, the bid-ask spreads have widened. This means that when the number hits, even a small surprise could cause exaggerated price swings (gaps) as orders chase a lack of liquidity.

This critical economic print will likely serve as the next major test for a market currently caught between robust tech earnings and a potentially stubborn Federal Reserve.

Tekedia Capital invests in India-based Frekil. Frekil accelerates how healthcare AI teams procure and annotate medical scans such as X-rays, CT scans, fundus images, and more making the process up to 10x faster with AI-assisted workflows. The company partners with radiology networks to access large-scale imaging datasets and operates a global marketplace of certified radiologists who deliver rapid, high-quality annotations.

Globally, AI is reshaping healthcare, yet the biggest obstacle remains unchanged: access to clean, well-annotated medical images. Healthcare AI companies and life sciences R&D teams spend months collecting imaging data from hospitals and securing experts to annotate it. The annotation process itself remains manual, slow, expensive, and lacking transparency in quality.

Frekil was created to transform this bottleneck. Working closely with radiology partners, they source large volumes of imaging data and match them with Frekil’s worldwide network of vetted radiologists. On top of this supply chain, they have built powerful, browser-based annotation tools designed specifically for medical AI: collaborative, benchmark-driven, and FDA-ready from day one. With Frekil, teams can move from raw data to fully annotated, production-ready datasets in days instead of months.

This is Scale AI for medical scans and a foundational platform for healthcare innovation. Tekedia Capital welcomes Frekil.

Tekedia Capital invests in India-based Frekil. Frekil accelerates how healthcare AI teams procure and annotate medical scans such as X-rays, CT scans, fundus images, and more making the process up to 10x faster with AI-assisted workflows. The company partners with radiology… pic.twitter.com/XySUXpX2Gc

— Ndubuisi Ekekwe (@ndekekwe) November 20, 2025

Microsoft is gearing up for what CEO Satya Nadella sees as a once-in-a-generation transformation, and he is bringing back one of the company’s most influential strategists to help drive it.

Nadella has tapped Rolf Harms, the economist and strategist behind Microsoft’s pivotal “Economics of the Cloud” paper in 2010, to serve as his advisor on AI economics, a role that signals how sweeping the company’s shift toward artificial intelligence could be.

In a memo circulated to senior executives earlier this month, Nadella said Microsoft must “rapidly rethink the new economics of AI across the company — just as we once did with the cloud,” describing the moment as a fundamental platform shift. He emphasized that Microsoft is building a modern “AI factory,” with Copilots and autonomous agents sitting on top of massive investments in compute, data centers, and model infrastructure.

Harms’ return to the center of Microsoft’s strategic planning is steeped in history. Fourteen years ago, he coauthored “Economics of the Cloud,” a white paper that forced Microsoft to confront the financial realities of a future dominated by hyperscale computing. At the time, Harms was a director of corporate strategy, and the paper challenged internal assumptions so aggressively that employees complained he had dropped “bombshells” into their organizations. Nadella recalled in the memo that Harms’ response was simple: “They’re already there, I’m just helping you find them.”

That document ultimately became foundational to Microsoft’s cloud computing dominance. It justified early investments in global data centers, offered a quantitative roadmap of how cloud adoption would evolve, and made the case that customers would eventually embrace large-scale cloud services for cost savings and operational efficiency. Its arguments cleared internal resistance and helped set the stage for Azure’s rise.

The parallels with today’s AI moment are hard to miss. Companies across the tech sector have embarked on massive spending sprees to secure advanced chips, build new data centers, and train increasingly powerful models — even as analysts question whether the economics make sense. Microsoft briefly slowed its AI infrastructure spending earlier this year, a move that heightened concerns about demand and profitability. In recent months, however, it has accelerated its commitments again, signing expansive new agreements with OpenAI and Anthropic.

Nadella’s memo to executives made clear that Microsoft cannot treat AI as an add-on or incremental upgrade. He wrote that AI represents a shift that is “much more capital and knowledge intensive” than the cloud transition. Harms’ new role will involve working directly with Nadella and the company’s most senior leaders to reexamine everything from infrastructure scaling and platform economics to how applications should be designed and monetized in an AI-first world.

Harms has remained important inside Microsoft’s hierarchy. He is now a corporate vice president in the Cloud + AI group led by Scott Guthrie, and he will continue reporting to Guthrie while taking on his expanded mandate. Business Insider previously profiled Harms as one of the quiet power players behind Microsoft’s AI strategy, tracing his influence from the cloud era into the company’s next frontier.

Nadella said Harms will help Microsoft understand not only how existing businesses will be transformed by AI, but also which entirely new product categories might emerge. The goal is to avoid repeating early mistakes from the cloud era and ensure the company has a clear, data-driven blueprint for the enormous financial and structural commitments that AI now demands.

If the cloud revolution redefined Microsoft once, the company now appears to be preparing for a second reinvention — with the same strategist helping guide the way.