https://nashvance.com/ Memos and reports on public companies building AI compute, robots and the U.S. power grid. en-us https://nashvance.com/companies/etn/https://nashvance.com/companies/etn/Tue, 03 Nov 2026 12:00:00 +0000Eaton makes the switchgear, transformers, uninterruptible power supplies, busway and prefabricated power rooms that move electricity from the grid to the rack, plus aerospace fluid and power systems. Electrical Americas is the profit engine, with $1.24 billion of operating profit on $4.17 billion of sales in Q3 2026 and backlog up 33% in a year. Data center revenue is growing at roughly three times the market rate and utilities and machine builders are accelerating, but its margin of 29.8% in Q3 2026 is still below last year because costs ran ahead of price. The Mobility business is being split off in a deal with Dana. https://nashvance.com/reports/the-rebuild-power-equipment-crews/https://nashvance.com/reports/the-rebuild-power-equipment-crews/Fri, 30 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000U.S. electricity demand is growing again after two flat decades, and the physical inputs to meet it are sold out: gas turbine slots into the early 2030s, large transformers for years, and interconnection slots for five years. The factory leg of the story has faded, with manufacturing construction down sharply. Data centers and the power system carry the cycle. Backlog goes first to the sellers of the scarcest items, and the report sets out what would end the cycle. https://nashvance.com/reports/physical-ai-robot-floor/https://nashvance.com/reports/physical-ai-robot-floor/Fri, 30 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000Robots are slowly leaving fixed, caged cells for hospitals, warehouses and shared factory floors. The money follows installed base, recurring revenue per machine and service capacity, and only surgery has proven the model at scale. Warehouse automation has a large backlog but a thin recurring layer, collaborative robots are a small share of units, and humanoids remain mostly targets. China now supplies most of its own factory robots. https://nashvance.com/reports/ai-infrastructure-bottleneck/https://nashvance.com/reports/ai-infrastructure-bottleneck/Fri, 30 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000AI compute supply has been gated by one scarce input after another, and the scarce input has collected the profit. Third-quarter filings from the four reporting hyperscalers, the chip suppliers and the grid show the constraint now sitting in memory and electricity, with GPU wafers and packaging easing. The signals that would end the spending cycle are listed. https://nashvance.com/reports/research-agenda/https://nashvance.com/reports/research-agenda/Fri, 30 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000Eleven companies in three sectors, and the one question behind each company memo. https://nashvance.com/companies/nvda/https://nashvance.com/companies/nvda/Fri, 30 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000NVIDIA sells the accelerators, CPUs, networking and software that large AI data centers run on, increasingly as complete rack-scale systems. Data Center was about 92.5% of revenue in the quarter ended July 26, 2026, and customers split roughly 55/45 between hyperscalers that also design their own chips and a growing group of neoclouds, sovereigns and enterprises that do not. Revenue more than doubled year over year to $96.2B at a 75.0% gross margin, yet management guides margin down toward 71% to 72% by early 2027. Management blames memory prices, and the buyers designing their own chips have not yet forced a price cut that shows up in reported margin. https://nashvance.com/companies/tsm/https://nashvance.com/companies/tsm/Fri, 30 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000TSMC manufactures most of the world’s leading-edge logic chips for fabless designers, including the GPUs and custom accelerators that run AI workloads, and increasingly assembles them into finished packages using CoWoS and related 3D techniques. Revenue for the quarter ended September 30, 2026 was US$46.7 billion, up 41% in dollars, with high performance computing at 68% of sales. TSMC is the sole volume source for the most advanced AI silicon, so its capacity decisions in wafers and packaging set the pace for the AI hardware build-out. https://nashvance.com/companies/avgo/https://nashvance.com/companies/avgo/Fri, 30 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000Broadcom designs the custom AI accelerators (XPUs) that Google, Anthropic, Meta and OpenAI run in their data centers, and sells the Ethernet switches, optical components and connectivity chips that tie those clusters together. A large enterprise software franchise built on VMware, Symantec and CA sits alongside. In the quarter ended August 2, 2026, AI semiconductors produced 56% of revenue and software 30%. With Anthropic, Broadcom is now supplier, lender and possible shareholder to the same customer. https://nashvance.com/companies/tsla/https://nashvance.com/companies/tsla/Fri, 30 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000Tesla sells electric vehicles, stationary battery storage, and a growing stack of software and services to consumers, fleets, utilities and data center builders. It describes itself as an AI company bringing intelligence into the physical world, and it is spending accordingly: research and development and capital expenditure are rising far faster than revenue, which has been flat for three years. The market value rests on three unproven physical AI businesses: supervised and unsupervised driving software, a robotaxi service, and the Optimus humanoid robot. Disclosed results and management targets are different things here, and the memo keeps them separate. https://nashvance.com/companies/gev/https://nashvance.com/companies/gev/Fri, 30 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000GE Vernova builds the gas turbines, grid equipment and wind turbines that electric utilities and data center developers need to add generating capacity and move power. It was spun out of GE in April 2024 and reports in three segments: Power, Electrification and Wind. Its order book reached $197 billion at the end of Q3 2026, and gas turbine customers have reserved or ordered 122 GW of equipment, with delivery slots sold into 2032. So far, higher prices are doing most of the work on earnings. https://nashvance.com/companies/isrg/https://nashvance.com/companies/isrg/Fri, 30 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000Intuitive Surgical makes the da Vinci robotic surgery systems and the Ion robotic lung biopsy platform. Hospitals buy the systems, then buy instruments, accessories and service for every procedure performed. About 12,100 da Vinci systems are installed worldwide, and surgeons performed roughly 906,000 da Vinci procedures in the third quarter of 2026. Recurring revenue is about three quarters of sales. The company now faces its first credible wave of U.S. challengers, from Medtronic, Johnson & Johnson and CMR Surgical, while Chinese makers are winning export orders. https://nashvance.com/companies/pwr/https://nashvance.com/companies/pwr/Fri, 30 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000Quanta Services builds and maintains the electric grid for U.S. utilities, power developers, data center operators and pipeline owners. Its edge is labor: about 69,500 employees, a large union-trained craft workforce and its own lineman college. Total backlog reached $63.7 billion at September 30, 2026, up 62.7% from a year earlier, as utility capital spending and large-load interconnections pile up. Management has raised its 2026 guidance three times since February. https://nashvance.com/companies/vrt/https://nashvance.com/companies/vrt/Fri, 30 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000Vertiv designs, builds and services the electrical and thermal equipment that keeps data centers running: UPS systems, switchgear, busways, chillers, coolant distribution units, racks and the maintenance contracts behind them. Its buyers are hyperscalers, colocation operators and neoclouds, and the Americas supply most of its sales. Third quarter 2026 sales rose 61% to $4.3 billion, well above the top of the guidance range the company gave three months earlier, and management says organic orders more than doubled. https://nashvance.com/companies/ter/https://nashvance.com/companies/ter/Fri, 30 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000Teradyne sells automated test equipment that checks chips, circuit boards and electronics before they ship, and also collaborative robots (Universal Robots) and autonomous mobile robots (Mobile Industrial Robots) to factories and warehouses. In the third quarter of 2026 chip test supplied 82% of revenue and about 91% of pre-tax income, driven by AI compute and memory demand. The Robotics segment posted a small pre-tax profit after annual losses in each of 2023 to 2025 and a restructuring, on revenue that has levelled near $95 million a quarter, against more than $1 billion a quarter from chip test. https://nashvance.com/companies/sym/https://nashvance.com/companies/sym/Fri, 30 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000Symbotic sells AI-guided warehouse automation: mobile robots, storage structures, case and each picking, palletizing cells and the software that runs them. Walmart supplied about 85% of fiscal 2025 revenue and anchors a $22.5 billion backlog, of which $11.6 billion sits with a SoftBank-backed joint venture now called Exol. Revenue grew about 22% in the June 2026 quarter, gross margin is rising, and the company reported positive GAAP net income in each of the first three quarters of fiscal 2026. Diversification beyond Walmart is real but still small.