Wall Street Lunch: Nvidia's Huang Declares 'AGI Has Arrived' After OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra Launch

Nvidia (NVDA) CEO asserts AI has reached general intelligence, highlighting rapid model evolution and the income-generating potential of NVDA compute infrastructure. Intel (INTC) receives an upgrade to Outperform with a $120 target, citing material turnaround progress and potential CPU price increases. PepsiCo (PEP) is moving beyond shelf-stable chips, soda and packaged snacks into new areas of the grocery store, including refrigerated, produce-adjacent, deli, dip and ready-to-eat meal categories. Memory stocks like Micron (MU) and ETFs such as DRAM are breaking out of summer consolidations, signaling renewed momentum in the AI trade.

Jensen Huang declares artificial general intelligence after GPT-6 Astra. (0:15)

IonQ raises its outlook. (2:02)

Pepsi moves beyond chips and soda in an Ozempic world. (2:19)

Our top story so far, don’t look now, but your AI may already feel smarter than you. Nvidia (NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang declared that artificial general intelligence “has arrived" following the release of OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra. He cited the rapid four-year evolution of models trained on more than 100K Grace Blackwell NVLink72 chips. "400K GPUs coming online next," he added. OpenAI said Astra saturates FrontierMath Tier 4 with a 98% score, having already helped solve long-standing open problems in mathematics. Astra also saturates ARC-AGI-3 with a 99.9% score and ExploitBench with a 100% score.

Separately, Huang argued that Nvidia’s computing infrastructure should be viewed as an income-generating asset. “NVIDIA compute is fungible, durable and highly rentable. It is a productive, revenue-generating asset,” he wrote, responding to a post noting that rental prices for Nvidia’s three-year-old H100 GPUs had risen 22% over the past month to $3.28 an hour, noting that depreciation schedules assume a chip this old only loses value.

For market perspective, AI-related industries now account for more than half of the S&P 500 when combining hyperscalers, semiconductors, hardware, power and software, according to JPMorgan Asset Management.

Among active stocks, Intel (INTC) is higher after Northland analyst Gus Richard raised his rating to Outperform from Market Perform with a $120 price tag and said the company has made “material progress” in its turnaround. Separately, Digitimes reported that Intel is set to raise prices on its CPUs by as much as 10.

Roivant (ROIV) is surging after the first investigational candidate of its subsidiary Pulmovant succeeded in a mid-stage trial for patients with pulmonary hypertension associated with interstitial lung disease. And IonQ (IONQ) is rallying after the quantum computing company raised its financial guidance following its completed acquisition of SkyWater Technologies. IonQ also published the first complete, end-to-end fault-tolerant resource estimate for running Shor’s algorithm, which finds prime factors of very large numbers.

In other news of note, tired: chips. Wired: dips. PepsiCo (PEP) is moving beyond shelf-stable chips, soda and packaged snacks into new areas of the grocery store, including refrigerated, produce-adjacent, deli, dip and ready-to-eat meal categories. Appetite-suppressing GLP-1 medicines such as Wegovy and Ozempic have reduced purchases of salty snacks and sweet treats, with that spending going to protein, fiber, hydration and fresh foods. Pepsi’s strategy includes extending established brands into adjacent fresh products such as the Tostitos Guacamole launch, as well as using acquisitions and ownership consolidation.

And in the Wall Street Research Corner, memory stocks and related market exposures are starting to break above their recent downtrends after spending much of the summer consolidating, according to Goldman Sach.