Week to 28 August 2026 — GS Investments

Market position

Two events defined the week. On Wednesday Nvidia reported the largest quarter in its history. On Friday the Chairman of the Federal Reserve told an audience in Wyoming that he did not believe the summer's improvement in inflation meant anything yet. The second mattered more.

S&P 500: 7,711.76
Nasdaq: 26,402.42
Dow: 53,559.99
S&P, week: +0.5%

Closes of Friday 28 August 2026. The S&P 500 fell 0.25 per cent on the day, the Nasdaq Composite 0.52 per cent and the Dow 9.45 points or 0.02 per cent. On the week the S&P 500 rose 0.5 per cent, the Nasdaq 0.9 per cent and the Dow 0.5 per cent, the last of these its first winning week in three. Source: CNBC.

Kevin Warsh used his debut Jackson Hole address as Chair to strengthen his anti-inflation credentials. He said that price stability is not self executing, that inflation is not necessarily mean reverting, and that it is the Federal Reserve's job to deliver stable prices. He acknowledged that the summer readings for personal consumption expenditures and the consumer price index had come in better than expected, then said plainly that they did not tell him underlying trends had meaningfully improved.

The bond market's response was muted, which is itself notable given the content. Jan Hatzius at Goldman Sachs read the speech as leaving a September increase possible if the August inflation data came in firmer, while maintaining the firm's expectation that core measures would print around 0.2 per cent and the Committee would hold. Andrew Bailey and Tiff Macklem were both present at the symposium, which is worth recording given that the Bank of England faces the same question eight days after the Federal Reserve.

Beneath the index the rotation continued. Semiconductor stocks weighed on the Nasdaq on Friday, with Nvidia and Intel both lower, so the sector that produced the week's best result also produced Friday's worst. Gap rose about 13 per cent on a mixed quarter after announcing a new chief executive for Old Navy. Marvell Technology fell more than 10 per cent after guiding current quarter non-GAAP gross margin below expectations.

The deal desk

The transaction of the week was announced on Thursday 27 August and involved no public company at all. Apollo managed funds acquired a significant, co-controlling interest in Atlantic Aviation from KKR, in a transaction valuing the fixed base operator network at nearly 10 billion dollars. KKR managed funds remain a substantial shareholder. Financial terms of the Apollo investment were not disclosed beyond the valuation.

Asset: Atlantic Aviation, one of the largest private aviation infrastructure platforms in the United States
Valuation: Nearly 10 billion dollars
Seller's basis: KKR paid nearly 4.5 billion dollars to Macquarie Infrastructure in 2021
Scale then: 69 fixed base operator locations
Scale now: 105 locations, more than 30 added by acquisition
Revenue model: Aircraft fuelling, hangar leasing and handling under long term airport concession agreements
Buyer scale: Apollo had approximately 1.05 trillion dollars of assets under management at 30 June 2026

Apollo and KKR joint announcement, 27 August 2026, via GlobeNewswire, with reporting from Bloomberg, GlobalAir and AeroTime.

The valuation has more than doubled in five years against a location count that has risen roughly fifty per cent. Some of that is genuine consolidation of a fragmented market. Most of it is multiple expansion on contracted infrastructure. David Cohen of Apollo described the business as having built an irreplaceable footprint across the country's busiest airfields, underpinned by long term concessions, and that sentence is the investment case in full: the asset is not the hangars, it is the concession agreements that make the hangars impossible to replicate.

Read this alongside the Workday approach earlier in the month and a pattern emerges. Sponsors are paying up for two things and two things only. The first is contracted revenue attached to physical infrastructure that cannot be rebuilt. The second is recurring software revenue that the public market has marked down on a disruption thesis. Both are bets on the durability of a cash flow. Neither is a bet on the consumer.

Who is advising

Sponsor to sponsor transactions of this kind rarely produce a public adviser list, which is part of their attraction to the parties. The structural point is that the fee pool from a co-control sale between two of the largest alternative managers in the world sits with whoever holds the relationship rather than whoever holds the balance sheet, because no acquisition financing is being syndicated to a broad group. That is the economics that has allowed the independent advisory houses to take share in sponsor coverage over the past decade.

The positions

NVIDIA Corporation

NVDA · NASDAQ · results

Second quarter fiscal 2027 results, for the quarter ended 26 July 2026 and reported after the close on Wednesday 26 August, showed revenue of 96.2 billion dollars, up 18 per cent sequentially and 106 per cent year on year. That is above both the company's own guidance of 91 billion plus or minus 2 per cent and the 92.07 billion consensus. Data centre revenue was 89.0 billion dollars, up 117 per cent. Gross margin was 75.0 per cent on both a GAAP and a non-GAAP basis. Diluted earnings per share were 2.46 dollars on a GAAP basis and 2.22 dollars adjusted, against a 2.09 dollar consensus.

Jensen Huang framed it as an inflection: artificial intelligence, he said, is doing useful work, its tokens are productive and profitable, and compute is now revenue. He went on to forecast roughly 70 per cent revenue growth for fiscal 2028, well above estimates.

Two disclosures carry more weight than the beat. Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress said capital expenditure among the top five hyperscalers is expected to rise to 1.3 trillion dollars next year from 800 billion in 2026. Separately, Amazon Web Services agreed to buy two million Nvidia graphics processors and to adopt the company's new Vera central processor, some units integrated with the forthcoming Rubin architecture and some standalone. The outlook continues to exclude any data centre revenue from China.

The view

Hold. The quarter answered the demand question and did not answer the concentration question. A 1.3 trillion dollar hyperscaler capital expenditure figure is a forecast about five customers, and three customers already account for more than half of revenue. The AWS agreement is simultaneously the strongest evidence for the thesis and the clearest illustration of the risk: the customer is buying two million processors and specifying its own central processor in the same sentence. The operating performance is not the variable to watch from here. The customer list is.

Position. The author holds no position in this security.

Method and limitations