Does Nvidia need a hug?

Hello, this is Leonie Kidd coming to you from London.

It was going to take something big for Nvidia to impress the market, and Jensen Huang’s company did not disappoint. Alongside the numbers, the AI giant is reportedly back on the M&A trail, so a lot to digest for investors.

Read on.

Nvidia has delivered the surprise the AI bulls were hoping for — a forecast-beating projection that sales will soar 70% in the company’s fiscal 2028. This is significantly higher than Wall Street’s most optimistic prediction.

Based on the consensus projection for revenue of $396 billion for fiscal 2027, which ends in January, sales next year would hit $673 billion. That would put Nvidia ahead of Apple and Alphabet, according to Wall Street projections, and behind only Amazon — still primarily a retailer — among U.S. tech companies.

And it could have been bigger.

“Our demand is much greater than 70%,” CEO Huang said on the earnings call. “Our supply allows us to confidently deliver 70%, and we’re going to continue to work with our supply chain to increase on that.”

You can watch CNBC’s Jim Cramer and his full interview with Huang here.

Amid the announcement of those blockbuster results, reports have also emerged that Nvidia is hunting for deals. Both Business Insider and The Information are reporting that the group is in talks to buy Hugging Face for around $13 billion, according to sources. CNBC has reached out to both companies for comment.

Hugging Face was recently hacked by one of OpenAI’s agents, with Sam Altman’s group publishing a technical report on Wednesday detailing how its models breached Hugging Face last month.

Watch CNBC’s full interview with Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue about the impact of that hack, here.

According to CNBC sources, Anthropic has agreed to a roughly $45 billion cloud deal with Nscale, a U.K.-based AI infrastructure company.

As part of the agreement, Anthropic will rent around 460 megawatts of compute capacity at an Nscale data center development in West Virginia, according to two people with knowledge of the matter who asked not to be named because the details are confidential.

Meanwhile, Meta and a group of state attorneys have agreed to a $16.7 billion settlement.

The federal case was based on allegations the social media giant misrepresented the extent of child mental health harms caused by apps like Facebook and Instagram.

The settlement includes several requirements that Meta must make to its app, including daily usage limits and “nighttime blocks” for teenagers.

Oil prices remain depressed after Iran claimed it has reached a deal with Oman to resume vessel traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. The agreement includes a revenue-sharing deal.

Despite…