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JP Morgan Chase Bank NA Member FDIC Copyright 2026 JPMorgan Chase Co. 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. This is Bloomberg Tech Coming up, Intel plunges after the chip maker warned it's struggling with manufacturing problems. Plus, China's largest tech firms get an initial green light from Beijing to start preparing orders for Nvidia's X200AI chips. And after years of drama, it comes to an end as Tick Tock and its Chinese parent ByteDance close a deal to operate in the U.S. let's look right now though, at U.S. markets as we close up this week. A volatile trading week to say the very least. Consumed by geopolitics to start. Chart. And we end with a little bit of green on our screens. The NASDAQ 100. We're up 5, 10 of a percent, 6, 10%. You can see the clawback that happened post Davos speech and post President Trump really taking his line of sight away from Greenland by force at least. But Ed, it's all about the chip stocks today and you're digging into them. So intel is down a lot and it's because of a sales outlook for the current period that at the midpoint was below investor expectations, on track for its biggest drop since August of 2022. But remember, this was a stock that just in few weeks we've had of 2026 was up 47% as of yesterday's close. The problems are in supply, but specifically in execution. Let's get to Bloomberg's chips reporter, Ian King. And Ian, you and I spoke with Intel CEO Lip Bhutan on the telephone. He was very clear that actually when they say there are supply issues, a lot of this was how intel tried to manage it. They have yield and they have production problems. Explain that to us. Yeah, so there's a couple of things here. The first was that they basically didn't believe that the demand for some of their best products, which would be the server chips, was there, didn't build inventory, didn't assign supply to that, so that didn't help. But then the production, which could help you out where you get more chips for production, run what's called yield. If that had been better, they would have had more chips and been able to meet more supply. So they've really left quite a lot of orders on the table here. And obviously that is not good. What does it say about the future of its fab business and if yield is so low? Well, I mean, I can refer you to what the analysts have said, which is, look, if you're out there looking for external customers for your factories, your factories have to be showing their best side. They have to be operating at full, you know, as best they can. They have to be working, you know, maximum efficiency. If that's not the case, then that obviously hurts your, you know, your sales pitch to outside customers. Intel, Intel. Ian. We also discussed in the context of intel, his efforts with the coming 14A process. Right. And I found Lippu Tan's candor quite interesting. We tried to push him and say, where are the customers? And his answer was, until I have a volume commitment on that, I'm not going to tell you anything. Just give us a bit more of how he tried to explain that foundry business and its progress. Yeah, I mean, this is him sticking to a line of kind of reasoning which I think resonated initially with shareholders and then caused a little bit of concern. Basically, he's saying, look, this is really expensive. Building these factories and equipping them costs a fortune. I am not going to do that until my customers say, here's an order that I can then turn into cash that pays for these factories. So that's a very logical sort of down to earth, pragmatic sort of viewpoint, saying that he'll know for sure whether he's going to get concrete orders or not in the second half of this year and into the first half of next year. So from the Wall street perspective, that's like we're still in the kind of wait and see period in terms of whether intel can become this kind of foundry, this rival to tsmc. Wonder how the administration is viewing it as a key stakeholder in Intel. Ian King, great roundup. Thank you. Let's turn our attention to a Bloomberg exclusive now. Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance, when they're now allowed to prepare orders for Nvidia's H200AI chips, suggesting that Beijing is prioritizing the needs of the major Chinese hyperscalers and getting close to formally approving imports of essential AI components. Let's get to Blue Motec executive editor Peter Elstrom. It's another stepping stone that hints Beijing will let them in. Yeah, this is a very closely watched drama. Of course, Nvidia used to sell lots of chips into the China market, but Washington and Beijing have been battling over exactly what kind of chips are going to be sold and what kind of volume. Washington has stopped the most advanced chips from going into the market, but the Trump administration did approve these H200 chips to be sold into the market. It wasn't clear whether Beijing was going to let its tech companies buy these chips. Now what we're hearing from sources is that they have given the go ahead for the key companies you mentioned, Alibaba, Tencent and ByteDance, to prepare their orders to tell them how much they want to buy from Nvidia and then they're going to make decisions about when exactly this is going to happen. It's going to come with some caveats. They do still want to build up the domestic industry. They want these companies to also purchase from some of the domestic players, which include Huawei Technologies and Camera Con, as we've talked about in the show a few times before. But it looks like they're going to be able to go ahead with those H2 hundreds. Yeah. Those caveats also include restrictions right. On both sides of this negotiation. There is agreement that the Chinese officials that we're hearing from talking about there will not be access when it comes to sensitive industries, things like that. Just break that down. Peter? Yeah, they're concerned, they've said this before with the H20 chips and now the H200 chips. They're concerned. They don't want Nvidia's chips going into sensitive areas like the military, like state owned enterprises or government agencies for that case. So the market's going to be narrower than what it would be otherwise. But in video used to, again, used to sell a lot of chips into this market used to be very, very important. Jensen Huang has talked about how important it is and they know that there's demand there for these chips. So he'd like to get back in. And I think this is not the 200-00 are not the end of the game here. We know that some people in the Trump administration included David Sachs have advocated for selling even more Nvidia chips into China. And so we think that if this is going to move ahead, it's more symbolic of what the broader potential in China for. In video, in video if they can make this happen. Bloomberg's Peter Elstrom, thank you very much. Let's get more on that story. Joanne Feeney, partner and portfolio manager at Advisors Capital Management, long time coverage of the chip industry now on the buy side of the table. Joanne, you, you yourself own some Nvidia. I feel like we've discussed different shades of this story many times over on this program with you, but at this point, at this juncture and based on the reporting that Peter just gave us, do you start to model in some upside for Nvidia in the China market and thus think about your positioning on that stock? Yeah, clearly it's a good sign, right? And it's been long and coming. But you know, the, the size of the market opportunity is still hard to define. You know, clearly China wants to encourage its own semiconductor industry to catch up to some degree to Nvidia. But you know, it's a good sign. It's incrementally positive. We're not really going to model it in at this point because it's hard to know how large it could be. Nevertheless, a positive sign opening up that market and also just to, you know, continue to make sure, as Jensen Huang has put it, that applications are built on the US Technology stack primarily. And because we have the leading chips that's appropriate. As Jensen Huang has put it, it's a $50 billion per year market opportunity. If they can go back to China, which is currently a net zero assumption. That last bit you said, I really want the Joanne Feeney take on this in the White House. The consideration was if we don't sell any technology, deprecated or otherwise, into China, then there will be a vacuum which the Chinese domestic players will occupy. But there is still this national security and competition standpoint. Where do you stand on that? Yeah, I'm not a military expert, Ed, so I'm going to refrain from, from talking really about how this could change the military, you know, competitive situation. You know, if we don't sell these chips, if Nvidia doesn't get to tell these, sell these chips, China will develop them and they've worked around the less capability of their own chips by, you know, redesigning, you know, inside the racks to try to save energy, to try to boost throughput, and they'll continue to do that, and they'll do that in AI applications. They're going to do that in military applications, whether or not they can use those Nvidia chips there. So, you know, I think that the, the opportunity for us to have more sort of input and potential control over the future of this AI technology is really a worthwhile goal. The administration looking at H200. The administration probably looking at the sharefall of intel today. John, take us to your thoughts on the manufacturing. Well, lackluster performance thus far from the company, it seems. Yeah, I mean, Intel Carolina certainly had its problems. I mean, they went down, in retrospect, the wrong path in terms of the process technology. And now they've been trying to fix that since Pat Gelsinger was put in charge and now with Bhutan, and clearly we're seeing that it's more challenging than, than perhaps investors recognize. And I think investors really got ahead of the story. You know, they saw the US Government come to take a stake and they felt like, you know, that put a floor on the stock price to some degree. But, you know, intel is in a situation with, you know, two things coming out on that report. One, their gross margins, you know, you know, they beat a little bit, but they beat it 37.9%. I mean, intel, right, should have gross margins above 60%. Given that they're one of two suppliers in the PC business. Well, let me just say whether they should or not, whether they should or not, historically, historically they had margins of 60%. Just to jump in on that point, that's a very good Clarification, that very good point should in terms of market structure. But now, you know, they're trying to play in the markets and they're well behind and now Nvidia is the leader. So, you know, look at Nvidia's margins, clearly ripe for competition to come in there. But you know, with their outlook showing that they've sold out of their server CPUs, they're going to have a weak quarter this quarter, the yields are lower than they would like. And it just, you know, people look at that gross margin and they see it as a really important signal of how much progress they're making in a complex manufacturing process. And clearly they're not making as much progress as investors would like and as the company would like. And so I think it's a particularly risky bet. We have not owned intel for clients. We think that the, the opportunity cost is just too high. You can own a Broadcom, which we've owned for, you know, 11 years for clients. You can own in video, which is own. We've owned for clients since 2022. And these are clearly market leaders and they've ironed out the design challenges and through their partners like tsmc, the manufacturing challenges. And so they're delivering and intel faces now a chicken and an egg problem on the 14A process go there on the foundry side therefore Joanne, because this signals that maybe, well, that side of the equation still needs more than just the government buying in to think that they're going to solidify any partners here and building and manufacturing for them. Yeah, Intel's tried to enter the foundry world. We've talked in the past about, you know, how challenging that is to move from producing your own chips to move to producing others. You need the design libraries and all that. But they fundamentally need the manufacturing process. And the problem that they face right now is that on the one hand they're saying, hey, we don't want to invest the capex to build up this capacity until we have customers locked in. But customers aren't going to lock in unless they know they have a manufacturing process that works and that can deliver because, you know, you're designing a product, you're designing it, you know, years out and you have to know the supply will be there if you commit to a certain manufacturing partner. So it's a real chicken and an egg problem. They might have to bet on, you know, on making it happen and being able to deliver the customers by getting that process up and running and showing that they can get yield up in volume even in advance of locking down some customers. So you know, it's almost a bet the company kind of problem. And that's why again, as an investor, we're not enthusiastic about Intel. The risk is simply too high. We don't find the current valuation compelling. Given that risk, we think there are better places to be. And so we're going to, we're going to stick with with where we are, for example, and amd. By the way, that recent result pretty clearly indicated that AMD is continuing to gain share against intel, likely both in Server CPU and in PC cpu. Joanne Feeney with all the context Advisors Capital Management, thank you so much. Happy Weekend. Now coming up, Tesla's Robo Taxi gets closer to fully autonomous reality as some vehicles in Austin feature no human safety monitors in the car. More on that next is a Bloomberg Technology. Every day millions of customers engage with AI agents like me. We work round the clock and have the facts at our fingertips. We're fast and effective, but incredibly patient. And we're built on Sierra, the leading AI powered customer experience platform. No hold music, just answers and action. Visit Sierra AI to learn more. That's Sierra AI. Support for the show comes from public. On public you can build a multi asset portfolio of stocks, bonds, options, crypto and now generated assets which allow you to turn any idea into an investable index. With AI it all starts with your prompt. From renewable energy companies with high free cash flow to semiconductor suppliers growing revenue over 20% year over year, you can literally type any prompt and put the AI to work. It screens thousands of stocks, builds a one of a kind index and lets you back test it against the S&P 500. Then you can invest in a few clicks. Generated assets are completely customizable and based on your thesis, not someone else's. Go to public.com market and earn an uncapped 1% bonus when you transfer your portfolio. That's public.com market paid for by Public Investing Brokerage Services by Open to the Public Investing Inc. Member FINRA and SIPC Advisory Services by Public Advisors llc. SEC Registered Advisor Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation, recommendation or advice. Complete disclosures available@public.com disclosures. You need to make a huge presentation in an hour. Luckily Adobe Acrobat Studio uses AI to take all your documents and generate a presentation with a single click, building slides faster than ever before. So if you need a last minute pitch deck, do that with Acrobat. Need to level up your presentation design? Do that with acrobat you have 30 plus documents that need to be simplified into a proposal. Do that with Acrobat. Learn more at adobe.com/do that with Acrobat. So Tesla has begun offering robo taxi rides in a limited number of vehicles in Austin with no human safety driver behind the wheel. In a post on CEO Elon Musk went even further suggesting that cracking real world self driving technology could ultimately lead to artificial general intelligence. Thomas really unpacked what this moment means for the future of autonomous technology. We're joined by Regina Kulo, Managing Director of Populace. Regina brings more than a decade of hands on experience in transportation and mobility. You hold a PhD in transportation and energy systems from MIT. We should listen to you. Is this a big feat? This is definitely a significant development. It's another major player in the autonomous vehicle space and it shows more confidence in the technology, but it's still pretty limited and it's definitely an experiment. It's experiment. Regina, I'm just going to jump in. People on the Tesla side of the camp say this is a notable moment because it's a first for a vision only based platform to be on public roads. Not just with no one in the driver's seat, but no supervising attendant in the passenger seat either. People would also note that there were other restrictions on social media media for example, there were support vehicles from Tesla. It is alleged and claimed. That said the vision only part, the distinction that Tesla system relies only on cameras, wires, Waymo has a multi sensor suite. Your interpretation of why that's significant? Well, I think there are a couple of companies including Zoox and Tesla that are really designing vehicles that are intended to be purpose built for autonomous driving and for autonomous ride hailing. So it is a significant development and I think at the end of the day what's great is that there are multiple players that are entering the market which ultimately for cities is a good thing because it makes the regulatory landscape easier for them to manage. Regulatory landscape has not held back other competitors to this point. And when you think about a few, few a handful of Tesla's on the road and you compare that to a million rides that we're all having per month already using Waymo and they're aiming it for a million per week. How much are we able to really say that Tesla's winning here or not? I think it's still very early days, but the landscape is moving much more quickly, especially over the last three years. And you see these new players entering the market with commercial ride hailing services. But I don't think that you know, it's clear that there's any one winner at this point in time. Although Waymo is significantly ahead at the moment in terms of commercial ride hailing, as you mentioned, they're estimating to reach a million writes per week by the end of the year. But it's still anyone's market to win, and it's exciting to see more players enter it. Yeah. In simple terms, people define Waymo being ahead by the number of cities it's deployed in without any human supervision in the car and charging a fare to passengers. I'd love to talk about the human side of this, though. Right. In your research at a number of academic institutions over the years, do we have the evidence yet that the general population feels ready to jump in a robotaxi as their sort of chosen method of transport? I think that in San Francisco, there's a lot of data to suggest that consumers do really feel comfortable utilizing Waymo and certain segments of customers preferring Waymo and even being willing to pay more for that vehicle over, let's say, an Uber or Lyft. So I think that people are becoming very comfortable very quickly with these vehicles, and we'll just continue to see that happen. Regina, what's interesting is the global context, because we saw shares of Uber and Lyft shift get hit by this announcement of Elon Musk. And in many ways, they're already out there, not only partnering in Austin with Waymo, like Uber, but they're also in China, and we're seeing Beijing people hopping in those cars pretty actively. We're also seeing in the Middle east as well, with we Ride and Uber out there trying things. How are you seeing globally the readiness of the consumer? I think that a lot of the global readiness is. Is pretty accepting. We have a lot of other countries out there that will be willing to allow more vehicles and more operators to experiment. And then putting those vehicles out there for consumers to begin adopting allows them to move forward more quickly. So I think that, you know, at a global level, we're going to continue to see an acceleration of the adoption of those vehicles. Regina Clulo of Populous, great to have you on the show. Thank you very much. Okay, so Apple's basically flat in the session, but actually it had a pretty rough start to the week. And believe it or not, this is a stock that's on track for its eighth straight weekly decline. The worst run of weekly declines going back to May of 2022. There is a lot in the news cycle with Apple, and a lot of it comes from Bloomberg, the company's hardware chief, John Turner, has added one of the iPhone maker's most critical functions and prestigious responsibilities to his role overseeing the design teams. It's a new sign that Turnus is a leading contender to take over for CEO Tim Cook one day, all according to our sources and the guy that broke the story plummet, Mark Gurman, and is here. Introduce us to Mr. Turner. What does your reporting tell us about his new workload and also that that signal that he's climbing the ranks here? John Ternus has been Apple's senior VP of hardware engineering since 2021. That means he runs all hardware development for essentially every Apple product. He's in charge of the iPhone, charge of the iPad, in charge of the Mac, now in charge of the Apple Watch. And he's been elevated to expand his role this year a couple of times, taking, like I said, full oversight of the Apple Watch, but also taking charge of Apple's AI robotics teams. Now, very recently, Tim Cook put him in charge of overseeing Apple's design teams for both hardware and software. Now, design is the look and feel of the products, what the interface looks like, but the icons look like, how the software works. Industrial design are things like the shapes of the devices, the colors, the weight and the feel goes well beyond the engineering of making everything work. And like you said, design is one of the most critical and prestigious functions at Apple. It's really only been run by the most senior executives in the company's history. People like Jony I've, Steve Jobs himself, Tim Cook himself, and the CEO Jeff Williams, who retired a few months ago. Now, John Ternus adds to that list. And it's yet another strong indicator that he, he's being groomed for a larger role and is at the very top of the short list of frontrunners of potential Tim Cook successors. At one point, when Cook ultimately does decide to retire, Mark, what's interesting is how subtly this was done. And I'm sure that's because they don't want to aggravate too much the investor base, but also those also in the running. Talk about who else we could see being lined up in some way. This is a very strange setup. Organizationally, the design teams are overseen by Turnus, but on paper, they report to CEO Tim Cook various reasons why you'd want to do that. Apple previously announced that Cook would be running the design team, so you don't want to take that away from him publicly and undermine the CEO. You don't want to get into a debate about who's better suited to run design, whether that's an engineer or an operations person like Cook. In terms of other CEO candidates are really only one other at this point. That's Sabi Khan, the chief operating officer. Other publications have thrown out names like Eddie Q. Greg Joswia Federighi, Deirdre o'. Brien. Nothing I've heard points to any of them being CEO other than maybe an emergency like scenario. It's really Turnus or the new CEO, Savvy Khan. Mark, we have 10 seconds. What's the one product that turn us is going to be zeroed in on this year? This year it's got to be the foldable iPhone. This is going to be a potential growth driver for company revenue and we'll see him front and center for that in September. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman with all the scoops. We so appreciate it. Welcome back to Bloomberg Tech. Let's check in on these markets because we end the week on a high, but it's been a turbulent four days of trading, shortened week given the holiday on Monday. We're up 5, 10% on the day on the NASDAQ 100. As you'll see, more focus maybe post Davos on the future of AI and of technology. Bitcoin is up 3.10percent but look, it's still been hammered a little bit. We're sub $90,000 overall. I'm looking at some individual names and the only one really that you want to be taking real attention to in terms of points and in terms of the absolute move, it's intel. We're off by 15%. Look, the context next is it's up prior to today 50% on the month, on the year and it had a rapid run up. But the manufacturing issues, the issues with basically yield on some of their chips and not managing to make the most of demand for PCs and indeed in CPUs. That's a letdown to the investor base. Investor base, okay. Some deal news. Capital One has agreed to purchase fintech startup Brexit for $5.15 billion in a 5,050 cash and stock deal. It's the largest acquisition for the bank since its purchase of Discover, which closed in May of last year. Here to discuss is Pedro Francesca Brics CEO. Pedro, let's get into it. I mean the obvious question to many last night was the timing, but $5.15 billion is a pretty steep discount to the valuation you raised money at in 2022, which was 12 billion. What, what do you think that signals the timing and also the the value you agreed yeah, thanks for having me. We're really excited about this news and you know, this is a really special combination. First it's as you mentioned, it's the largest bank fintech deal in history. And really the way we thought about this is really this unique one plus one equals three scenario. So of course at Brax we build, you know, corporate cards, expense management, banking products, bringing financial services and software together. And then Capital One is, is really the original fintech. They, they brought technology and data together for the first time and have been a huge source of inspiration for us. And as we saw, as we started to think more about this together, we really saw this very unique combination of bringing Brexit its technology, product and platform with Capital One scale, brand distribution and balance sheet and materially accelerate our go to market and our product development to a level that would be, you know, unmatched to a standalone private company or even a public company for that matter. So we saw this massive opportunity to build it together. Opportunity to build that. Why was Capital One able to pay more than than 50% discount on your last private valuation? Yeah, so, so when we look into all the public market comps that, that in the fintech space they're mostly trading between 8, 9, 10, maybe 11 times. This acquisition is at a 13 times multiple. So it's a huge premium to where all public market comps are today. And the reason of course Capital One believes in this is because there is a massive growth opportunity. We really believe that we're here to build really the most important financial platform for businesses in the US and you know, it's a very, you know, two founder led companies coming in together. And the reason they're so excited and we're so excited about this is because of the obvious upside path that we have from here. But Pedro, it's not an upside to that previous valuation and I hear you on the premium compared to, to where others trade on the day, but why not just stay private for longer? Why not build, why not return to a $12 billion valuation in the private markets? Yeah, so the thing that we learned is we had, we did a lot of, you know, 2021 valuations were, were a very specific point in time in markets. And one of the things that we believe in Bracks is that the teams that see reality the best wins. And we, we like to run the company in a way that mirrors where everything eventually comes converters to which is public markets. And when we look from a public market lens into everything that we've done, we made a lot of decisions around the way we accelerated growth over the past few years went after the enterprise became a cash flow positive company. And this combination of factors made this be a really special outcome. And we think that private companies that mirror themselves in a point in time, valuation, you know, eventually forget that everybody, everything converges to public markets eventually. And when we compare that where Brexit today with where a lot of peers have ipoed and where other companies on a private basis have been, we think this is a really exciting and different outcome. But the real reason behind it and the real reason I'm so excited for this next phase of Brex is because this is the beginning of us building the most, the largest and I think the most important platform for business businesses. When you combine the scale, the balance sheet, the distribution in the tech mindset, the capital One has with the product and the technology that we have at Brex. So really, at the end of the day, it's about building something bigger than what we could ever build as a standalone company. How will it change your trajectory? What will you build? Is it AI that gets infused? What more does this give you power to do? So just giving you two, two examples. So Capital One has a $6 billion marketing budget. Brex has a fraction of that, less than 1% of that today. Just imagine the distribution and the capability to go in and serve the millions of businesses in the US Capital One also serves already millions of businesses today. And all these businesses will benefit from the Brex product and technology that really helps them run their business in a much better way. And then when you look in the R and D side and to your point, Capital Lines is $6 billion again, R& D budget as well. And when you combine this with the product roadmap and the vision that we have at Bracks, we think we're going to accelerate this momentum tremendously and continue to build in a much steeper trajectory than what we're able to do now. And the benefit of the for customers will be, you know, a much better product, a much, a much more robust roadmap and just accelerating our path compared to what we could ever do independently. Come back as you scale. Pedro. Francesca, it's great to have you. The Brexit. Thanks for having me. Look, let's stick with other deal news because nearly a year after the initial deadline to sell, TikTok US has been bought by consortium, you know who it's led by. Oracle. On the social media, President Trump thanked the Chinese leader Xi Jinping for, quote, working with us. Let's discuss the details. Bloomberg Social media reporter Alexandra Levine has been following what has been quite the journey. So the players involved talk us through who's going to have the ownership and how that ownership changes what us TikTok looks like. So we know that the, the folks that are ultimately going to be involved are going to be the three managing investors, Silver Lake, MGX and Oracle, which already has this long standing relationship with Tick Tock. And then there are a combination of other investors that are already that have long time been long time by Dance affiliates. I think that the most remarkable piece of this is just the fact that it spanned three presidencies, more than half a decade. It's been almost seven years since all this started and 200 million people, which is more than half the country, are now on the platform and it has grown so considerably since all of this has been happening. I think it's also important to kind of get to know some of the people behind this new entity. They have elite leader who was a relatively high level executive at the larger NC. Tell us about him. Yeah. So the new CEO of this new TikTok venture is Adam Presser. Adam Presser has been viewed as the contender for the top job. He's been viewed as a very influential insider for many years. He has an entertainment background, not a political background. But he, he came from Warner WarnerMedia and he joined TikTok in 2022 and was since then really, really close to show to reporting directly into to show who has been the CEO. He's taken increasing responsibility over the last few years and he's really like just below the top of ByteDance Global and so this was a very obvious choice. And he has also been leading Tik Tok US Data Security, its data protection arm that is now basically being adapted into this new joint venture, you know, over the last year or so. Bloomberg's Alex Levine with the reporting. Thank you very much. Coming up, the age of unicorns is behind us as the number of Decker Horns and Hector Corns grows. Peter Singlehurst of Bailey Gifford joins us to talk about skyrocketing private valuations. That's next. This is Bloomberg Tech. Support for the show comes from public. On public you can build a multi asset portfolio of stocks, bonds, options, crypto and now generated assets which allow you to turn any idea into an investable index. With AI, it all starts with your prompt. From renewable energy companies with high free cash flow to semiconductor suppliers growing revenue over 20% year over year, you can literally type any prompt and put the AI to work. It screens thousands of stocks, builds a one of a kind index and lets you back test it against the S&P 500. Then you can invest in a few clicks. Generated Assets are completely customizable and based on your thesis, not someone else's. Go to public.com market and earn an uncapped 1% bonus when you transfer your portfolio. That's public.com market paid for by Public Investing Brokerage Services by Open to the Public Investing Inc. 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Is this sustainable, this extensive that companies are staying private for longer? And will the wall of money still come in? I think what we've seen is a structural change in how companies capitalize themselves. This is driven by Some very enduring factors such as regulation, Sarbanes, Oxley made it more difficult to be public and aspects of the Jobs act made it easier to stay private. But I think there's also been a cultural change amongst companies. I think founders today realize that you can build a better, more enduring business by staying private for longer because you can be more focused on the fundamentals of business building. And I think that has led to an irreversible change in companies staying private for longer. And as a result, we're seeing exceptional world class businesses of real scale in the private markets. And now 2026 could be quite the unlock stock. We could have a 1 1/2 trillion dollar IPO of Space X if they live up to their own hype, which you're in, we could have. Anthropic has been talked of for 2026. Even open air has been talked over 2026. Peter, is 2026 going to be the year and, and how do you think about some of your holdings ahead of that as to whether you want to be holding on to them in significant size? It is unquestionable that many of these companies are on the scale and maturity, solidity, operational robustness to be public businesses. And I think the real question is when do they choose to enter the public markets? I think it's also pretty clear that public market investors are going to have real appetite for these businesses. I think There are really two questions though. what price, at what valuations will public market investors be willing to commit significant amounts of capital to these businesses? And how do the Public Markets Digest IPOs of this scale? The largest tech IPO in history was Alibaba in 2014. That was a mere $25 billion IPO. If Space X were to list 10% of itself, even at its current valuation, you'd be looking at an $80 billion valuation. I think we're in slightly uncharted waters with regards to the scale of these IPOs. Here at Baillie Gifford, we keep our public and private growth equity franchises tightly integrated. And when we own a company that comes to the public markets, if our public teams decide to buy that company, that's based on their own decision, they have to make the right decisions for their public market clients. We can potentially become much, much owners of these businesses and own them for a really long time into the public market. Long termism is in our DNA as an organization. We've been doing growth equity investing for 118 years, right? We've been doing it in private markets for about 14 years and we have really been in this part of the private markets, these large growth stage private businesses, for as long as this asset class has existed, those names have, have not been 100% illiquid. The secondary market has been fascinating for transparency and context. You know Betty Gifford came in for criticism by Cyber Capital Management, right, A hedge fund park that context. But is the manager on the private side? How do you balance that? The timing of maybe trimming or taking advantage of liquidity moment tender or otherwise, or not holding on to it and growing? I think that's a really interesting observation that, and that that first wave of companies staying private for longer, I would say up to the 2015 stage was driven by the provision of primary capital to fund companies growth in the private markets. What's led to these mega cap private companies is that we're seeing more secondary market transactions happening, meaning that secondary market requirements can be solved whilst companies remain private. We've seen that in the likes of Space X, we've seen that in the likes of databricks, in ByteDance, in Stripe. And that is really enabling companies to put off these IPOs for a really, really long time. Your job is to manage portfolios and selectively we will occasionally look to trim our positions in, in, in private markets if we're wanting to realize some of those gains either to recycle into new new holdings or distribute returns to our limited partners. I'm really interested in how strong and influential you feel Bailey Gifford is. You know, with respect Peter, I've broken a lot of news right over the years on SpaceX and, or whatever, but the composition of the cap table like Space X, you've basically got Founders Fund, Fidelity and Google, not necessarily in that order. And like all late stage growth rounds pre ipo, the crossover investors want to come in, they want to anchor a future ipo. Do you have influence on the management at Space X? Do you try and be constructive operationally in working with them in the direction of direction they want to take the company? So we try to focus our value add capabilities on the things which are particularly pertinent growth stage companies. We're not trying to do venture capital, we're trying to growth equity investing. And that means the ways in which we have to influence companies need to be designed to the growth stage. So for instance, we will often play a role in helping our companies shape governance frameworks, transitioning to independent LED boards as they think about becoming public. The public markets is where we've been for 100 years and we bring that expertise in helping our portfolio companies get Ready for being a public business. But that's not something that we try to do six months before a company becomes public. We try to do that in the years leading up to being a public business. So when you're looking at an Anthropic, for example, example, and there are no, there are actually more companies, analysts at banks now analyzing private companies because they're so huge. And one of the analysis, really JP Morgan, for example, is that the premium pricing that anthropic has might start to be hit by the level of competition in the enterprise. Is that something you steer a company on or something that you agree with? Look, I think that when we're investing in a company like Anthropic, fundamentally what we're trying to do is determine not to just how large the revenue base can be. We're trying to determine how much of that can flow down to profit and how large that profit can be relative to return on equity. So of course we're trying to understand pricing, power dynamics, we're trying to understand margin structures, and we're trying to understand capital intensity and the returns that can be earned on capital. Clearly the markets are pretty hot at the moment. We think whenever you have a market there will be a tiny number of exceptional companies. And so we own anthropic, we own data breaks, but we're not an AI fund. We're trying to find the best growth companies wherever we can find them. And often you find them in areas where people aren't looking. Peter, I wish we could do 30 minutes with you. We can't. Very simply, things have changed. You have retail investors coming in via these big SPVs, pension funds I talked about with Space X and then basically Gulf sovereign money. How is that changing the market for you? And again, let's go back to valuations in that context. I think the truth is private markets are not democratic markets. So companies still get to choose their investors and companies will still anchor towards or steer towards value added partners and partners who they believe will be with them for the long term and can support them. But I think it's really important to point out that the demand and appetite for these kind of large late stage growth companies is very rational. To give you one very tangible example, Tesla went public in 2010 at a $2 billion valuation. Today Space X is still private valued at $800 billion. So there's a 400x difference there that historically the public markets had access to and today that growth is happening in the private markets. So I think it's perfectly right that people are wanting to get access to these companies and I guess the journey that we've been on over the last 14 years has been helping our clients maintain their exposure to the growth of these world beating companies despite them remaining private for longer. Peter Singlehurst, head of private companies at Bay Gifford, really grateful for your time on Bloomberg Tech. Thank you very much. Amazon's preparing to let go of thousands, thousands more corporate employees. According to sources, the company plans to begin terminations as soon as next week. This comes just a few months after Amazon announced it was cutting as many as 14,000 rolls. The layoffs could affect the company's nearly 350,000 corporate personnel Car 1 to watch of course, because meanwhile Amazon has confirmed its due release earnings and the date is going to be Thursday, February the fifth, along with a whole host of other mega cap names that are due in the next week or so. Equities reporter Ron Vasilika joins us now as we brace ourselves for what Romaine Bostick will call the fire hose. So are we prepping for good underlying fundamentals this time? Fundamentals? Probably yes. A lot of growth metrics remain very strong, much stronger than other sectors of the market. The question is because growth is going to be slower than it was last year, is there enough juice to keep pushing these mega cap tech stocks higher? It does seem like so far this year sentiment has really moved to other parts of the market. There's been rotations towards cyclical sectors. There's been favoring within tech of companies like Sandisk and Micron, the memory and storage companies. So there's been some changes in market leadership and momentum. But I do think people are expecting some pretty strong numbers out of the mega caps. Of those mega caps and of the different data sets you track. What gets Ryan Vlastelleker excited? What, what is the kind of key thing that you'll be scanning at your desk next week? Well, I think a major focus is going to be how much these companies continue to spend on capex, especially when it comes to AI. And furthermore, the kinds of returns they're seeing on this if they people start giving more pronounced guideposts to the kinds of returns they're seeing, how much they're able to monetize all this AI related spending. I think all of that is going to go a long way to sort of dictating sentiment towards AI over the coming months. When it comes to Apple, a little bit of a unique situation there. The real focus is going to be how much memory chip prices have increased in recent months. If they indicate that that's going to be a real head wind to their margins or their overall growth. That's going to be something to watch there. That was something we're thinking about with intel and itself. The valuation got crazy more than tsmc Briefly, Ryan, where do we stand on valuations? It does seem like a lot of people feel like Intel's valuation got kind of ahead of itself. I think the Stock rose about 180% off of a low hit last year. That's a very steep move for a company of this type, especially one that's undergoing this sort of really fundamental and dramatic transformation. There's a lot of skepticism still about how well they're going to be able to get their foundry business kind of up and running and able to compete with some of the bigger players in the market. So very much a show me story, a turnaround story that remains in progress. And I think a lot of people just looked at how much it moved since a lot of those moves kind of came on, you know, limited news. Bloomberg's Ryan for Seneca, thank you very much. That does it for the addition of Bloomberg Tech. Check out the pod. This is Bloomberg Tech. These days, it seems like AI agents are just about everywhere you turn every field and every function. But without identity, you can't trust they'll serve your business instead of jeopardizing it. 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