The US Administration is very clever or very lucky. The reassessment of the new rule on chip exports from the USA by luck (or by design) will still have the impact of limiting China’s competitiveness despite its ability to develop leading-edge AI. At the same time, it will mollify prominent allies such as the UAE and Saudi Arabia who have...
For once, Jensen is not long-term enough. Jensen has bemoaned the potential loss of the Chinese market which he thinks will be worth $50bn. Even though he is famed for thinking way ahead of everyone else, this time he is too short-term focused, as what US and Western companies lose in China, I think they will get back elsewhere in...
USA / China spoils the party. AMD’s excellent results show that it is taking share from Intel in PCs as well as gaining share in the data centre as inference becomes a much larger part of demand, but unlike Intel, Nvidia has a fix for this. AMD Q1 25 revenues / EPS were $7.4bn / $0.96 comfortably ahead of estimates...
The chances of collapse have increased materially. The abandonment of the plan to become a public benefit corporation means that the current unstable and conflicted corporate structure will persist, greatly increasing the risk of repeating the almost lethal implosion of 2023. OpenAI’s rivals, and particularly Google, will benefit as OpenAI will be less inclined to compete against them and will,...
Balkanisation gathers pace. China’s efforts to become self-sufficient for technology are gathering pace exactly as we predicted, but this will come at the expense of efficiency as Chinese standards will become more costly to implement and run, making China less attractive to non-affiliated countries. Alavan Independent has long observed that what began as a strategic rivalry during the first Trump...
Apple FQ2 25 – AI not a problem yet, but tariffs bite. Apple reported good results, but then guided weakly as it warned of a $900m tariff impact that sent the shares down 4% demonstrating just how skittish the market remains when it comes to the “T word”. FQ2 25 revenues and net income were $95.4bn / $24.8bn just ahead...
Qualcomm FQ2 25 – Unreasonable punishment Qualcomm reported good results, but a slightly weaker-than-expected revenue forecast caused the market, already nervous about tariffs, to send the shares down 6%, creating an opportunity for anyone with a time horizon longer than 5 minutes. FQ2 revenues / adj-EPS were $10.84bn / $2.85 just ahead of expectations of $10.84bn / $2.82. On the...
F8 is resurrected to shoot at OpenAI & Co. Meta Platform’s cancelled F8 developer conference has been resurrected as LlamaCon where Meta spent most of its time shooting at OpenAI, and setting out its case as to why it should be the platform for the AI era. Meta kicked off its event by disclosing that Llama has been downloaded 1.2bn...
Inference at the edge moves forward. Alibaba has added to the ever-increasing deluge of AI models with the release of Qwen3 which it claims is better, faster and more efficient than anything that DeepSeek has produced, adding weight to my view that DeepSeek may have been unique only because it was first. It also advances the case for running models...
Richard is founder, owner of research company, Radio Free Mobile. He has 16 years of experience working in sell side equity research. During his 11 year tenure at Nomura Securities, he focused on the equity coverage of the Global Technology sector.
Google – Code Yellow
The warning lights are flashing yellow Apple claims that it has seen the first sign of generative AI impacting Google’s search traffic, meaning that Q2 25 will be a crucial quarter to see whether the anecdote translates into data. Even if there has been an impact, Google already has a competitive product, meaning that if it can execute on Gemini,...