Nvidia's $96.2bn Quarter, Anthropic's $45bn Nscale Deal and OpenAI's Break With Cursor
Updated: 7 days ago
Title: Nvidia's $96.2bn Quarter, Anthropic's $45bn Nscale Deal and OpenAI's Break With Cursor
Date: 1 September 2026
Type: Blog
Author: SAASiQ (contact@saasiq.ai)
Word count: 1411 words
Reading time: 6 min
Published: 01-09-2026
Nvidia reported revenue of $96.2bn for its second quarter on 26 August and told investors to expect growth of about 70 per cent in its next financial year, against the 44 per cent analysts had forecast. In the same week Anthropic agreed a six-year compute deal worth about $45bn with the British company Nscale, Salesforce put its CRM data inside Claude, and Dell raised its annual revenue forecast by $25bn. OpenAI said it would stop supplying models to Cursor, now that SpaceX owns it.
Nvidia's results
The quarter ran to 26 July and is the second of Nvidia's 2027 financial year. Revenue was up 18 per cent on the previous quarter and 106 per cent on a year earlier. Data centres accounted for $89.0bn, up 117 per cent, of which $48.71bn came from the hyperscale cloud providers and $40.31bn from the group Nvidia calls AI clouds, industrial and enterprise. Gross margin was 75.0 per cent on both GAAP and non-GAAP measures.
Nvidia guided to revenue of $108.0bn, plus or minus 2 per cent, for the current quarter, and its chief financial officer, Colette Kress, said the company expected revenue to grow by about 70 per cent in the 2028 financial year. Yahoo Finance and Insider Monkey describe it as Nvidia's first year-ahead forecast, and put the LSEG analyst consensus at 44 per cent. Management said the figure is set by what Nvidia can supply, with memory the main constraint. On the call Jensen Huang said: 'Our demand is much greater than 70%.' The outlook excludes data-centre revenue from China.
Nvidia returned $26.0bn to shareholders in the quarter and has $99.0bn left on its buyback authorisation. The next dividend, $0.25 a share, is payable on 1 October. The shares rose by between 8.7 and 9 per cent in Thursday's trading, according to Yahoo Finance and the Motley Fool. The release says 35 new Nvidia AI and high-performance computing supercomputers are in development across Europe, and it has no item specific to the UK.
AWS commits to 2 million more GPUs
Amazon Web Services and Nvidia announced on the same day that AWS will add 2 million more Nvidia GPUs across 2027 and 2028, covering the Blackwell Ultra, Rubin and Rubin Ultra generations. AWS had committed to more than 1 million at Nvidia's GTC conference in March, so the total is now more than 3 million. Nvidia's Vera CPU is coming to AWS as well.
Of the new capacity, 100,000 GPUs will go into what the two companies call AI factories for the US government, on secure AWS infrastructure for federal and national-security work. The release also makes performance claims for AWS services: G7 instances with 4.6 times the AI inference performance of the previous G6 generation, GPU-accelerated EMR up to 3.7 times faster, and vector indexing in OpenSearch up to nine times faster at a quarter of the cost. These are vendor figures. Amazon's shares fell about 1.5 per cent, to around $256, according to the Motley Fool.
Anthropic and Nscale
Bloomberg reported on 26 August that Anthropic had agreed to pay about $45bn over six years for AI cloud capacity from Nscale, running on Nvidia's Vera Rubin systems, with the capacity coming online in late 2027. Neither company has commented on the record. The reports, including those from CNBC and TechCrunch, rest on unnamed sources.
Nscale is a British AI infrastructure company founded in 2024, but the capacity is in the US. The deal covers about 460 MW at Nscale's Monarch Compute Campus in Mason County, West Virginia, which generates its own power from gas on site. That is the first of three planned buildings, roughly a third of a campus planned at about 1.35 GW. According to TradingKey, Microsoft signed a letter of intent for the same capacity in March and withdrew this summer, after which Anthropic became the tenant.
TechCrunch counts it as the latest in a series of Anthropic compute agreements over the past eight months: about $10bn over six years with Volta in Norway, about $5bn with AMD, capacity from SpaceX, about 5 GW more from Amazon and an expanded partnership with Google and Broadcom.
Salesforce results and Claudeforce
Salesforce reported second-quarter revenue of $11.3bn on 26 August, up 11 per cent, with subscription and support revenue of $10.8bn. Annual recurring revenue from Agentforce, its AI agent product, passed $1.5bn, up more than 240 per cent, and Agentforce and Data 360 together came to nearly $3.9bn. Salesforce also reports what it calls Agentic Work Units, its own count of work done by agents. It has delivered 7.0bn to date, 3.2bn of them in the quarter.
Full-year revenue guidance went up by $200m, to between $46.1bn and $46.4bn. Salesforce says that range includes $200m from the pending acquisitions of Contentful and Fin and allows for about $100m of adverse currency movement. It is also part way through a $25bn accelerated share repurchase, due to settle in October.
The same day, Salesforce and Anthropic announced a partnership they call Claudeforce. Its first product, Salesforce in Claude, is a plugin with 37 prebuilt sales skills that lets sellers work with live revenue data from Salesforce, and take governed actions on it, from inside Claude. Selected pilot customers have it now, an open beta is expected in September and more skills are due late in 2026. Claude runs inside Salesforce's Trust Boundary through Amazon Bedrock, which the release presents as suited to regulated industries. There is no pricing yet, and the release says pricing and packaging are subject to change.
Anthropic's Dario Amodei said companies can 'point Claude at the customer information and business context that they've been building in Salesforce for decades'. Neither release mentions the UK or the public sector.
Dell raises its forecast by $25bn
Dell released its second-quarter results on 1 September. Revenue was $47.0bn, up 58 per cent. The Infrastructure Solutions Group grew 89 per cent to $31.8bn and the Client Solutions Group 20 per cent to $15.0bn.
AI server orders reached a record $60.9bn in the quarter, and AI server revenue a record $16.4bn, about double a year earlier. The AI backlog stands at $95bn, against $43bn at the start of the financial year. Dell raised its full-year revenue forecast from $167bn to $192bn, which would be growth of 69 per cent, and expects about $74bn of that to come from AI-optimised servers. Earnings per share were $6.34 on a GAAP basis and $7.04 non-GAAP.
OpenAI ends model supply to Cursor
OpenAI said on Friday 28 August that it will wind down its contract supplying models to Cursor, the AI coding tool made by Anysphere. The proposed shutoff date is 12 November 2026. Cursor users will still be able to reach GPT models with their own API keys.
SpaceX agreed to buy Anysphere in June in an all-stock deal that valued it at $60bn, and completed the purchase on 14 August. OpenAI's statement, as quoted by DevOps.com, says: 'We cannot be confident that SpaceX will use our technology within our terms of service.' It pointed to contract breaches at Twitter, now X, and at xAI, and to Elon Musk's evidence in court that xAI had distilled OpenAI models, meaning it trained its own model on their outputs, to build Grok. The Decoder attributes the line 'It boils down to trust' to OpenAI's Thibault Sottiaux.
Cursor's co-founder and chief executive, Michael Truell, said OpenAI models account for about 5 per cent of Cursor's AI traffic. The Decoder also reports that Anthropic's Tom Brown said Claude will keep supporting Cursor.
For buyers
Many AI tools run on models the tool vendor licenses from a model company, and the Cursor decision shows that supply can end when the vendor changes hands. At renewal it is reasonable to ask a supplier which models its product depends on, what its supply terms say about a change of control, and whether customers can bring their own model keys if supply stops, as Cursor users can.
Nvidia says its growth next year is limited by supply, mainly of memory. None of the new capacity announced this week is due before 2027: the AWS additions cover 2027 and 2028, and Anthropic's capacity at Nscale comes online late in 2027.
For Salesforce customers, the release says Claude runs inside the Trust Boundary through Amazon Bedrock but does not say in which regions, so UK customers with data residency commitments should ask before switching Salesforce in Claude on. The open beta is expected in September.
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