LEAP Day 2– Floor Speed Run

A rapid tour found themes other than Humain.

Startups appear capital constrained

• The startup section in Hall 1A is much quieter than before, and as almost everyone is doing either an AI agent or an AI platform of some sort, one could cover the floor fairly quickly.
• Startup land was also a ghost town compared to Halls 1 and 2, where one finds the big tech companies, which is a sign that data centre builds and huge capital commitments are sucking all of the cash out of the ecosystem.
• This is bad news for the fledgling startup ecosystem in Saudi Arabia, as one of these companies could eventually become a Google or a Meta in Saudi Arabia, but to do that, startups need love and support.
• While Europe continues to languish in technology, the Middle East has an opportunity to attract talent and startups to the region with the promise of capital, compute and low tax.
• However, Europe may be beginning to take action in terms of technology and AI in particular, and so this opportunity may not last forever.

China Robots – Dancing to the controller

• Tucked away in Hall 5 are the Chinese robot companies or consumer electronics companies who now also make a robot.
• All of these robots look almost identical, and some bright spark assured me that when his company took the robots to pieces they all use the same components and the designs were almost identical.
• These are the same robots that executed martial arts moves at a recent Chinese state event and also marched ominously around the track at the robot Olympics, looking very much like a battalion of soldiers.
• Here at LEAP, they were doing backflips, shaking hands, dancing and doing all the usual sorts of things we have come to expect over the last year or so.
• However, just like at CES, employees are hiding in the crowd, controlling the robots with what looks like adapted Nintendo Switch controllers.
• What was most interesting is that where the screen should be are a series of preprogrammed moves and the key combos that are required to command the robots to execute them.
• So, if one wants the robot to Samba while moving forwards, one pushes the joystick forwards and executes the key combo for Samba at the same time.
• Some of the controllers were unfamiliar with the commands and had to keep looking them up rather than keeping the robot in sight all of the time.
• This led to some amusing slip-ups like the robot raising its hand to no one for a handshake.
• This is a good indication that one can teach robots to move in the human world within limits, but they are not incapable of operating with any real degree of autonomy.
• This is broadly in line with RFM’s current thinking where it thinks that the humanoid robot market has great potential but remains very far away from becoming commercially viable.

Huawei – Data Centre Update

• A trip to the Huawei stand uncovered a 50MW data centre in Malaysia that is now up and running as well as a large installation in Thailand that is being used by TikTok.
• On the surface, this sounds like Huawei has made a breakthrough in selling its Ascend AI training and inference processors overseas, but this is not what is going on.
• The 50MW data centre in Malaysia is not an AI data centre in that it is running much older Huawei silicon and is being used for regular compute tasks.
• The marketing literature highlights the possibility to upgrade to the Ascend 950 (Huawei’s 2026 AI chip), but the data centre has not qualified this chip yet and so it is not clear whether it will be deployed.
• What is most interesting is that this data centre has been designed to be able to support whatever chip combination the owner wishes to use.
• Hence, it is not impossible that this gets upgraded to an Nvidia or AMD data centre with a Huawei shell, core and power system.
• Hence, I still have yet to see a genuine purchase of Huawei’s new AI silicon in non-Chinese markets and remain dubious whether this will ever happen without giving the chips away for free.
• This is because Huawei remains very uncompetitive on almost every metric, meaning that anyone with a choice would purchase something else.
• I have seen nothing at LEAP to change my view that the USA still has the edge in the AI race.