CNBC Halftime Report: Brad Gerstner, Jensen Huang, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent (February 6, 2026)

Episode Overview

Live from outside Levi’s Stadium ahead of Super Bowl 60, CNBC’s Scott Wapner hosts a dynamic roundtable on the state of the markets and the forces shaping the future of tech and finance. Joined by Altimeter’s Brad Gerstner, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, and U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, the team dives into recent market turbulence, the AI investment super-cycle, America's global race in artificial intelligence, and the rollout of the Invest America Trump Accounts.

Key Topics and Segment Highlights

1. Market Turbulence and Big Tech Capex

• Participants: Scott Wapner, Brad Gerstner, Josh Brown, Steve Weiss, Malcolm Etheridge
• Timestamps: 00:46 – 22:26

Massive Tech Selloff and Recovery

• Market rebounding on the day, but tech has seen a significant decline (over $1 trillion in market cap wiped due to Capex spending fears).
• Brad Gerstner highlights that “$100 billion of incremental spending by Google and Amazon above and beyond consensus... is pretty extraordinary” but says it was well telegraphed and justified by demand. (02:19)
• Josh Brown critiques panic selling: “If you were out there as an active seller yesterday and you did not have a margin call, you’re a donkey.” (04:34)

AI Investment Cycle and ‘Fog of War’

• Gerstner: “When the rate of change goes parabolic… there's a fog of war. When there's uncertainty, discount rates go up and multiples come down… valuations change even before numbers change.” (03:21)
• Despite sharp spending increases, all major tech companies (Google, Amazon, Microsoft) showed strong results: “The world is desiring to consume a vast amount of this AI resource. It's a struggle to keep up building it.” (03:39)

Investor Strategy During Volatility

• Discussion about whether current pain is a buying opportunity, especially for beneficiaries of the tech infrastructure build ("picks and shovels"), rather than only those doing the spending.
• Malcolm Etheridge: “It explains why it’s so important to [Amazon] to spend so aggressively to ramp up to meet [backlog] and capitalize on as much as possible.” (08:55)
• Steve Weiss: Advises patience and suggests owning “beneficiaries of Capex,” coming back into the Capex spenders later, when the cycle matures. (12:09)

2. Software Stocks: Uncertainty and Opportunity

• Participants: Scott Wapner, Brad Gerstner, Josh Brown

• Timestamps: 14:37 – 20:53

• Software names are severely down YTD; Gerstner asserts "90% of [beaten-down software companies] deserve to be" punished because the market can't trust their long-term cash flows in an age of AI disruption: “I can’t see as far into the future, so I’m going to pay less for the terminal value.” (15:18)

• Standouts will be those accelerating revenues as core AI infrastructure (Databricks, Snowflake), but general application software will see lower multiples.

• Josh Brown: Investors, not traders, may find long-term value in the selloff: “If you’re not highly dependent on nailing the perfect timing, you can rationally and calmly lower your average cost.” (18:54)

3. Interview: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang

• Participants: Scott Wapner, Jensen Huang, Brad Gerstner
• Timestamps: 24:01 – 46:21

Unprecedented AI Buildout

• Huang: “Demand is sky high. We’re in a once-in-a-generation infrastructure build-out… Artificial intelligence is going to fundamentally change how we compute everything. This is the largest infrastructure build in human history.” (24:47)
• AI’s new usefulness: “Last year we saw an inflection—AI became super useful… generating informed content, reasoning, doing research, able to use tools.” (24:47)
• AI is now profitable: “Anthropic is making great money. OpenAI is making great money. If they could have twice as much compute, the revenues would go up four times as much.” (24:47)

Capex Justified and Sustainable

• Huang: “$660 billion [AI Capex] is appropriate and sustainable… all these companies’ cash flows are going to start rising… we’re addressing the largest software opportunity in history.” (26:20)
• Example: Meta’s use of AI for recommendations and advertising has already boosted earnings and justifies heavy reinvestment. (26:20)

Investor Perspective

• Gerstner relates today’s spending to Amazon investing in AWS in 2008–09: “These guys are digging the biggest gold mine in the history of software, but it costs something up front.” (28:05)
• “If you want my personal net worth, I want my fund’s net worth levered against AI because all human progress is going to be derived from machines helping humans think… Nvidia is our largest public position.” (28:29)

Potential for Overbuilding?

• Huang: “We’ll need seven, eight years to build to the sustainable level, then refresh and slightly grow… [But] every single pixel and beep is now generated in real time—hence the need for massive compute.” (30:04)

Bubble Fears vs. Today’s Reality

• Huang: “History informs us, but history doesn’t repeat. With the Internet, there was a ton of dark fiber; there are no dark GPUs. 100% of the GPUs are rented, even ones sold six years ago are going up in price.” (31:53)
• Gerstner: “It turns out that fiber had 7% utilization. We only had 30 million people on broadband then; today billions use this tech daily.” (33:16)

Nvidia’s Defensible Moat

• Huang: “Nobody develops the technology more advanced than ours at a pace higher than ours and at a scale as large as ours… Our technology is the best—lowest-cost tokens.” (34:03)
• “We’re the only company in the world that takes our roadmap and secrets and shares it with customers who are building their own chips… Software is built on platforms, and if it's built on Nvidia, it runs best on Nvidia.” (35:38)
• Nvidia’s AI exposure is extremely broad, well beyond language models: “We’re in every cloud, in digital biology, autonomous vehicles, robotics, across all five layers of the AI cake.” (35:38, 37:09)

Geopolitics and the American AI Stack

• Huang: “The US has to win at every single layer [of AI]—energy, chips, models, applications. Every single layer has a battle.” (38:50)
• Gerstner: China is exporting models and chips rapidly—“the US wins when the world runs on American technology… but the Chinese are out in front in many places, so we have to accelerate.” (39:52-41:07)
• Huang: “It makes no sense to forfeit a large market… if you want to win globally, the US needs to win in China too, while strict export controls already exist for military use.” (41:32)

OpenAI, Competition, and Industry Collaboration

• Huang dismisses media drama with OpenAI: “No there isn’t [any tension]… The new AI models need much more compute, which is why we invented the next-gen [Blackwell] chips.” (43:18)
• Gerstner: “It’s too big—everybody’s going to be everywhere… both [OpenAI and Anthropic] will be public in the next 12–18 months, and retail investors will get to participate.” (44:31)
• Jensen: “Imagine being early investors in Google, Amazon, and Meta. Insane, and that's what we're looking at.” (46:04)

4. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent: Invest America Trump Accounts and Economic Outlook

• Participants: Scott Wapner, Scott Bessent, Brad Gerstner
• Timestamps: 48:27 – 56:46

Invest America Trump Accounts

• Bessent: “Every American child gets an investment account and millions will be pre-funded. That's free money. We can all expand [the] American dream.” (48:27)
• Target: Reach the 38% of Americans with zero household exposure to equities. “Everyone should have a share of [America’s economic success] and understand how the economy works, how companies interact with the economy, and what it feels like to be a shareholder.” (50:01)
• NFL, Comcast, City of San Francisco, and others will match funds for kids’ accounts. “20 years from now, there will be 100 million kids and families that have 3 to 4 trillion in wealth that would have otherwise had zero.” (50:55)

Legacy and Social Impact

• “There’s a chance that these Trump accounts may be [Trump’s] greatest legacy... as these accounts mature when you're 18, they can be rolled into a retirement account.” (51:56)
• Bessent emphasizes this as a nationwide experiment in financial literacy and economic participation, with generational impact. (53:17)

Monetary Policy and Economic Backdrop

• On Fed independence: “The President has great respect for the Fed and Kevin Warsh is his choice. I think he will be a fantastic leader.” (54:09)
• On the US dollar: “The strong dollar policy is: are we doing the things to create a strong backdrop for the dollar? No one’s done that better than President Trump.” (55:55)

Brad Gerstner’s Market Outlook

• “The flight path for the United States looks great… GDP accelerating, inflation anchored, AI investment tailwinds, reindustrialization—on a relative basis, we’re one of the strongest places we’ve ever been.” (56:57)
• “Multiples are well below average—some really interesting buying opportunities.” (57:45)

Notable Quotes

• Brad Gerstner:
  “This is like building the interstate highway system… it's all funded by profitable private companies in America. And it's great that it's being built here.” (07:03)
• Josh Brown:
  “If you were out there as an active seller yesterday and you did not have a margin call, you’re a donkey.” (04:34)
• Jensen Huang:
  “We are in a once in a generation infrastructure buildout… the largest infrastructure build out in human history.” (24:47) “There are no dark GPUs. 100% of the GPUs are rented. Even GPUs I sold six years ago are going up in price.” (31:53)
• Scott Bessent:
  “[Trump accounts] may be [Trump’s] greatest legacy… as these accounts mature… they can be rolled into a retirement account. The full effect may not be felt for 20, 30, even 60 years.” (51:56)

Episode Takeaways

• AI Investment Is a Supercycle: Tech’s massive Capex is justified by profound demand for AI compute. Leaders (Nvidia, hyperscalers, frontier AI labs) are digging modern gold mines.
• Software Valuations Reset: Uncertainty breeds lower multiples for companies not core to AI progress; only true infrastructure “picks and shovels” may benefit.
• Nvidia’s Moat Remains Strong: Platform status, developer ecosystem, and relentless pace defend against customer-competitors.
• Global AI Race: America’s tech stack leadership cannot be assumed and must be continually defended across the value chain; engagement with China is both necessary and fraught.
• Financial Access Initiatives: The Invest America Trump Account is ambitious—potentially reshaping American household equity ownership and financial literacy for generations.
• Economic Optimism: U.S. macro outlook is robust, offering investors opportunity—particularly in the aftermath of sharp multiple compression.

Timestamps for Key Segments

• 00:46 – Market overview, tech selloff, Capex commentary (Gerster, Brown)
• 03:21 – ‘Fog of war’ in markets, AI spending, valuation changes (Gerstner)
• 14:37 – Software stock destruction, multiples, AI’s impact (Gerstner)
• 24:01 – Interview with Nvidia’s Jensen Huang: AI boom, chip demand, platform wars
• 38:50 – AI competition, China, US policy (Huang, Gerstner)
• 48:27 – Treasury Secretary Bessent on Invest America Trump Account
• 56:57 – Brad Gerstner’s closing market outlook

This episode is essential listening for anyone interested in how geopolitics, AI disruption, and generational shifts in financial access are rewriting the playbook for technology and markets in 2026.