China EV – The shakeout

There will be fewer Chinese car makers. Recent price cuts from BYD are accelerating a price war against a backdrop of weak domestic demand, meaning that the inevitable consolidation of Chinese car companies is coming sooner rather than later. RFM Research estimates that there are at least 100 car makers in China, which have around 200 vehicle brands compared to...

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MediaTek & Nvidia – Rumblings from Computex

Rumour is much worse than reality. Aside from Nvidia opening up the data centre CPU market, MediaTek was expected to enter the PC CPU market, but with nothing more than a vague hint from Rick Tsai, tongues were set wagging, mostly wrongly in my view. The PC market is ripe for disruption as the x86 instruction set increasingly looks obsolete,...

OpenAI – A Consultant’s Dream

The most expensive consultant in history. OpenAI will acquire Jony Ive’s hardware start-up at an eye-watering valuation, but it has filed to acquire the man himself full-time, making him the most expensive consultant of all time. OpenAI is paying $6.4bn for a company with no product, no revenues and will not even secure the full-time services of Jony Ive, which...

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Google I/O – Fightback Begins

Google moves to defend its turf. Although Google is yet to see any impact from OpenAI, Perplexity etc on its Search business, it is moving to future-proof its legacy business, which, compared to Nokia in 2007, has a much better chance of success. As expected, Google I/O is all about Gemini, which beat AI as the most used word during...

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Computex Day 2 & Microsoft Build – Tale of 2 Conferences

Computex Day 2 – Wider and deeper. While Nvidia dominated day 1 with data centre, it was left to the rest of the industry to make the announcements that everyone has come to Computex to see, namely computing and gaming. Here, Windows on Arm continues to dominate the agenda with x86 largely missing in action, although to be fair, neither...

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Computex Day 1 – Nvidia Opens.

Nvidia is not standing still. Nvidia Founder Jensen Huang opened Computex 2025 with a confident session that launched new products aimed at the enterprise, but also admitted that in the AI factories, not everything is going to come from Nvidia opening the door for other silicon offerings. I see this as a wise move as the AI data centre market...

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Alibaba FQ4 25 – AI no-show.

Economic gloom shatters AI dreams. Alibaba reported a mediocre set of results, underlining that the task at hand for the Chinese state is to breathe life back into the consumer economy in which it had a large part in destroying. The health of the Chinese economy is a crucial factor when considering the struggle with the USA, as it is...

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China vs. USA – The Isolation Game

The current game mode is isolation. On top of incentivising the Middle East to pivot West, the US Department of Commerce has warned that the use of Huawei chips is a violation of US export controls. This is a thinly veiled strategy aimed at further isolating China from the rest of the global technology ecosystem. If the majority of the...

Artificial Intelligence – The Middle East

Plenty of space, electricity and money The visit of the US President to the Middle East has intensified the friendly competition between Saudi Arabia and the UAE, both of whom intend to become global AI hubs. The President’s visit coincides with a Saudi-US Investment Forum where a slew of deals have been announced that look set to give the region...

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Arm FQ4 25 – Mean Reversion

Worries have already evaporated Arm reported good results but guided weakly as a result of trade issues which already look like they will not come to pass which is why the shares have already put back all of what they lost last week. Q4 revenues / Adj-EPS were $1.24bn / $0.55, just ahead of estimates of $1.23bn / $0.53. This...

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