Nvidia earnings ease bubble fears (for now)
Plus: Employment Hero jobs report paints mixed picture heading into Xmas
Happy Thursday!
This is the day we typically go around the world for global startup / tech news and thanks to Jensen Huang and Nvidia for giving us the biggest news of the day. The global economy isn’t going to collapse in a AI bubble burst….yet?
Here’s what’s brewing in your Daily Shot:
Kiwi-founded Foxglove Raises US$40m Series B
Employment Hero jobs report paints mixed picture heading into Xmas
Gemini 3 launches as Google gets back in the race
Report: Fundraising for AI Startups in 2025 from Carta
As always, thank you to everyone who has upgraded to a paid subscription or simply recommended Caffeine to friends and whānau. We couldn’t do any of this without you.
Finn and the CAFFEINE team
Nvidia beats expectations and quells market fears: I have never seen an earnings report earn the kind of breathless coverage plastering the internet leading up to Nvidia posted its Q3 results. Headlines blared about ‘the most important stock in the world’ and the earnings call which could ‘costs trillions and shake the global economy’. The says thing is, it’s not actually hyperbole. Markets shed billions in the past week just based on the idea that Nvidia’s earnings might not beat expectations. As I have said before, he global economy is essentially one big bet on AI currently. If this ain’t a bubble, it’ll do till he bubble gets here.
Luckily for investor portfolios however, the results for Q3 cleared even the lofty hurdle set by insane speculation. Nvidia’s sales grew 62% to $57 billion in Q3, nearly $3b ahead of projections and signalling ‘off the chart’ demand for chips. It posted profits of $31.9 billion, up 65% from he previous quarter and (somehow) only slightly ahead of expectations. This is tamped down fears of a bubble bursting just yet and expect a market rally tomorrow. How long before the music stops, not just skips a beat, is another question.
Employment Hero jobs report paints mixed picture heading into Xmas: On the local front, our friends over at Employment Hero have provided some great data to parse heading into the festive end of Q4. With employment rising but hours and wages slipping, New Zealand’s labour market enters the Christmas period with mixed signals.
Employment Hero’s October Jobs Report, built from real-time payroll data across over 350,000 businesses and 2.5 million employees worldwide, shows New Zealand employment rising 4.5% year-on-year, 6.0% quarter-on-quarter, and 2.8% month-on-month; but average hours worked fell 0.1% MoM and 0.6% YoY, while median wages slipped 0.1% MoM and declined 1.4% QoQ, signalling pressure on both household earnings and business output.
Key insights - Employment Growth
Employment up 4.5% YoY, 6.0% QoQ, 2.8% MoM.
South Island leads with 8.5% YoY, outpacing North Island’s 1.6% YoY.
Otago surges 32.5% YoY, while Hawke’s Bay jumps 12.7% MoM.
Hiring is heavily weighted toward casual roles (+12.6% YoY; +4.48% MoM).
Wages slipping despite hiring gains
Median wages fell 0.1% MoM, 1.4% QoQ and now sit at $35.10/hour. This stagnation - especially heading into the Christmas period when wages normally tick up - suggests ongoing cost pressures for employers.
Additional highlights:
Casual, full-time and part-time wages were all stagnated MoM.
South Island: highest YoY wage growth (4.1%), but also a -0.6% MoM decline.
Canterbury leads in YoY wage growth (5.4% YoY) but saw the sharpest MoM drop (-2.3% MoM).
Retail, Hospitality & Tourism is the only sector showing meaningful wage growth (+4.1% YoY).
Education & Training wages fell (-1.9% YoY, -0.9% MoM).
Gemini 3 Drops, frightens me a little: With the Nvidia news headlining this piece, it’s good timing for Google to also drop their latest frontier model which is causing quite a stir in Silicon Valley circles. There is a lot of what you expect from new models - smarter, faster, longer context windows etc - but there are some upgrades which seem genuinely notable.
One is how Gemini 3 presents information, spinning up unique interfaces based on the question you’ve asked to present it in a more engaging format. It does feel like the structure of a classic chat interface is limiting the potential for AI engagement so if Google can meaningfully iterate on the UX experience it could make them feel more like the Google of ten years ago.
Gemini 3 also promises to be exceptionally good a parsing different visual inputs, like photos of handwritten notes, which sounds simple but has fairly profound implications for the complexity of tasks it can handle. As always, this announcement came with some published benchmark testing, which isn’t always interesting to those you who spend time outside regularly but is fascinating to screen gremlins like myself.
There’s a particular benchmark called ‘Humanity’s Last Exam’ which is specifically designed to replicate the kind of complex thinking required of PHD and Graduate students. It’s a global collaboration between 1,000 subject expert contributors affiliated with over 500 institutions across 50 countries. I am not saying when a model passes this exam it means AGI is here but it’ll be kinda like AGI has RSVP’d to our party.
For context, ChatGP4o gets 2% on his Benchmark. Chat GPT 5.1 gets around 25%. Gemini 3 just scored 37.5% - scoring up to 45.8% if its search and coding functions are enabled. From the frontier model of its time barely scraping 2% to a competitors eyeing a passing grade just 1.5 years later, things are getting scary again team. Gemini 3 is rolling out for select users from today.
Report: Fundraising for AI Startups in 2025 from Carta: Shout out to Peter Walker and the always exceptional team over at Carta for their regular reports parsing the vast data set a their finger tips into legible, insightful graphs. The latest Fundraising for AI Startups in 2025 report felt very on heme to highlight today and gives a great insight just how dominant AI is in the fundraising space. Check out the full report here.
That’s it for today, thanks for reading. Want to get in touch with a news tip, bit of feedback or just to chat? Email hello@caffeinedaily.co