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- [00:00]
Michael McDermott
At ces. Michael mcdermott, evp of samsung, spoke with bloomberg media studios about what the company calls its next AI chapter, your companion to AI living. It's a shift from AI as a feature to AI as a trusted partner in everyday life.
- [00:18]
Caroline Hyde
Bloomberg audio studios podcasts radio news. Bloomberg Tech is live from coast to coast with Caroline Hyde in New York and Ed Ludlow in San Francisco.
- [00:38]
Ed Ludlow
This is Bloomberg Tech Coming up, AMD shares sink after a sales forecast that underwhelms investors. The chip maker perhaps not making the inroad some on Wall street had hoped for.
- [00:49]
Caroline Hyde
Plus the sell off continues across tech markets as fears of AI disruption they take hold following Anthropic's new automation model.
- [00:56]
Ed Ludlow
And Bloomberg reports Nvidia is nearing a deal to invest $20 billion in open air with the AI company looking raise up to $100 billion in its new funding round. AMD is ugly right now. The stock down 15%. It is on track for its biggest drop since October of 2018. That is how severe this sell off is. Let's get to the numbers. It's projecting sales in the period roughly $9.8 billion plus or minus $300 billion. That was above consensus estimates. But go into your Bloomberg terminal and you'll see at the high end of the ranges forecast many expected sal billion anyway. Then there's the China issue. They had China revenues but it weighed on margins AMD's results. Let's react Conjuren Sobhani of Bloomberg Intelligence who in his react piece in his research you talk about the impact of China. Good. We recognize some revenues. It impacted margins. You talk about the CPU GPU ramp that's not coming until the second half of the year. Take it from that.
- [02:00]
Conjuren Sobhani
Yeah, I mean fundamentally there was nothing wrong in this report is just when you take out the China revenues the 390 million and 100 million for the guide the beat magnitude was really modest and that didn't hit at par with the lofty expectations. Again most of this was known so very surprised to see a stock reaction that we are seeing today.
- [02:19]
Caroline Hyde
So the surprise what in terms of what enthusiasm had been baked in that shouldn't have been how far had the market moved past already? The bullish tone that we get time and time again from Lisa Su.
- [02:33]
Conjuren Sobhani
Yeah, it's about, it's about now waiting about the next GPU inflection point which is which we knew is not going to happen in this quarter or next quarter. It is for second half 26. Remember there has also been that noise in the market around delays with Their ramp of the 450 Series. None of this was shown in this report. I mean we don't expect significant upside right now because most of their customers are really waiting to pick up that server level. Helios Rack solution.
- [02:59]
Ed Ludlow
Right. Also just on a dollar terms. Right. Second, sequential decline in revenues maybe. And no one wants to hear that. Right. And we'll wait until the rest of the year. Second half of the year can mean June, it can mean December. Who knows. A big pie piece of M and A in your industry. Texas Instruments buying Silicon Labs $7.5 billion. What do we need to know about this in the analog space?
- [03:18]
Conjuren Sobhani
Yeah, this is surprising. The last time they did a deal like this was in 2011. Strategically, this fits well. They add a missing piece which was wireless connectivity in TI's portfolio. But more important, the implications are financially the key thing. Remember here Texas Instruments trades on free cash deliverability. So this management has said will not impact that free cash flow, will not impact their dividend and they'll be able to absorb the capac in the capex that they've spent over the last three to five years.
- [03:47]
Ed Ludlow
King and Spani, Bloomberg Intelligence and all things chip. We have breaking news on Cerebras Sarah Brass Systems raising a $1 billion Series H at a $23 billion valuation. This is a company that we've been tracking closely. Will they, won't they IPO? Well, right now they're raising around $1 billion at a premium valuation of $23 billion. We'll get more carriers. We get that throughout this day and this week. There is plenty more news. Hit me with it.
- [04:13]
Caroline Hyde
There is because those fears around and they're continuing to ripple through the markets at the moment. At Anthropic, it accelerated the sell off in software stocks after it rolled out that new automation tool. Bloomberg equities reporter Carmen Reinecke has been following this story. I mean the numbers are gargantuan. I think it's something like $2 trillion been wiped off that Goldman Sachs software index more broadly since its highs. But what can stop the rot right now because this has gone global.
- [04:40]
Carmen Reinecke
You know that's such a great question. And we're really seeing such a broad sort of reaction to the software sell up. I mean we're, we know that software has been beaten down. We're seeing more sort of stocks kind of join in the fray off of this latest Anthropic tool. But it's also kind of spreading into the hardware stocks we're seeing in video down, Google down. Interestingly, Microsoft is up a little bit today. Sort of rebounding I think from a sell off from its earnings report. But it has spread even into the European markets and others as well. So it looks a little bit like a washout. I think I have heard investors say, start to say that maybe this is a place to start nibbling. You know there, there could be really a rally if software sells off too much. You know many stocks in the index are in oversold territory so we could see you know, some rebound, some reinvigoration in that trade. I think investors are really just sort of thinking is it worth trying to catch a falling knife?
- [05:34]
Ed Ludlow
Common bring us some of the action of today Wednesday's session. Right. Because like to be fair to our audience, this is a conversation we had yesterday. It is a multi day story that's playing out what's new in the market this morning and what are we looking for next?
- [05:47]
Carmen Reinecke
Yeah, I think that there are multiple things going on here. So we're not only seeing you know this pressure on software but we've had a couple of few earnings reports that have stumbled that I think are adding. So Microsoft up a little bit today but that report, you know, injected some jitters into the market and also AMD as well. You know it really showed that even if you have a pretty solid guidance it's might just not be enough for investors to continue to buy your stock. So we're seeing that as well. And you know coming up we have Google report Alphabet reporting tonight, we have Amazon tomorrow. So there are just a lot of catalysts that are coming into the market right now that are shaking investors confidence in the sector.
- [06:24]
Caroline Hyde
Of course many pinpointed Anthropic's legal offering but we saw Google out with its gaming offering that had seen a lot of hit to some of the gaming software names. But I'm also interested in, we're a public market identifying show right now but private markets in particular the debt markets, we're seeing them roiled as well and it's impacting certain houses.
- [06:45]
Carmen Reinecke
Exactly, yeah. So there's just been a major sell off there as well. This, I mean this idea of contagion I think is huge.
- [06:51]
Caroline Hyde
Right.
- [06:52]
Carmen Reinecke
And you know the pain here from software spreading into all these other parts, you know, not just to equities is really prescient right now. So until there's sort of this idea that there can be a rebound, I think it's likely that we see that continue to spread and investors sort of continue to question what's next for the sector especially if is going to eat the lunch of these companies.
- [07:15]
Ed Ludlow
And by the way guys, brace earnings is still happening, right? So like there's all this news flow and this market moves on on a sort of macro concern about AI labs eating the lunch of software companies. Alphabet is going to come out and it's going to tell us about how it's doing. I mean how does that function into your week, fit into your week? Sorry, Common the earnings story, I mean.
- [07:34]
Carmen Reinecke
They'Re going to be huge. I think the thing that we're looking at the most for Alphabet and Amazon are these cloud numbers and that's going to be really important because that's where we saw Microsoft stumble. So that's what I'm going to be really laser focused on to see. I mean obviously all of these businesses are different. There are other components at play with both Alphabet and Microsoft or sorry and Amazon. But you know, cloud figure is going to be absolutely the most important thing and could really move these stocks in either direction going forward.
- [08:03]
Ed Ludlow
Bloomberg's come Reinecke all over the software space. Thank you very much. Earnings again, shares of Uber. This is so interesting. We're down 3% now in the pre market. We kind of swung to a gain. We've been down like 9% in the pre market. I call this a mixed bag. The company posted a weak profit outlook and announced a new CFO with a focus on a Robotaxi future and new markets for Robotaxi. Bloomberg's Natalie Long covers consumer apps, the gig economy and increasingly Robotaxi. Where do you want to start? Like I think let's go with the financials. Right, the earnings. They gave this adjusted EPS forecast, EBITDA forecast that appeared light but actually management had explained some of that already. Just explain.
- [08:45]
Carmen Reinecke
Yes.
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Natalie Long
So the EPS outlook for first quarter came in a bit light. That could be a result of a lot of their new product initiatives. Let's say the low cost shuttle product at airports and even the high end premium reserved rise at airports. Sort of these new products not yet yielding the return that, that they're hoping to see but they're still hoping that would sort of expand towards this year. That said like the fundamentals, the demand, underlying demand, especially in the US where they have some of their most profitable markets is very healthy. They think growth will accelerate there as some of the risks we saw last year, like high insurance costs, they think that will sort of abate this year.
- [09:33]
Caroline Hyde
Gross bookings could be up to 53 and a half billion dollars for the current fiscal quarter. Natalie Darukos was Shahi mainly trying to talk up some of the healthier pricing. What about this new cfo? What about the focus on Robo Taxi from him?
- [09:46]
Natalie Long
It's interesting they appointed, they promoted Krishnamurti to the role of cfo. He's one of the more outspoken autonomous bulls among the leadership. He's always on X defending Uber's AV strategy. And so we'll definitely see Uber double down on that sort of narrative, you know, trying to combat what it calls misconceptions among Wall street bears on how it's going to, you know, facilitate and support the ecosystem rather than completely be disrupted by, you know, rivals like Tesla.
- [10:20]
Caroline Hyde
Or Waymo and way more they partner with often as well. Natalie Lang, we appreciate the breakdown and talking of AVs, the Senate committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation is holding a hearing on the future of self driving cars right now to assess existing autonomous vehicle regulations. Of course, this is as the race with China to lead the future of transportation technology heats up. Witnesses from Tesla, from Waymo and others. They're participating. If you want to follow along, just go to live go on the Bloomberg.
- [10:46]
Ed Ludlow
Terminal and that's Tesla's Lars Moravi on the on the screen right there. We'll track the headlines coming up. Jessica Legion from the Competitive Enterprise Institute joins us to talk about antitrust concerns from a Netflix Warner Brothers tie up. We have more on that in a moment. AMD sell off accelerated in the last few minutes at one point down 16%, already on track for its biggest decline Since October of 2018, a forecast for sales in the current period. That at the high end of estimates was disappointing, but also a sequential drop in revenues. And we are waiting on this big GPU and server design moment that isn't coming until the second half of this year is one we're going to watch for the hour. This is Bloomberg Tech.
- [11:31]
Michael McDermott
How do you shift AI from being a flashy feature to a trusted partner in consumers everyday lives on the ground at CES Bloomberg Media Studios, asked Michael McDermott, EVP of Samsung. Our 2026 vision is built around an AI companion. It understands you and responds intuitively. This intelligence works quietly in the background across TVs, home appliances and mobile devices. By putting AI at the center of everything we do, we're simply improving everyday life for everyone everywhere.
- [12:07]
Mitesh Agrawal
This deal keeps one of the most iconic Hollywood studios healthy and competitive. Warner and Netflix together will create value for consumers, more opportunities for the creative community and more American jobs.
- [12:19]
Caroline Hyde
Netflix co CEO Ted Sarandos there testifying before lawmakers about the company's plan to buy Warner Brothers Streaming and studio divisions. Sarah's also said yesterday that the deal would give streaming consumers more for less, noting that 80% of Netflix subscribers also pay for HBO Max, currently owned by Warner Brothers. Let's talk through the antitrust concerns with Jessica, managing director of the center of Technology and Innovation at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Jessica, you've actually testified before Congress about streaming competition in previous times. So what did you make of Ted Sarandos and his argument that this is going to give more consumers, more to them for less?
- [12:57]
Jessica Legion
You know, I think you can buy it. There's so much overlap in people who maintain a Netflix subscription and also an HBO subscription. The companies have talked about how they would be willing to combine those and offer those at a lower price. I think he said as much in the hearing yesterday. So there are competitive concerns that remain for some people. But I think certainly, certainly there are efficiencies and overlap because most of this merger is a vertical merger. There's pieces that one company doesn't have that the other one does are going to fit them together, and, and that could be substantial cost savings that one hopes get passed along to consumers.
- [13:33]
Caroline Hyde
What was interesting amid the politicking that goes on on Capitol Hill in these sorts of hearings, the time and time again iteration we hear from our guests is it all depends on how the market is defined. Now, how are you defining this market? Is, for example, YouTube the competitor, or is it just other streaming companies?
- [13:52]
Jessica Legion
You know, I tend to come at it from, how do consumers actually use these technologies? What would they reach for as a substitute if Netflix weren't there or Warner Brothers streaming services weren't there? How do we actually behave, I think is the most common sense way to approach that. And I think in the way that we see users sit down, they clop on their couch, they go to the tv. What do they put on? It's very difficult to exclude YouTube, YouTube, TV from that because that's how people use it. That's the way we're living now. So I think if regulators are trying to get to the closest version of what the real competitive effects are, you know, you have to say, how is this actually happening with consumers and in the market? And I think it means a more broader definition of the market, which puts them more at a 10% market share, roughly, if these companies combined. If you exclude things like YouTube and you want things that look just exactly like Netflix does, that's how you get to your 30% market share mark, which triggers a bunch of stuff in antitrust litigation that would make it more Difficult for this merger.
- [14:55]
Ed Ludlow
Jessica, in antitrust, there is political theater and then there is actual process. What we showed on the screen a few moments ago and are showing now, that's political theater. Doesn't it matter really whether the DOJ takes an action here and that actually regulators are paying attention beyond the senators that pose questions in that room?
- [15:20]
Jessica Legion
No, that's exactly right. There was a lot of political haymade. And I will point out that the Senate doesn't actually have any direct jurisdiction over this merger, that that's all happening at the doj. And if they follow traditional US Antitrust laws, they're going to look at, you know, how do we define what the market is so we can think about what the market shares involved are here. And then once you get past all of that, the question becomes, you know, on that generally, on balance, what we can predict into the future, are there potential consumer benefits here to these two companies merging that might outweigh some of the competitive concerns that we heard mentioned yesterday in the hearing.
- [15:58]
Ed Ludlow
We've been asking this question consistently and in a process, it's probably right to ask the same question consistently, which is is there any past precedent that we can look to that would suggest the outcome of this proposed merger.
- [16:14]
Jessica Legion
In the regulatory sense? I don't know. It's, you know, Washington these days is setting precedent every day. But I think in the market you could look at something like the T Mobile Bull Sprint merger and say, you know, that took two competitors into being one, but that one bigger, better, stronger competitor was able to make it three big guys on the scene alongside Verizon and AT&T instead of two, which those two individual companies at 3 and 4 wouldn't have been able to to challenge the big two. So I think there's precedent in how things actually work in the real world that say a lot of times mergers can be very productive, very good for the economy, for stockholders and for consumers. I think that's probably one of the more recent examples.
- [17:01]
Caroline Hyde
Consumers are the focus though, right. In America, at least. How are you looking at to how other jurisdictions are going to analyze this deal? Because these are global companies.
- [17:11]
Jessica Legion
Yeah. They're going to have to go within the US they're going to have to talk to some state attorney generals and they'll have to deal with the DOJ's assessment. But you're absolutely right, international, certainly the standards are different here in U.S. antitrust law, you know, it's all still the consumer harm standards. So even if there might be some concerns with labor, that's part of the discussion. But really the lodestar is do consumers benefit from this in terms of maybe lower prices, more innovation, more output? There's lots of things to look at there, but that's not the case, for example, in the EU where the focus for regulators is much more concerned, concerned with the effect on competitors to these companies and not so much just consumers.
- [17:51]
Caroline Hyde
Now someone turned down going for the political theater and it was David Ellison over at Paramount Skydance. He wasn't there. I'm sure he was tuned in. What do you think it states in terms of him not wanting to go and address his own concerns or indeed whether he'll have his time to be able to discuss what a potential merger looks like with his business rather than that of Netflix flicks?
- [18:12]
Jessica Legion
I don't know. He's probably smart to take the opportunity and not have to testify in front of Congress whenever he can. We watched those two executives yesterday earn their paychecks. But you know, the, the Paramount stuff lingering on the sideline is sort of like a whole different bag of raccoons waiting in the wings to see how that interacts with all of this. Maybe not at all. If the board doesn't approve this, then that pretty much goes away. But hopefully it doesn't have any effect on what the board decides that they want to sell and they want to do and hopefully also doesn't have any impact on the regulatory structure. There's economics to be applied to this, there's consumers to be looked out for and that should be a very dry, boring story that I hope we'll see sooner rather than later.
- [19:01]
Ed Ludlow
Jessica Malaysian, Director of the center of Technology and Innovation at the Competitive Enterprise Industry. Thank you very much. Nvidia is close to investing $20 billion in open air. That's according to sources. The deal, if completed, would be the chip maker's single biggest investment in the chat GPT developer. Both companies declined to comment on Bloomberg's reporting. Let's get the details with AI reporter sharing Ghafari so Jensen Wong has walked in front of a camera quite often recently. Sam Altman has taken to social media and also been on stage, you and I. Our best understanding and reporting from sources is that actually for all the noise, this transaction's almost done. What do we need to know?
- [19:50]
Shreen Ghafari
Yes, well, the key part is the 20 billion potential investment in OpenAI's current funding round is almost done. Now the bigger question is what about the overall up to 100 billion commitment that Nvidia and OpenAI were supposed to agree on? They're still Finalizing that agreement that is still yet to be determined, did everything.
- [20:13]
Caroline Hyde
Just get very confused? Because at no point did it feel like in what was originally $100 billion up to agreement on paper that was going to be an exchange with for gigawatts coming online was in any way sort of also bounded around the actual funding round of Open Air. Can you just make a clear line of what we expected Nvidia and OpenAI's relationship to be like from that September announcement?
- [20:37]
Shreen Ghafari
Look, I think what we're seeing in these larger and larger mega funding rounds that both OpenAI anthropic and others are doing is that strategic investors are increasingly getting involved. Right. So we, you know, as expected, that it's not just going to be VCs companies, it's also going to be these large tech companies like Nvidia who are investing in rounds. 20 billion is a lot for Nvidia, but obviously up to 100 billion is a lot more. When they made that announcement of up to 100 billion, they didn't say over what time period. They said it was a tentative agreement that has yet to be finalized. And they also said that it would be contingent upon certain milestones around how Open Air deploys its chips, its compute power. So there's still details to be sorted out. I think what's sort of confusing is when, you know, there's reporting out that the deal has yet to be finalized, that there may be tension and then at the same time we see Nvidia in talks and as we reported, finalizing this very large sum in the current round. And you know, it can be true that two things are happening at once, right? So there can be a big investment in this current round and there can be uncertainty about, about how much more Nvidia might give in the future. And you know what milestones OpenAI may or may not hit tied to that larger investment.
- [21:51]
Caroline Hyde
While excited for the rest of your reporting on the current round and who else is involved, Shreen Ghafari, we thank you very much indeed.
- [22:03]
Ed Ludlow
Welcome back to Bloomberg Tech. If you're just joining us, the technology picture in equities, public markets, it is, it's pretty ugly. The earnings story is a big part of that. AMD is now on track for its biggest drop since 2017. But there are other stories out there, right, Carrie?
- [22:19]
Caroline Hyde
There are the software sell off is a key one. It's continuing with the sector already trailing the S&P 500, as is investors reassess valuations and business models in the face of this rapid advance in AI. But the move has been accelerated course by Anthropic introducing a new AI automation tool, fueling disruption fears across industries. Now here to discuss the tech market impact in both software, but also in hardware is Howling Loven and portfolio manager Uday Trivial. And in fact, a lot of the software names that you analyze are bouncing today. I'm looking at Adobe, for example, Microsoft, which is all things to all men. We've also got the likes of SAP that just managed to push up a little bit today. But this software pain. Yeah, what do you make of it?
- [23:00]
Michael McDermott
Look, I think there's a narrative out there that AI is going to eat up software, that AI is going to replace software and that's dominating right now. And in a sense that investors are putting high probability to that. What we look at as long term investors is say that there's a range of outcomes that are possible, it could be complementary and supplementary to software, not just replacing software. And that's how you have to think about it right now. In a market where everything's blocking up, it looks like, hey, there's pain coming left, right and center. You step back and think about what are the sort of companies that can go through this sort of environment, go through this transformation of technology and still come out to the other side holding their own. And in that sense, Microsoft is one of those companies that we think can do that.
- [23:44]
Caroline Hyde
What have you analyzed to get that comfort? Because there's much to say that not many of the seats that are actually being paid for, for, for Copilot are being used. Yeah, I think about Adobe's been on the offensive. There's a story out today showing how they've ramped up advertising by 30% to try and highlight their own AI tools. What do you want to hear and see in the data to show that these companies can weather it?
- [24:05]
Michael McDermott
So I think before we get to the data, what we need to understand is what is the type of software that these companies are selling, where their point solutions say, for example, on the legal side, you know, LexisNexis, maybe there's a reason why that can be displaced more by AI, which does point solutions. But Microsoft and Adobe, they do their platform solutions. What they do is not just function for the user, they manage the whole workflow, the whole process of a company set up in this. In companies like Microsoft or SAP, those companies from a product perspective are much more entrenched. So that's the starting point. The second point we do look at is from a data per seat, is the revenue per seed going up and why is that going up? Is that just from pricing or increasing the number of tools that are being used? And if we look at the evidence, there seems to be an improvement for Microsoft. The copilot is going up now. Is the pace of that going up differently to cloud cowork and what they're announcing it would be because one is an enterprise product and one is much more an experimental product right now. So the growth rates would be quite different. So that's what we're looking at the data points of the number of users, percentage of take up in terms of new new products and tools.
- [25:16]
Ed Ludlow
It's great to have you on the program this moment in time in particular. Microsoft, you know, is a name that you hold in the portfolio. It's probably worth just looking back a little bit and asking what you learned from that earnings print because of course the market reaction in the moment was pretty severe. But what was the bigger picture for you?
- [25:34]
Michael McDermott
The bigger picture for us is the fact that Azure is continuing to grow. Yes, it missed the bogey of you know, 40% growth, it came at 38%. To us that matters much less than the fact that the reason that they missed is because the capacity constraint and the reason why they're capacity constraint is two years ago they made the decision to wait and see into blowing into growing their data centers just in anticipation of demand.
- [25:59]
Shreen Ghafari
Demand.
- [26:00]
Michael McDermott
So that shows us the management mindset is that they will build for as they see demand, not just anticipating demand. And that's why the growth is constrained and that's why the growth for the next quarter is constrained. So to us that's not the, that's not the end all and be all. So therefore missing that small number is not a bad thing. But what we do like is the fact that on an office side, on the commercial side growth remains very strong. The part that missed was, was their personal computing and that's got to do with memory pricing. Now when you come back to hardware, huge memory price increases, there's going to be demand destruction and that's what Microsoft is seeing. So to us put all that together. This doesn't change the long term valuation picture. The fact that they continue to allow other LLMs and other models into their Azure, into, into the Azure infrastructure means that they benefit from the overall growth in the AI ecosystem.
- [26:52]
Ed Ludlow
Bloomberg's reporting that Nvidia is close to confirming its $20 billion contribution to the open Air round. That's ongoing. That of course comes from, from sources but that's my best understanding is a portfolio manager that that holds in video and looks at Nvidia. How much do you care about that story? Nvidia's financial investment in OpenAI.
- [27:14]
Michael McDermott
The financial investment is the quantum of that financial investment is not that important. It's what's the relationship that they're building up with OpenAI and how they're driving Open Air in terms of their usage of Nvidia. Because the long term story for Nvidia is how much of your chips are going to be used in the next generation of training models. How much is going to go to the Asics that the companies like Google and all are coming up with. The more, the deeper their relationship with these AI frontier model companies is, the more likely they can, they can, you know, the design roadmap will tailor to these companies and therefore they become more entrenched. What you want to see is companies getting more entrenched and invest in those companies.
- [27:57]
Ed Ludlow
Who dash river of Harding load. And it's great to have you here on Bloomberg Tech. Thank you very much. So coming up, Amazon's former worldwide consumer chief Dave Clark joins us to talk about his new style supply chain software startup Augur. That's next. This is Bloomberg Tech.
- [28:20]
Caroline Hyde
Matter Reality Labs. Well it's just selected the startup Augur to provide the operating system for the company's supply chain. Now the startup was founded by the former head of Amazon supply chain itself. Dave Clark, August CEO Founder, joins us now. Your co founder along with your partner. And I'm interested Dave, as to what this is going to mean for all those that want the latest greatest hardware from Matter. How much quickly will it be in their hands?
- [28:43]
Dave Clark
Well, good morning. Thanks for having me on. We're excited to be working with Matter in this way. We're in the midst of deploying software now. We'll deploy with them over Q1, Q2 of this year and finalize in Q3.
- [28:57]
Caroline Hyde
Interestingly, how little spy on your website. Met is not the only brand that I saw. Fanatics is another one. How are you scaling new companies to come on and basically be the first customers that you have for this startup?
- [29:10]
Dave Clark
Well, we started building out, we've been building out the products for the last year. We deployed in proof of concepts with customers in the middle of last year including Meta and Fanatics. And so what we've been doing is building the platform for how you're going to build an autonomous operating system for supply chain. At its core is really the contextual infrastructure for data across the supply chain world that makes it happen. And because we build it as a, there's this platform of infrastructure. It's very scalable from customer to customer.
- [29:45]
Ed Ludlow
Dave, without trivializing it, why the name Augur? What is, what is it represent present? I think that might give us an insight into what the company is and what it does.
- [29:55]
Dave Clark
Well, if you think about the big challenge in supply chain is really trying to connect all of this disconnected data together, to make it reason together, to create a layer of contextualization and understanding. And to do that you really have to have both the technology and the knowledge to drill down into an organization, to drill into the process of, of how they work to enable that. And so Auger fit a lot of things that we really liked and had some meaning behind it as well for how to think about it. Also supply chains, a contact sport like this is not the world wakes up every day trying to wreak havoc on supply chain planners around the world. And so we thought it was a framing that sort of represented the grit and determination and sort of just grind through it, that represents operators around the world.
- [30:45]
Ed Ludlow
We're showing video of how the software, the platform works. We know you from, from your time at Amazon, right, and your experience of global supply chains. You had a brief 10 year at Flexport and maybe we'll get into that another time. But I don't know you as a software guy. How did you build this platform? What are the people behind the company? Core competency here, please.
- [31:10]
Dave Clark
Yeah, well, I mean if you think about, I mean Amazon is, is in many ways a supply chain technology company at its core. You know, we had my team at thousands of software developers, you know, the last mile technology teams, the robotics teams, the inventory forecasting ML neural network teams, you know, so while I'm not, I don't write code for a living. I've been leading and working with software teams for two decades now. We have a phenomenal team of people, many of whom were from folks I've worked with in my past lives and some new folks that have joined us from other places. But the unifying bit of the whole group is people incredibly passionate about customers, incredibly curious about the technology that's coming out in the world, and incredibly fast at delivering output for the people we're.
- [32:04]
Caroline Hyde
Working for is an agentic technology that's going to drive us forward in many ways, Dave. But what's so interesting is I see the retail benefits, I see the e commerce lived experience and I can see what's happening with Metro fanatics. But how does this expand supply chains is something we talk about in every type of industry right now and particularly In a national security context.
- [32:23]
Dave Clark
That's right. I mean at the core of the this thing is really, well, Agentix is the subject of so much of the conversation. The way you make Agentix work is through context. Context is king. And our core platform is really about context enablement across large global enterprise data sets, unifying thousands of tables into one operable platform of data that agents can actually then work with for autonomy that's extensible in all aspects of the world. Our early customers today are focused more in the consumer space, but we're also partnering, looking at, working with governments to enable process flow. You can imagine the kind of work that needs to be done to connect sovereigns, not just companies. And we think that's a big expansion area for us as we move forward in the next months ahead.
- [33:14]
Caroline Hyde
Taking a step back, we are currently in a day of trade where anxiety run runs high on AI disruption of software companies. And I'm interested as to how you felt that Olga is something you needed to build for yourself as an operating system rather than companies plugging in what is currently being developed by large language models.
- [33:35]
Dave Clark
Well, you know, as I said, I think the large language models can only do so much. You know, their large language models are fantastic, but they're limited by the context you provide them. And what was missing and what I saw nobody building was the contextual infrastructure to make supply chains work as a unit. And so we felt we had the right technology background, we had the right operational background, sort of right team, right technology, right time to go out and do this. We think it's one of the sort of few big enablement plays at a global scale to really, you can really go out in software and change the way the physical world interacts.
- [34:15]
Ed Ludlow
Dave Clark, CEO of Olga, great to have you here on Bloomberg Tech. Thank you very much. Let's get to the world of inference. Positron AI has raised $230 million in a series B funding round, valuing the company at over $1 billion. The AI chip startup is working to compete with Nvidia by developing energy efficient chips for AI Inference. Joining us to discuss, Mitesh Agrawal. Positron CEO Mitesh, it is good to see you. Thank you for coming on the show. We have to say we have a new inference chip name on the show on a weekly basis at the moment. Opus right through to the next generation of accelerator for Inference. We'll get to the money. But what is the Depositron elevator pitch? What is it you're doing differently that really would allow you to take on Nvidia in the market for inference?
- [35:03]
Mitesh Agrawal
Yeah, it's a silicon focused on memory architecture for inference. It's fairly memory bottleneck both on memory speeds and memory capacity. Positron has deployed and you know, our first generation product already and are building our second generation which is very much focused on building the memory closer to the systolic array. So very, very fast on decode speeds and then second is having massive amounts of memory capacity directly attached to the chip. Our second generation will be the world's first terabyte memory chip going up to 2.3 terabytes of attached memory. You know, for comparison, Nvidia Ruben will launch with 384 gigabytes end of this year. So that's, that's where we are really focused on if you think about decode applications. You know, video generation, code generation, reasoning models. That's the current bottleneck. Very large models as well.
- [35:52]
Ed Ludlow
You know, mitesh. This issue like latency for one of a better expression, you know, Nvidia is looking, the giant that is in video is looking at optics as well within the server design to overcome that. They got a lot of cash to do it. You now have $230 million. You know, how is that going to help you progress it?
- [36:10]
Mitesh Agrawal
Yeah, I think, look, obviously you can't do cash to cash comparison. I think the research directions are different. I think that's where our technology is completely different. Well, Nvidia is looking at optics to scale out over a rack scale data centerscale because they have to connect multiple chips because they're limited on memory. We are kind of bringing the scale out a little bit inward. We are saying that by having that much memory you still have to do scale out when the models are going to be 10 trillion parameters long or large. But the point is you have to do it less so you can consume less chips, you consume less power and so on. Right. So. So it's a different type of architecture than what Nvidia is focused on. I really do believe that, you know, in the world of inference you're going to see, you know, the world. You've heard the word disaggregation and obviously that's going to come through. But you know, each silicon will have, or silicon architecture will have its kind of niche in terms of what application they really drive through fundamentally more efficiently. It's like the Pareto curve. You know, you are trying to minimize power consumption, you are trying to minimize energy, you're trying to minimize the cost, you know, with a per token per video generation. And you're trying to increase the speed of output. Right. And, and each of the silicon architectures will find its own niche there and we are right in that, in that space.
- [37:23]
Caroline Hyde
Is your niche finance? I mean I'm looking at Jump Trading being one of your investors and is that sort of a strategic investor? Where do you think that you will be first shipping to?
- [37:32]
Mitesh Agrawal
Yeah, I mean actually Jump is one of our customers for the first gen product and it's, that's the validation that you know, really kind of encouraged us to, to go out and raise this round. You know, Jump became a customer first. They looked at our first gen, they used it, they looked at our second gen roadmap and they said look, we got to invest in this company. And that's kind of how they came as co lead on the round. So trading is obviously using a lot of language models, transformer models, auto aggressive models for, for their applications. They're exploring that. It's R and D and expanding but they're exploring that and that's kind of where having driving, lower latency or loving like very large context length can, can really make an impact for them. So that's how they got interested from a strategic point of. Caroline, you mentioned we have AAM and qia. So it's not just customers in finance or certain types of customers, it's the ecosystem players and you know, different types of sovereign and datacenter players that are getting interested in this space as they look at heterogeneous deployments of silicon for inference for a glimpse.
- [38:35]
Caroline Hyde
So we saw grok, its focus on inference and its interesting purchase by Nvidia. How do you see your growth now? You've got money. I'm sure it's about hiring talent and getting and shipping the systems. But with AAM on the cap table, do you see some sort of purchase in your future? What do you want for the business?
- [38:54]
Mitesh Agrawal
I think our, our main focus is how can we deliver our maximum enough chips in the world. Right. I think that's really what drives us fundamentally is how can we deploy millions and millions of chips. I mean we are starting at you know, started obviously with just the first prototype. We are in thousands right now, so it's still a long way to go. And you know, Nvidia is the company in the millions and that's kind of where we have to reach everything that goes by the side. You know, acquisitions, you know, going public. All those things are kind of byproducts of the actual technical product and the consumer and the customer. From a customer point of view, I'LL answer you, Carolyn. I think from, from, from our perspective, you know, over 80% of Wall's influence gets driven through hyperscalers or associated customers and that's kind of where we are really aiming to, to go after from specific workloads to, to them.
- [39:42]
Caroline Hyde
Natasha grows a Tron Great to have you on today. Alphabet's earnings, they come out after the bell. We want to hear about what to expect the Bloomberg's comment of Royal and it's all going to be about Cloud, about capital expenditure again.
- [39:54]
Jessica Legion
Yes, exactly. I think everyone's expecting a great quarter for Alphabet again.
- [39:59]
Carmen Reinecke
It's going to be a lot of.
- [39:59]
Jessica Legion
Attention on Google Cloud given that Alphabet.
- [40:02]
Carmen Reinecke
Basically released Gemini 3 during last quarter.
- [40:06]
Jessica Legion
So we're going to talk about how it's been rolling it out in all the products, how the distribution is going and basically they're still dominating search, which is expected that they are and how.
- [40:15]
Carmen Reinecke
They'Re defending that position against other chat bots.
- [40:19]
Ed Ludlow
Bloomberg's common Royal will be at her desk primed for Alphabet post market. There are many others reporting Qualcomm is one carry frank reality of it. Biggest maker of smartphone processors. We'll learn about the health of the smartphone market, what's going on with memory supply chain and general demand. Of course, you know you spoke to Cristiano at cbs, right. They want to diversify into datacenter, PC, autos, networking, all that, but that's their.
- [40:44]
Caroline Hyde
Bread and butter and robotics as well. Really the future drivers for this business is something I'm sure they'll be trying to lean upon. But in the here and now, as you say, what is the ramifications of memory prices on some of the other clients that they serve? How are we seeing Qualcomm brace for what has been just an extraordinary sell off that we're seeing into the hardware ecosystem as well. But this is as their fiscal first quarter is the one to look at. Look, we've also got chip design in the center spotlight, right. Maybe one day it wants to be a chip maker too, but right now it's a designer and ARM just up 9, 10% ahead of its earnings. How are you thinking about the strength of its own design vis a vis the competition right now?
- [41:20]
Ed Ludlow
Yeah. Jensen Wong, Nvidia CEO changed the game for ARM based cpu. He said it just a couple of weeks ago. They're coming to market with their CPU as a standalone product. It's based on ARM architecture. ARM might want to talk that up because that really did sense some ripples in the market. CPU right now in demand.
- [41:38]
Caroline Hyde
Yeah, we're thinking of total revenue about one and a quarter billion dollars. EPS estimate 19 cents. But let's just focus on these markets today because that does it for this edition of Bloomberg Tech. Ed. We are seeing such a significant sell off across the software names, but in risk assets more broadly. Look, Bitcoin 73,000 where we stand.
- [41:56]
Ed Ludlow
Yep, at its lowest level since the November 24th presidential election. We have a podcast. You should listen to it. This is Bloomberg Tech.