Nvidia posts a $96B quarter, Meta pays $16.7B, SpaceX bets…

Four stories, one thread: the AI boom is now being measured in tens of billions and in the rules that come with it. Nvidia reported the biggest quarter in the history of the chip industry and told Wall Street next year will be even bigger. Meta wrote a $16.7 billion check in the middle of a trial and agreed to redesign Instagram and Facebook for teenagers. SpaceX committed $100 billion to a second Starbase on the Louisiana coast. And Amazon quietly announced the end of Mechanical Turk, the 21-year-old marketplace of human micro-tasks that helped train the first generation of AI.

Nvidia doubles revenue to $96.2B and forecasts 70% growth for fiscal 2028

Q2 fiscal 2027 revenue hit $96.2 billion, up 106% year over year and 18% over the previous quarter; data center alone brought in $89.0 billion (+117%), net income was $59.7 billion and gross margin held at 75%. Guidance for the current quarter: $108 billion, plus or minus 2%.
In a rare year-ahead call, Nvidia projected roughly 70% revenue growth for fiscal 2028, about $100 billion above the $570 billion analysts expected; shares rose more than 4% after hours. CFO Colette Kress said supply commitments jumped from $119 billion to $279 billion and that Nvidia raised prices about 15% to pass on memory costs.

Why it mattersJensen Huang's line was "compute is revenue": the company is arguing that every GPU it ships pays for itself in tokens, which is why it can pre-announce a year of 70% growth without flinching. For Latin America the number that matters is the 15% price increase — startups in Bogotá, Caracas or Miami rent that compute through the cloud, and the bill just went up.

Meta settles with 29 states for $16.7 billion and agrees to redesign Instagram for teens

The settlement was announced mid-trial in federal court in Oakland, before Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, by California AG Rob Bonta and the attorneys general of Colorado, New Jersey and Kentucky, the lead states in a 29-state case over addictive design and data collection from minors. Meta denied wrongdoing; the total could reach $17.1 billion if TikTok and YouTube also settle.
Within months, Meta must add daily time limits for teens, block overnight access, silence notifications during school hours, tighten age verification and expand parental controls on Instagram and Facebook. All parties waived their right to appeal once the court enters final judgment.

Why it mattersThis is one of the largest payouts ever by a tech company to U.S. states, and the product changes matter more than the check: a time cap and a night curfew baked into Instagram's code are likely to become the default for teen accounts everywhere. Regulators from Brasília to Mexico City now have a template — and a price tag — to point to.

SpaceX plans a $100 billion 'Starbase Louisiana' for thousands of Starship launches a year

Announced Aug. 25 with Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry, the site in Vermilion Parish on the Gulf Coast, a former Exxon property, would break ground in 2027 with a first Starship launch targeted for 2029. SpaceX expects 3,000 direct jobs over a decade at an average salary of about $92,600, plus more than 30,000 construction jobs at peak.
Elon Musk said Starship will be "launching more than 30 times per day by 2030," more than 10,000 flights a year; SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell said the new facility "will make Starbase, Texas look like a small operation." Louisiana's own estimate puts initial operations in 2030.

Why it mattersA second Starbase only makes sense if Starship becomes a freight line rather than a rocket, and $100 billion is a bet that the demand — Starlink, lunar and Mars cargo, orbital data centers — will be there. Louisiana wins the jobs; the Caribbean and northern South America sit under the flight paths, so expect debris zones and airspace closures to become a regional conversation.

Amazon shuts down Mechanical Turk on Sept. 30 after 21 years

The platform Jeff Bezos once called "artificial artificial intelligence" launched in 2005, once served more than 500,000 workers and stopped accepting new customers on July 30, 2026; Amazon says the closure follows an internal assessment of its programs. AWS will keep offering SageMaker Ground Truth as the in-house alternative for data labeling.
The human-labeling market moved on to Scale AI, Mercor and Prolific, which pay specialists to train frontier models. The irony was already documented: a 2023 study found that between 33% and 46% of MTurk workers were using large language models to complete tasks meant for humans.

Why it mattersMTurk was the original gig economy for AI: pennies per task, no benefits, and a labor pool that stretched across the Americas. Its end says the cheap-click era is over and the value has shifted to expert labelers — doctors, lawyers, engineers — which is where Latin American professionals can actually compete. The micro-task workers who depended on these platforms, many of them in Venezuela and across the region, are the ones left looking for the next one.

The big picture

Put the four together and you get the shape of the AI economy in late 2026. The money is concentrating at the top: Nvidia alone now books more revenue in a quarter than most countries' tech sectors do in a year, and it is raising prices because it can. The bill for the last decade of "move fast" is coming due at the same time, with Meta paying $16.7 billion and rewriting its product for minors under court supervision. Infrastructure is following the money — SpaceX's $100 billion spaceport is a bet that launch capacity, like compute, will be sold by the ton. And at the bottom of the stack, the cheap human labor that bootstrapped machine learning is being retired. For Latin America the message is consistent: the region will pay more for compute, inherit the U.S. rulebook on teen safety, and find its opportunity in specialized talent rather than in micro-tasks.

Sources & further reading

Topics:AI Chips Space Regulation

Nvidia posts a $96B quarter, Meta pays $16.7B, SpaceX bets $100B on Louisiana and Amazon shuts Mechanical Turk