The Hottest IPO of 2026 Will Shock You

In this episode of Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing, Motley Fool contributors Travis Hoium, Lou Whiteman, and Tyler Crowe discuss:

• Nvidia’s OpenAI guarantee.
• More Nvidia investments.
• A hot IPO.
• Memory gets more crowded.
• Merger mania?
• Case for smaller acquisitions.

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A full transcript is below.

This podcast was recorded on July 27, 2026.

Travis Hoium: It's Monday, and Jensen Huang is making big deals. Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing starts now. Welcome to Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing. I'm Travis Hoium, joined today by Lou Whiteman and Tyler Crowe. Guys, we're taking over the Monday show today. We can bring some heat. Over the weekend, we got some interesting news Tyler that Jensen Huang and Nvidia again, making potentially massive deals. This time, the reporting from the Wall Street Journal is that they are going to basically backstop potentially a $250 billion project. I even saw $500 billion thrown around that OpenAI would like to build. Somebody's got to guarantee those debt payments, those lease payments, and Nvidia apparently seems to have raised their hand.

Tyler Crowe: To the point we're all having the substitute teacher energy today with the three of us doing the Monday show. The funny thing was, I feel like that Wall Street Journal article buried the lead, too, because not only was Nvidia saying they're going to guarantee that $250 billion. That's just for the build-out of the facility and had nothing to do with the chips. Then it was like it could potentially also be another $350 billion in chips on top of the equity stake that Nvidia has already invested.

Travis Hoium: What a half trillion dollars between friends?

Tyler Crowe: The numbers now almost seem like they're just made up. I'm about to go 11 to billion-dollar or something for all these deals here [LAUGHTER] Again, this was the only deal that was announced today. Nvidia is on a real heater here. On top of the open AI deals that were announced, it was obviously smaller because these were smaller companies. But Nvidia also side to deal with thinking machines, which was a new start-up coming out of those the OpenAI genesis of people who started early on, as well as I always mispronounced his last name Ilya.

Travis Hoium: Ilya Sutskever.

Tyler Crowe: Sutskever. Safe super intelligence. Awful name, dude. Get a better name. Either way, all three of these companies are just basically getting Nvidia money thrown at them right now. A lot of money going out the door. We're going to touch on this. That circular accounting thing is starting to come back up again, which does give some people who have been around a little bit longer some nervous feelings.

Travis Hoium: Lou, this reminds me a little bit about the discussions we've had about Eli Lilly. Hey, when the times are good and you've got a high valuation, you've got cash, try to build a moat around your business. Eli Lilly's buying other pharma companies; Nvidia’s making sure their customers are staying afloat.

Lou Whiteman: I'm glad Tyler didn't say bender. They're not on a bender today. They’re on a roll, but maybe we’ll see if it might turn into a bender. Here's the good news for Nvidia shareholders is that there's enough cash there. This is not a bad balance sheet. The debate here is whether or not the stock works or the stock doesn't work from here. It's not will the company fail? I don't think we have to worry about that. Look, there is a way that this all works out fine. The way is AI is everything we think it is. It generates all the revenue that we've seen in projections. Revenue solves all issues. If all these companies can pay back all of this debt that they're taking Nvidia has got nothing to worry about. But obviously, there's a lot of ways this doesn't work out. Tyler mentioned the circular funding. The obvious comparison here is vendor financing in the 90s. I get the concerns. I get why that's scary. But let's just say balance sheets are a lot stronger than in the ‘90s, back to what I said before about Nvidia, and this feels like a different business environment. In the 90s, we were financing fiber being laid that was 90% not being used or even more. We just we were building excess capacity. We weren't building for what we need today.

Travis Hoium: To be fair, we are building data centers that don't yet have chips in them. We're not seeing the support hit the bud.

Lou Whiteman: Data center vacancy rates are near record lows. I think right now the assumption we see all of these companies making deals. SpaceX is selling off its data centers where whoever needs it. The neoclouds are all out there. There is a lot more today demand. For data centers than there was for this fiber back in the 90s. Look, whether or not it all works out, I don't know, but I think that's an important distinction to remember here. Tyler, one of the things I always remember hearing is, it's not really a bubble until you start seeing debt involved. We've now seen debt. We've seen special purpose vehicles. We've seen guarantees of other companies' obligations. What should we be watching to potentially indicate that, this isn't necessarily sustainable because we've been talking about this circular financing thing for quite a while.

Tyler Crowe: As far as I've seen so far, and obviously, in part because it doesn't seem like either Anthropic isn't doing these deals or they're being much quieter about it, which may be the smart thing to do. But it seems like a lot of these circular finance deals that we have heard about all tie back to OpenAI in one way or the other. Sometimes when you hear a lot of this AI bubble, sometimes I almost want to say it's more like an open AI bubble because it's so much of this, creative financing, these circular finance deals, Meta, off-balance sheet deals. A lot of these things seem to especially Oracle, too, with a lot of the debt financing they're doing to build out. A lot of that is tied to these IOUs that OpenAI has out in the field out there somewhere, and it’s starting to look like the briefcase from Dumb and Dumber, where when they open it up, instead of $1 million, it’s just a million IOUs.

Travis Hoium: To bring Oracle, that was the one that I was thinking about as you were talking. Oracle shares since they signed that huge deal with OpenAI, $300 billion worth of remaining performance obligations that was announced in late 2025, their stock is down 63% since then. The IOUs are great, but you also need that confidence in the market, so we will see if that maintains with Nvidia backstopping a lot of its own customers. When we come back, we're going to talk about the latest IPO in the memory market. We're listening to Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing.

Welcome back to Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing. We have the hottest IPO of 2026 hit the market in the last 24 hours. It's not SpaceX. It is CXMT. Lou, this is a company that most of us had never heard of until a few weeks ago. But as a Chinese memory maker, the number four memory maker in the world. We talk a lot about Micron, SK Hynix, and Samsung. Those are the big three. This could be Number 3 as early as next year because they're raising a whole bunch of money to expand their D-RAM capacity. The market's not reacting positively on the U.S. side, but this stock was up almost 500% today.

Lou Whiteman: Not bad for one day, right? It was over in China, so I guess we can if we really, really want to try and play it, but it's not easy for us to play. But look in theory, this is bad news for all of those other players. We've talked about memory is very, very commoditized over time. This is, like you said, this is an expansion IPO. The company already existed, but they're raising a ton of money to build out capacity, which should impact the supply. In theory, though, because, look, we still don't know if customers like Apple can buy products from CXMT. The Pentagon classifies this company as a Chinese military operation. The Department of Commerce has not blacklisted it yet, and we don't know that they will. I know Apple is lobbying for, but wait, this would solve a lot of our problems. We'll see. But look, this is another company that's out there. They are expanding. It should I mean, there is the rest of the globe, even if U.S. buyers can't access it. But this is, again, part of the big picture in memory that you really have to watch before you buy into these companies.

Travis Hoium: Tyler, you've been following the energy markets for a long time, and the commoditization of memory looks a lot like the energy markets, where you add a whole bunch of supply, it impacts prices. This is one of those things. I've been hearing for months, You know what? This time is different in the memory market, and I don't know. This is now a fourth supplier that's going to bring a lot of capacity online. You start having 4, 5, 6 suppliers. That's how you get to commodity pricing. You're no longer an oligopoly.

Tyler Crowe: One thing that management teams at commodity companies, whether it be oil and gas or mining or production of solar panels, basically anything that's commoditized like that. Management teams there do tend to be pretty good at shooting themselves in the foot with overcapacity when things are a little too exuberant.

Travis Hoium: You and I have had too many conversations about this over the years.

Tyler Crowe: It's quite a few of them. Look, if I'm going to squint hard enough and try to be like, maybe it's not that bad. The thing that you could justify here is the fact that, CXMT doesn't really make a high bandwidth memory chip to the technology specifications that Micron is making these days are SK Hynix, basically the things that are being used in data centers. There is the argument to be made of Micron and SK Hynix and all these other memory companies are just going to push into high bandwidth memory because they have the capacity, they have the technology. They have the data center demand and all that lower commoditized to a lesser degree, some DRAM, but not as severe, but also down into the flash memory level. A lot of that stuff that is getting left behind the consumer electronics and all that stuff that we're hearing these nightmare scenarios of iPhone prices going up. People can't get Nintendos, and Xboxes because memory is going to go away. The theory is is a company like CXMT can backfill some of that with the lesser technologically demanding product. Maybe that's the case.

The one thing that you do have to keep in mind here, this is a Chinese memory company. They are going to want to get into high bandwidth memory. Some of the presentations are saying within 2-3 years, they're going to be able to replicate more or less SK Hynix capacities about three years ago in terms of the technology. There's a runway here. It's hard to tell. I find it fascinating where we're looking at this particular equity raise of $10 billion and they want to surpass Micron. But Micron has said they're going to spend $250 billion over the next 10 years on capacity expansion too. It's not just like, this is going to be the Chinese silver capacity fall too, because everyone else is doing this, and they're going into their respective niches. It goes back to what we were talking at the top here with Nvidia is if we do believe that the current spend rates are sustainable and that the power demands, the compute demands, and everything maintains its current trajectory, then overcapacity may not be a problem, but those are some pretty bold assumptions. Whenever it comes to technological advances like this, there is going to be something that's going to make it cheaper, more flexible, less demanding on compute. Something along the way is going to come around to make that better, and that would more than anything be a bigger fear for these commoditized-esque type things like memory chips, whatever.

Travis Hoium: Lou, there could be a potential upside here. That's if this brings more of that commodity, that DRAM supply to market, that means that electronics, whether it's Apple, you're filling a hole that there is in the market, whether it's Apple's products, whether it's Nintendo's products, or just everywhere else the DRAM goes could help pricing, which is actually good for consumers, and there should be some other investment opportunities as well.

Lou Whiteman: There's a reason Apple would like to do business with them because this is capacity now when you need it. Here's the other thing, too, hopefully, again, the Data Center is all this and more, but there is a risk that Micron and some of these other companies are abandoning their core customer, these simple memory users as they chase the data center, and that could bite you. If supplies Apple isn't going to say, micron you left us hanging. But if you won our business now, we'd be happy to come back to you.

Tyler Crowe: Isn't TSMC in this same scenario? Hey, we don't really want to talk to Intel. But if you're not going to make our chips that we need to make our products, we got to talk to Intel.

Travis Hoium: There's just a lot. Again, we don't know how this plays out, so it's hard not really predicting future, but there's a lot of room for unintended consequences here that I think is worth watching. Unintended consequences may be the term of the rest of the year, because I have a feeling things aren't going to go quite as planned on the market. When we come back, we're going to talk about potential merger mania coming. You're listening to Motley Fool Hidden Gems investing.

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Travis Hoium: 28 of September 2026 from 11:00 AM. Subject to availability. Welcome back to Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing to say the current administration has a different approach to mergers and acquisitions than the previous administration in the U.S. is, I think, an understatement. We've gotten very little pushback on some of the latest mergers, including Paramount buying Warner Bros. Discovery, at least at the federal level. Tyler, you had some interesting thoughts of this could lead to a boom in M&A activity, at least over the next couple of years as companies go, hey, these deals that we couldn't get done may actually get through and may actually get through pretty quickly.

Tyler Crowe: These things have been bubbling up a little bit to the surface in recent months, especially in industries where it almost seems like consolidation was never going to happen again. Talking about the Warner-Paramount deal was obviously one, talking about railroads, with the Norfolk Southern and the Union Pacific deal that seems to be working its way through, which I don't know, Lou, I think probably four or five years ago, we would have thought that is just unheard of that [OVERLAPPING] nobody would have done that. Then just earlier today, again, all of us just opened up the Wall Street Journal this morning and said, Hey, that's kind of interesting. There was talks that United CEO, United Airlines, excuse me, basically contacted the CEO of Delta Airlines said, Hey, what do you think about merging now? Some I don't know, deal of equals.

The fascinating thing, though, is I think wasn't a couple of years ago under the Biden administration, the idea of the Spirit and JetBlue merger happening was like, No, we can't do this. This would be awful for competition. Then all of a sudden, the Top 2 or Top 3 in some combination in the airlines is just going to sneak together and it's fascinating to me. It seems like a very unique period in time where probably under most other I feel bad saying this because it sounds like it's very political, but under most other administrations, this stuff would get a lot of blowback. But it's like, if we can do this now, it'll be a lot harder for them to try to pull us apart when after we've already been together. It does feel like a “getting-while-the-getting's-good” vibe with M&A.

Lou Whiteman: I don't want to be a wet blanket here because I love M&A. I cut my teeth on M&A, but, look, CEOs are not all knowing. They are reading the same press clippings we are, and they're daydreaming, and they are seeing if it's time to be opportunistic. The administration talks about being more M&A friendly, but let's look at the actual results here. Paramount-Warner Brothers Discovery, despite the green light from the feds, they've put that on hold for a year. That's an eternity in corporate time. That is just misery right there. Union Pacific-Norfolk Southern are on their way, but again, they're at least a year away, and things are about to get more difficult with them, I think, when they actually go to the customers and ask. These deals are still iffy at best. I think that we'd have just like CEOs can read the press clippings coming out of the election and say, maybe it's time. I think they're watching this too, and that might slow the roll.

Travis Hoium: Lou, these are some pretty big deals, though. What do you think about potentially smaller deals? I'm thinking back to Amazon was not allowed to buy iRobot. What about those little — the tech industry, in particular, always used to have these tack on acquisitions, a couple of billion dollars here, a couple of billion dollars there. Do you think that is potentially opening up?

Lou Whiteman: It's always a pendulum. It's probably always more open than it was. But again, I do think that the states are opening their mouths now, too. Again, this isn't a political show, but there is almost more motivation for the states to be overly aggressive right now. As a CEO, before you put capital at risk and time at risk and management bandwidth at risk, you want certainty. You don't just care about the DOJ. In my part of the world of defense, little deals are getting DOJ attention that we never saw attention before. I think that, yes, in general, we are more permissive now than we were a few years ago, but I don't think that this is a new golden age for M&A.

Travis Hoium: We see how this plays out, but there's definitely more to discuss as we get into earning season, so we will be back tomorrow with more certain that this is the week that I think the earning season really starts for a lot of us who are following a lot of stocks. This week and next week, be sure and tune in to Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing.

As always, people on the program may have interest in the stocks they talk about, and The Motley Fool may have more recommendations for or against. Don't buy or sell stocks based solely on what you hear. All personal finance content follows The Motley Fool's editorial standards, and it's not approved by advertisers. Advertisements are sponsored content and provided for informational purposes only. To see our full advertising disclosure, please check out our show notes. For Lou Whiteman, Tyler Crowe, and Dan Boyd behind the glass, I’m Travis Hoium. Thanks for listening. We'll see you here tomorrow.

Lou Whiteman has positions in Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing. Travis Hoium has positions in Intel. Tyler Crowe has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Amazon, Apple, Eli Lilly, Intel, Meta Platforms, Micron Technology, Nintendo, Nvidia, Oracle, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, and Warner Bros. Discovery. The Motley Fool recommends Delta Air Lines and Union Pacific. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.