Wall Street has barely finished sweeping up the broken glass from Nvidia’s latest implosion, and next week the AI circus rolls straight back into town. Tuesday brings Nvidia’s first earnings report without Jensen Huang, while Thursday delivers Anthropic’s potentially $1.4 trillion coming-out party.

One company has lost the man who helped finance the AI boom; the other is asking Wall Street to open its chequebook and bankroll the next chapter. Add retail sales, Fed minutes and a parade of consumer earnings, and we’ve got the sort of calendar that can turn a perfectly respectable Monday position into a very uncomfortable Friday post-mortem.

• Nvidia’s earnings will be closely watched, but the real examination may concern what happens to the elaborate AI financing network after the departure of its most influential dealmaker.

• Anthropic’s blockbuster flotation could open an entirely new chapter in AI funding, although the difference between an oversubscribed IPO and a successful investment is about to become rather important.

• Asia’s semiconductor suppliers have considerable exposure to Nvidia’s next move, making this more than another Silicon Valley boardroom drama.

• The American consumer and the Fed have their own appointments with Wall Street next week, and neither is guaranteed to deliver the sort of news equity bulls would prefer.

If you’re looking for a quiet week in the markets, I’d suggest taking up gardening. Wall Street has barely recovered from the extraordinary spectacle of Jensen Huang’s departure, and already we’re heading into a five-day stretch that could tell us considerably more about the AI boom than another month of breathless business television commentary.

Nvidia reports Tuesday, with interim CEO Colette Kress facing the unenviable task of convincing investors that the world’s most important AI hardware company can carry on without the man who spent 33 years building it.

The following Thursday, Anthropic is expected to begin trading on Nasdaq at a valuation that could approach $1.4 trillion, potentially raising as much as $64.4 billion in one of the largest public offerings in market history.

Two very different events, but they’re really examining opposite ends of the same trade.

Nvidia has become the unofficial central bank of the AI ecosystem, supplying the chips, capital commitments and strategic relationships that helped finance an extraordinary infrastructure expansion. Anthropic, meanwhile, is preparing to test whether the public equity market is willing to take on a much larger share of that financing burden.

And after the month technology investors have just endured, neither outcome should be treated as a foregone conclusion.

Nvidia’s market capitalisation has fallen from approximately $5.8 trillion in early October to $3.9 trillion by Friday. That’s nearly $2 trillion of shareholder wealth gone in a little over a month, an amount that would comfortably swallow the entire proposed valuation of Anthropic with plenty of change left over.

Yet the S&P 500 managed to register its first weekly gain after four consecutive declines, leaving the index up approximately 10.5% for the year. The market is wounded, certainly, but the broader bull case hasn’t been carted off to the emergency room.

What interests me is that investors are increasingly distinguishing between the companies generating the AI spending and the businesses financing it. The industry may have extraordinary demand for computing power, but that doesn’t automatically mean everybody collecting or writing those enormous cheques deserves a premium valuation.

And next week we’re going to discover just how carefully investors have started reading the fine print.

Under ordinary circumstances, Nvidia reporting earnings growth of approximately 90% on quarterly revenue of $109 billion would be enough to keep analysts occupied for several days.

Those are the expectations reflected in the LSEG consensus cited in the market preview, and they’re extraordinary numbers by any conventional standard.

But there’s nothing particularly conventional about Nvidia’s circumstances.

The company has lost the only chief executive it has ever known, and while Colette Kress is an experienced executive with an intimate understanding of its financial operations, Huang’s influence extended considerably beyond the usual responsibilities of a corporate CEO.

He was the industry’s chief salesman, principal strategic negotiator and, increasingly, the man capable of bringing together the customers, investors, infrastructure developers and technology suppliers needed to make another multibillion-dollar AI project happen.

In that sense, Nvidia wasn’t simply selling GPUs. It was helping arrange the financing and commercial relationships that allowed customers to purchase vast quantities of them.

And that’s where the Bank of Nvidia analogy starts to earn its keep.

When capital was plentiful and GPU capacity scarce, the arrangement worked beautifully. Nvidia could support selected customers and infrastructure partners, help secure future computing demand and benefit from the resulting expansion in orders for its own products.

But when the chairman of an institution built around complex relationships suddenly leaves the building, the first question isn’t necessarily whether the assets still exist.

It’s whether everybody involved remains as comfortable with the arrangements as they were before.

Take Anthropic’s reported $35 billion…