I Said Yes to Every Upgrade in Las Vegas. Here’s What It Cost.

LAS VEGAS—Few places vacuum money from you like this glittering gambling and entertainment playground. That’s true for the visitors in town for Sunday’s Super Bowl —official motto: Excessive Celebration Encouraged. And it’s true for visitors any time, with the $US200 seats at the pool and the $US800 bottle service at nightclubs. All before you step onto the casino floor. You can fly here for as little as $US50 if you play your cards right. But people come to Vegas to spend, and the businesses here know it. This place hits travelers with potential upgrades every few steps. So I flew in for an experiment, a real-life version of the Jim Carrey comedy “Yes Man” (or “Yes Day” if you’re a Jennifer Garner fan). I said yes to every upgrade and VIP package to see just how much you get for your money, and what can be skipped. I had parameters. The $US3,999 helicopter ride to the top of Valley of Fire State Park for yoga was out. As was the $US4,000-a-night upgrade offer to a three-bedroom presidential suite at my hotel. Still, I cut lines, got a massage in the reserved seats at the Aria sportsbook during an NFL wild-card game, relaxed in a private lounge before a show at the Sphere , and drank a French 75 from a prime window seat at the Eiffel Tower Restaurant. In all, I spent $US976 to upgrade my Vegas visit. Was every upcharge worth it? Absolutely not. But a few are worth your money.

Yes, yes and yes

The offers began minutes after I booked a room for two nights at the luxury all-suite Palazzo resort. The price: $US480 before taxes and fees for two nights, a relative bargain on a holiday weekend in January. How much for a room booked last-minute for Super Bowl weekend? $US1,700 a night. I landed two upgrades after an email prompt gauged my interest: $US75 for early check-in and $US57 a night for a city view, the cheapest room category upgrade. Early check-in fees irk me , but this was worth it after my early flight. I was in the room by 11 a.m. The room was swank. The view of Treasure Island and the Mirage was nothing special.

A city view room at the Palazzo resort, where travel columnist Dawn Gilbertson paid an extra $US57 a night plus taxes to upgrade the view. PHOTO: DAWN GILBERTSON/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

I headed to Area15, an arts and entertainment complex. First stop: Meow Wolf ’s Omega Mart, a popular immersive art experience that takes visitors into a bizarro grocery store that links to an alternate dimension. Admission is $US54; upgrading to a $99 VIP package promised to “enhance my experience” but bought me a souvenir pin, VIP lanyard, a cocktail and a 15% discount I didn’t use at the gift shop. Maybe the good stuff comes with the $US129 scavenger hunt package. (As I perused products like cans of faux La Croix in mashed-potato flavour and wandered a dizzying hall of mirrors, I wondered how many visitors upgraded with a trip to a local dispensary beforehand.) Admission to stroll around the rest of Area15 is free, but I upgraded to a $US35 pass, which included five attractions, the best of which was the outdoor Liftoff ride with great views of the Strip.

Cutting lines for crab legs

Many resorts here gave up the buffet business for good during the pandemic . The Wicked Spoon buffet at the Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas still packs them in. Saturday brunch had an hour-long wait during my visit. VIP line to the rescue! $US35 gets you a head start on the $US62 all-you-can-eat feast of snow crab legs, sushi and slow-roasted strip loin. The best part: The manager overseeing the line comped the fee because she said she enjoyed talking to me and a friend while we waited. (I never identify myself to employees as a Wall Street Journal reporter on these types of assignments.) Suddenly playing with house money, I sprang for the unlimited mimosa package for $US33 after tax and tip, to go with the brunch base price. There is a 90-minute limit, but I had places to be.

One movie, $US245

My colleague Jason Gay calls the Sphere, the giant orb that sits behind the Venetian, a “beach ball peaking on acid.” He paid $US539 to see U2 at the new venue. In the biggest single splurge on my trip, I paid $US245 to see a 50-minute movie there. The Director’s Seat package promised VIP entry, preshow lounge access with free beer, wine and snacks and a souvenir Sphere T-shirt. The VIP entry was the best perk, letting me skip the clogged Regular Joe lines. I was one of the first people in the atrium, where a humanoid robot named Aura chatted with me and a couple from Arkansas who also took the VIP plunge. The robot asked them the secret to their 55-year marriage. We met again in the nearly empty lounge before the Darren Aronofsky show “Postcard From Earth.”

Delta Sky Club this ain’t: The small food spread included soft pretzels with cheese and mustard. The bartender did dig out a great local IPA, Atomic Duck, and pointed me to the popcorn that VIP guests could take into the movie. The package promises premium seating for the show, a trip around the globe in which seats rattled when elephants or a jumbo jet rumbled across the giant screen.

My seat was good, albeit one row up and an aisle over from my friends who paid $US79 for their standard tickets. The final Yes Day in Vegas is a spendy blur: $US190 to watch the Lions and Rams duke it out in an NFL playoff nail-biter from a high-top table with food and alcohol included in a roped-off section at Aria Resort & Casino. The rest of the sportsbook was standing room only.

Then there was the $US40-a-person fee for the window seat at the Eiffel Tower Restaurant overlooking the dancing Bellagio fountains. The couple celebrating their anniversary one table back couldn’t believe I paid the fee. I left Vegas a little spoiled and out of sorts. When Southwest Airlines offered a $US50 upgrade to jump to the front of its boarding line on my flight home, I clicked buy. Can’t wait to explain that one to the folks in Expense Accounting.

Chip makers are fighting to assure investors that the artificial-intelligence boom is racing forward. Wall Street might not believe it until Nvidia’s NVDA -0.98%decrease; down pointing triangle Jensen Huang says so.

When Huang steps up to the mic for his company’s earnings call Wednesday, he will have the world’s attention. What he says about Nvidia’s present will preview the future of AI, dictate the path forward for a tech-crazed stock market and influence an American economy increasingly tethered to hopes that the boom won’t go bust.

The $5 trillion chip maker has provided the key building blocks for AI since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022 set off a race for dominance among OpenAI, Anthropic and established Silicon Valley giants. Now, as Nvidia backstops sprawling data-center projects and an exotic money pipeline to boost chip demand, the company’s influence is arguably bigger than ever.

But there are signs of trouble ahead. Political pushback to AI is growing. A bond selloff propelled borrowing costs to their highest levels in years. The hyperscalers that include some of Nvidia’s key customers—once cash-printing machines—are relying more on debt. OpenAI recently told investors its revenue rose by a tepid 18% in the second quarter while its losses deepened.

Nvidia is increasingly stepping in to shore up potential weak points across the market. Earlier this month, the company teamed up with six of Wall Street’s biggest firms on a $500 billion AI-financing plan, pledging to backstop lending to customers that can’t afford its chips otherwise. The chip maker last week also took a stake in Cloverleaf Infrastructure, which arranges power for data centers, and struck a $6 billion deal with startup Poolside aimed at developing a powerful open-weight AI model.

After watching shares in other chip makers and the so-called Magnificent Seven tech companies swing wildly in recent months, Wall Street is hoping Nvidia can beat expectations—again. The countdown is on.

“It’s kind of becoming more and more like the World Cup final than the Super Bowl at this point,” said Brian Mulberry, chief market strategist at Zacks Investment Management. “It’s just gotten to be that big.”

The company has smashed analysts’ earnings estimates for each of the 14 quarters since the AI boom kicked into high gear. Nvidia posted 210% annual growth in net income in its last three-month period, according to FactSet, making Wall Street’s 126% projection look pedestrian.

Expectations for a blowout second quarter have risen rapidly over the course of this year. All Nvidia will have to do to beat this target: outrun 95% annual earnings growth to more than $51.5 billion. Analysts project the chip maker will report record sales of $92 billion for the period, up from a forecast of $78 billion at the start of this year.

In July, big-tech earnings sparked volatility. Concerns about runaway capital spending spread across the sector after Alphabet’s and Tesla’s results, driving a $890 billion wipeout that contributed to the unwind of hedge fund Situational Awareness. Microsoft posted the largest one-day gain in market capitalization by any company, ever, after a quarter proving that it could still show investors the money. SpaceX rocketed higher after a record-breaking initial public offering, only to see $1 trillion in value evaporate.

Surging memory prices and borrowing costs have fueled fears that those and other companies will be unable to keep plowing more money into supplies including Nvidia chips. Shaia Hosseinzadeh, founder of OnyxPoint Global Management, has recently bought dips in AI-infrastructure stocks when Wall Street has strained to absorb massive debt issued by Silicon Valley.

“The macro data is really quite robust,” he said. “Of course, there’s a level at which everything breaks.”

Investors have kept pumping money into the AI trade despite concerns around chip consumers—and to the benefit of chip producers. That is why Nvidia’s outlook for semiconductor demand could send ripples through counterparts such as Micron Technology and Sandisk, developers of the data centers in which their chips reside, and a supply chain of power producers, contractors and other specialists that underpin the globe-spanning AI build-out.

“We joke internally that we’re all Nvidia analysts now,” said David Lefkowitz, head of U.S. equities at UBS Global Wealth Management.

The irony is that investors have tended to sell Nvidia stock immediately after blockbuster earnings, with shares falling each trading session after its four past quarterly reports. Some are betting that will be the case this time around, too.

The options market is pricing in a 5.3% swing, higher or lower, in Nvidia shares during the session following earnings, according to Option Research & Technology Services. That is higher than the 4.8% average move in Nvidia’s stock over the last 12 months after the company reports quarterly results.

In recent days, some of the most actively traded Nvidia options have been put contracts tied to the stock falling from its Friday value of $214.75 to $205 and $210 apiece, according to Cboe Global Markets data. Put options give the right to sell a stock by a set price and typically represent a bearish wager.

Many analysts remain optimistic. Frank Lee, global head of tech hardware and semiconductor research at HSBC Global Investment Research, recently raised his price target for Nvidia shares to $360 from $325, citing, among other things, Nvidia’s strategic partnerships with suppliers and its role as a top contributor to open-source AI.

I Said Yes to Every Upgrade in Las Vegas. Here’s What It Cost.

Yes, yes and yes

Cutting lines for crab legs

One movie, $US245

Nvidia’s earnings will test Wall Street’s confidence in the AI boom.