Nvidia, the US chipmaker at the centre of the artificial intelligence boom, reported quarterly revenue of roughly $96.2bn, more than double what it made in the same period a year earlier, according to the company’s earnings call transcript cited by Investing.com and MarketBeat. The figure beat Wall Street’s consensus estimate of about $91.9bn, easing investor worries that spending on AI infrastructure by big technology firms might be slowing.

Relief spreads through Asian markets

The results, released after US markets closed, triggered a rally in technology and semiconductor stocks across Asia on Thursday. South Korea’s SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics, both major suppliers of memory chips used in AI systems, gained alongside the wider KOSPI index, which rose between roughly 1.2% and 1.8% in sessions around the earnings, according to Investing.com and Tradingpedia. Japan’s Nikkei 225 added between 0.5% and 0.9%, while Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index closed up by as much as 0.8%, per Asian Market Sense and Investing.com.

The gains reflected relief that hyperscalers and cloud providers, the large technology companies that build data centres, are not overinvesting in AI capacity beyond what demand can support, a concern that had weighed on markets in recent weeks. According to the Guardian’s live coverage, the optimism coincided with the Jackson Hole economic symposium, an annual gathering of central bankers, and with US inflation data described as ‘stubbornly high’, which tempered some of the enthusiasm in broader markets.

UK youth employment figures show partial improvement

Separately, the Office for National Statistics reported that 981,000 young people aged 16 to 24 in the UK were classified as Neet, meaning not in education, employment or training, in the April-to-June period. That marks a fall of 30,000 from the previous quarter, January to March 2026, when the total had topped one million for the first time in some years, reaching 1.01 million, or 13.5% of the age group, according to the House of Commons Library.

Despite the quarterly improvement, the figure remains 30,000 higher than in the same period a year earlier, suggesting the underlying trend has not reversed. In the previous quarter, 39% of Neet young people were classified as unemployed, meaning they were actively seeking work, while the remaining 61% were economically inactive, meaning they were neither working nor looking for a job, according to ONS data reported by the East London Advertiser.

The April-June Neet total fell to 981,000, down 30,000 from the previous quarter but still 30,000 higher than a year earlier, according to the Office for National Statistics.

The two stories, one from financial markets and one from labour statistics, are unconnected but were reported together in the Guardian’s live coverage on 27 August. Together they offer a snapshot of divergent economic signals: renewed confidence in the technology sector’s growth prospects, set against a UK youth labour market still working through elevated levels of disengagement from education, training and employment.

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