Nebius – The Phoenix.

From the ashes of Russia comes something interesting Nebius may not seem very exciting on the surface, but outside of AI infrastructure, the company also has some of the non-Russian Yandex assets which could be more interesting when the current craze around generative AI calms down. Yandex was viewed as the Russian Google and while it operated mostly in Russia,...

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Artificial Intelligence – Better, Smaller, Cheaper

The race to the bottom is beginning.   OpenAI’s smaller GPT-4o Mini promises to kick off a race to the bottom in terms of pricing as it is only slightly inferior to GPT-4o but is 60% cheaper which is likely to trigger a spiral of price cuts as users realise that there is not much that separates all these models from...

TSMC Q2 24 – Still Rolling

AI party spoilt by China.    TSMC reported good results and narrowed its guidance to the top end of the range in a move that added confidence that the AI bubble will not pop yet and prevented the Taiwan-listed shares of TSMC from emulating the 5% – 10% correction witnessed in US markets yesterday. Revenues / EPS were TWD593bn /...

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USA vs. China – Closing Loopholes

ASML bucks the Chinese trend.   Excellent results from ASML indicate that China is still buying as much equipment as it can get its hands on but potential further tightening of restrictions from The USA threatens to turn equipment in China into very expensive doorstops. ASML reported Q2 24 revenues / EPS of €6.2bn / €4.01 ahead of estimates of...

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SoftBank and Graphcore – AI Armoury

More than meets the eye. Contrary to my expectations (see here), SoftBank has acquired AI chipmaker Graphcore for around $600m which is way below its peak valuation meaning that the shares of many employees and investors will end up being worthless. Graphcore has been in trouble from the time it lost its two biggest customers (Microsoft and Google) and has...

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OpenAI – Strawberries and Cream

Project Strawberry unlikely to get the cream. OpenAI has come up with a system to rank its progress towards artificial general intelligence (AGI) but apart from the first two, the levels are so vague that they will be of little use other than to help the company raise more money to spend on compute. This goes hand in hand with...

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Tesla – More of Same

Robotaxis could be a near-fatal disease. Tesla has rallied on a fantasy that I think will never come true even if FSD eventually works but reality has once again decided to intervene as there is yet another delay further denting Tesla’s already battered credibility in robotaxis. In April 2024, Tesla promised that it would unveil its long-awaited robotaxi in August...

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AMD – The Blueprint

AMD emulates Nvidia but has more to do. AMD is building a vertically integrated AI toolkit based on its silicon but there are two elements still missing that will still prevent it from really taking the fight to Nvidia. AMD will acquire Silo AI, a Finnish AI body shop that creates AI on behalf of its clients for $665m in...

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Windows on Arm – Trump Card

Its battery life first and AI second. It turns out that as good as the Copilot+ features are, they need a bit more refining before they are widely adopted meaning that the main draw of an AI PC is its battery life where Arm wins hands down over x86. The early reviews of s running the X Elite and X...

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Lucid Motors – Off the Bottom?

Higher shipments at negative gross margins are not good news. Lucid Motors has preannounced its shipments for Q2 24 where it managed an impressive jump in shipments despite the weakening market but, as ever, cash flow remains critical and here there is likely to be less good news. Lucid Motors produced 2,110 vehicles and delivered 2,394 vehicles to customers, way...

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