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Every small business owner has that one moment that could have broken them. But remarkably, it didn't. Hi, I'm Ben Walter, CEO of Chase for Business and on season three of the Unshakeables, my co host Kathleen Griffith and I are bringing you more incredible
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stories of overcoming the impossible.
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We're really proud to share that the Unshakeables is nominated for Best Branded podcast at the 2026 iHeart Podcast Awards. Listen to the Unshakeables wherever you get your podcasts and lear more@chase.com podcast JPMorgan Chase bank and a member FDIC Copyright 20 and 26 JP Morgan Chase and
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company want to earn extra income for your business? Amazon Hub Delivery is looking for ambitious business owners to assist with local deliveries. When you become a partner, you and your staff will deliver packages to customers in your area on a schedule that works for you. With each package delivered, you'll gain extra income and exposure for your business. Plus, Amazon Hub Delivery makes it easy to get started. There's no upfront costs, delivery experience or long term contracts required. Sign up to learn more at Amazon.com hubdelivery that's Amazon.com hubdelivery Ellie's Eden, part
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of Azure Standard, was created to make
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gardening more meaningful for families.
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In the Azure family, gardening is more than a hobby. It's how kids learn where food comes from, how families slow down together, and how we care for the land. Ellie's Eden offers carefully selected plant starts, seeds and garden essentials chosen to help you grow with confidence. Whether you're expanding backyard beds or planting your first patio garden, Ellie's Eden helps you grow something lasting. Explore Ellie's Eden at a z u r estandard.com
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Bloomberg Audio Studios Podcasts Radio News.
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Bloomberg Tech is live from coast to
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coast with Caroline Hyde in New York
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and Ed Ludlow in San Francisco.
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This is Bloomberg Tech. Coming up, Oracle reports strong sales and issues an outlook that suggests little let up in demand for AI computing. We break down the results.
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Plus, Metta plans to deploy four new generations of its in house AI chips by the end of 2027 to help power its rapidly expanding AI workloads.
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And Uber will let customers hail Robotaxis from Amazon Zoox starting in Las Vegas this summer. We'll hear from both companies in an exclusive interview later this hour. There's one big mover in technology and its Oracle on track for its best day since September, up around 11 12%. The numbers are very clear. Sales of $90 billion for the fiscal year starting in June. Capital expenditures holding at $50 billion. The backlog is rising. And so the market's looking at this and saying, okay, the demand story is intact. Now it's about execution risk and credit risk. And how is Oracle going to manage cash to fund all of this? There's a lot more behind the numbers, car.
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There is, and we can dig into them. And the results of Bloomberg's Brody. Look, they did enough to stay off any anxiety. They're sticking to just that. 50 billion in capital expenditure. And the numbers thus far, particularly in the offering of cloud and the infrastructure side, really strong.
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Exactly. Right now it's all about, as you both said, that execution risk. I mean, we have to remember that Oracle was kind of the poster child for Wall street getting scared about all these big data centers not going quite right or the margins being upside down. But the results last night gave a lot of comfort. Right. They show that things are progressing, they're recognizing revenue, the margin is reasonable. And so these are kind of all the messages that investors were hoping to hear from Oracle.
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Brady, take us inside the earnings call. What was it like? You know, going into it, we had broken this story about Abilene not expanding from what was a set 1.2 gigawatts to potentially 2 gigawatts. And the markets reacted, as far as I can tell in the transcripts, it didn't come up. But there were lots of questions about, like how Oracle is going to pull this off.
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Yeah, for sure.
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I think the big question underlying a lot of it is how are the big builds going? Right. And the indicator that some of these are going well is that the revenue is getting recognized. That means capacity is getting handed over to big customers like open air. The line in the transcript I thought was interesting was that their new co CEO Clay McGlork said that 90% of what we delivered this quarter was on time or ahead of schedule. I think that was probably kind of response to a lot of anxiety out there about potential delays or things kind of going sideways that, you know, despite the noise, we're handing over capacity just like we said we would.
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Brody's got the Tech in Depth newsletter out about how Oracle is pulling every lever in its AI cash crunch. Really worth reading. Brody, thank you very much. That's the story right now, right, in markets. What is happening on the demand side, what is happening in the supply side and what is happening in the cash supporting all of it. Matthew, where Goldman Sachs managing director joins us now. It's really interesting because for a very long time we were zeroed in on Capital expenditures. And that was the be all and the end all. There are stories on the Bloomberg terminal today about the credit profile and CBS for example, on Oracle. Are investors starting to look deeper and at different data sets to assess the health of what's going on?
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Yeah, absolutely. When we look though at the structure of the national economy and we look at CapEx as a share of GDP, what's interesting to note is that capital formation as a share of GDP is the same level as a percent as it was in 2018. So while we've seen a tremendous amount of investment, especially in the tech and AI space, from a national standpoint, it doesn't feel imbalanced. Now, rightly, investors are starting to wonder what is the return going to be on all the investment going into AI? We think that there has been a lot of excitement, perhaps over exuberance in places, but clearly, as you mentioned, that there is a lot of demand still and that's something that we think can continue to go.
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You have a very clear line which is the primary determinant in equity markets and equity prices is earnings 100%. We just had an astonishingly detailed earnings print from Oracle.
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Yes.
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What did you learn about the world from it?
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Yeah, well, I think going back to what you just said, the demand for capex is still very, very high. When we think about what determines equity returns, whether you're looking at history since World War II or even the last year for the S&P 500, 80 to 90% of the return comes from earnings. And so the outlook for prices is really predicated on do you expect earnings to grow? And we do think so. We think earnings growth for The S&P 500 will be about 10% this year. That is largely predicated on an economy that we think will be growing above Trend. We're expecting 2.4% real GDP growth versus trend growth for the US of about 2% that we think will generate that 10% earnings growth. We think though, in our base growth case that the total return though for S&P 500 will be about 7%, which means not all of that earnings growth makes its way into the total return, primarily because we think multiples will come down a little bit from their currently elevated levels.
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D
Interesting, because you've sort of been talking about the tech sector not being in a bubble, Matthew, talking about how valuations are relatively reasonable and certainly Oracle has come down some in terms of its own P E ratios. But talk to us a little bit about the anxiety in the software part of the, the business and Oracle Spoke and pushed back against that. Have you pushed back against that more broadly?
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Yeah, we do think that there should be some concern about the software sector. This though is reminding us of a few episodes historically, whether it was the global financial crisis and there were concerns about the US financial sector and existential concerns. If we go back to Covid, there are concerns about the office real estate sector and whether it was dead. We don't think this time is different. Investors unfortunately tend to move en masse, especially when pessimism takes over. Think this time is no different. Reality is probably somewhere in between what we've seen in terms of the status quo and the existential concerns that investors have. We think of this more as an evolution of the sector. There's certainly a competitive risk, but we certainly don't think that this is an existential one where there's so much focus on the terminal value. We think these are absolutely very competitive companies that will continue to evolve over time.
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There was a lot of anxiety in the market initially about software and then look there was the geopolitical risk that we're now combating day in, day out for a 12 state straight day over with the Middle east and conflict with Iran. Matthew, does that change in any way your perspective on investing into this moment in where you are in the market?
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Yeah, we're very focused on Iran. It's terrible from a humanity standpoint. I think though we would focus though on from an investment standpoint that this resembles what typically happens when there's a geopolitical shock. Over the near term there is a reaction by financial markets. What we've seen historically and specifically we've looked at the last 40 years. There are 21 airstrikes in terms of the US in the middle East. And we do see some patterns emerge. The first is that the initial reaction in markets is that risky assets like equities initially sell off, but then we see the dollar appreciate, we see oil rise, we see bond prices rise. But after about eight weeks, fundamentals, whether economic or corporate fundamentals, reassert themselves and the prior trend in financial markets resumes such that after eight weeks, 95% of the time, US equities are actually above their pre strike levels by an average of about 4%. So as a consequence we haven't changed our views. We have a key investment tenet at Goldman Sachs that history is a useful guide. The words this time is different we think are very dangerous. We think that history will repeat itself here and eventually markets will resume their
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four trend every day. Trying to understand the long term Impact of AI? Yes, on inflation and labor markets. And I know the Goldman house call is that I may displace a million jobs a year.
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Correct.
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But there is also job creation happening in parallel. Just what you said about, you know, how one might approach that as an investor, from your desk, in your perspective, what happens in the short, medium and long term.
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So we think technological innovation is a feature and not a bug of the US Equity market and the US Economy. The US Economy is by far the most innovative globally. It's a key reason that we recommend our clients be strategically overweight. US Asset Management. Now, certainly AI is going to boost productivity and unfortunately it is going to displace workers. But as you mentioned, Ed, there's a tremendous amount of new job creation each year. Bear with me some numbers here. There are 170 million jobs in the US each year. There are about 25 to 30 million jobs either lost or destroyed. But on the other side of that, and this is creative destruction, new jobs are created and there are more new jobs created than jobs destroyed. So as we put that 1 million numbers into context, we think that a lot, if not all of those jobs lost to AI will be replaced by new jobs. Think about the investment we've seen so far, whether it's the construction of data centers. Think about rising financial market prices. That's increased net worth and it's increased consumer consumption. And so as we think about the net impact longer term, we're bullish and we think that this is something that will be additive, even though over the short term there will be some tough adjustments.
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Matthew, we're of Goldman Sachs. Great to have your expertise today. Thanks for coming in. Meanwhile, up next Matter plans to deploy homegrown chips to handle workloads. I'll have the details next.
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This is Bloomberg Tech.
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Effective marketing is smarter, not louder. Cutting edge technology alone won't deliver better experiences or outcomes. Adobe helps marketers use data and AI to drive smarter engagement, reduce noise, and use AI effectively and responsibly. The brands winning in the AI era aren't the ones chasing every trend. They're the ones with the right systems and strategy. It's time to lead with insight, agility and innovation. It starts with Adobe. Want to earn extra income for your business? Amazon Hub Delivery is looking for ambitious business owners to assist with local deliveries. When you become a partner, you and your staff will deliver packages to customers in your area on a schedule that works for you. With each package delivered, you'll gain extra income and exposure for your business. Plus, Amazon Hub Delivery makes it Easy to get started. There's no upfront costs, delivery experience or long term contracts required. Sign up to learn more@Amazon.com hubdelivery that's Amazon.com hubdelivery
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hello. Hello. I'm Malcolm Gladwell, host of Smart Talks with IBM. I recently spoke with IBM's new Director of Research, Jake Ambetta. We discussed his vision for the future of quantum computing at IBM Research. What we always do is answer what is the future of computing? Whether it's coming up with new algorithms, coming up with better AI, coming up with Quantum, or coming up with just how do different accelerators go together? It's our DNA to answer the question of what is the future? Isn't it a perfect problem for IBM because you kind of need to have a legacy of building stuff, building actual physical machines. Yeah, it's why I came to IBM. I wanted the experience, the culture of building hard things that others have not done before. Where do you imagine we are in the timeline of this technology? There will come a point when it will mature, right? Yeah. My cell phone is a mature technology at this point. How far are we from that point with Quantum, by 2029 we'll build the first fault tolerant Quantum computer that is one that can run a very, very large, large problem. To learn how IBM is building the future of computing, visit IBM.com quantum.
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This is Meta's chip lab in Fremont Cal. Inside the company is developing the next generations of mtia, short for Meta Training and Inference Accelerator. Its in house AI chip program. It's a long term effort to build the most efficient architecture for Meta's internal workloads with four new generations of chips planned over the next two years. From ranking and recommendations to large scale gen AI inference. When chips come in from the fab, this is where they're validated, tested at the chip rack and workload level before deployment in into Meta's data centers. MTIA 300 is already in production supporting ranking and recommendations, training, helping decide what shows up in your social feed. Those go into liquid cooled servers like these. MTIA 400 is moving towards deployment, expanding into broader AI workloads including Genai. Future versions 450 and 500 push further into Genai inference with deployments planned in 2027. The effort hasn't always moved as quickly as Mark, Mark Zuckerberg and Meta had hoped. Meta has made some acquisitions, it has tried to make some others in an effort to strengthen its in house chip talent and accelerate progress. AI models are evolving faster than traditional chip cycles. So Meta is speeding up the design process aiming to improve performance, cost and power efficiency at scale. At the same time, the company is striking major supply deals with leading chip makers securing gigawatts of AI computing capacity. The strategy is buy compute at scale from Nvidia and AMD and but also use custom silicon where matters. Workloads are uniquely its own because in the air race it isn't just about the models, it's about the compute behind them. So we broke the story on this one this morning. The reaction in Medicare is kind of muted. Remember Meta, still a big buyer of Nvidia and AMD GPUs. Let's get more on matters own chip plans. The in house and custom silicon with Bloomberg's Raleigh Griffin who came with me to Fremont. And it was an interesting experience. Right. Like this is both they want to do custom silicon because they have a lot of internal workloads, lots of inference but they're going to have to keep buying from the big names as well.
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Yeah, it's a strategy of more is more is more and that is for the chips, that is for gigawatts. That is a total diversification approach to securing that compute given the insatiable demand. And right now for, for that.
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Talk to us a little bit about the M and A that was involved Riley to beef up the team because Ed hinted at it in his piece there. But they were pushed back by one Japanese company but then were able to buy a local chipmaking focus.
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Yeah. So early last year Metta had made an approach for Furiosa, a Korean chip maker that rebuked it. It turned down that $800 million offer. We then reported in March, later 20 towards the end of the year we also reported that Metta was successfully able to acquire Revos and with that its bench of talent and that was really the key here. They were able to bring in more than 400 employees who are now peppered across MTIA. This team, some of whom we met in Fremont that are making these four different chips and they're able to do that in parallel with that additional headcount.
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I think the specific is really interesting. Like MTI 300 is real. You know, Metta tells us it's in production and they still regard that as AI, Right. Training the AI that results in what shows in your timeline, targeted ads. But actually the next step is llama running the model. So when you put a request into Meta AI, what else did you see there? I mean the facility was large and from a dollar perspective they seem very committed here.
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It seems like a Massive investment. They wouldn't give us a specific figure to how much they're saying spending on their own in house chip work. But just seeing the products on the table, you got to believe there are billions at play here. One thing I would have loved to see was MTIA 4 5500. These are the next next generation and
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we asked, they showed us the cads or the ideas.
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But yeah, no, no finished product yet and that we're looking to 2027 for that. So two more being released next year and in six month increments which is really notable.
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Yeah, it was a great deep dive. I'm looking forward to seeing the next chips. Riley Griffin, thank you very much indeed. Now in other news, Nvidia will invest $2 billion into Nebby now as part of a strategic partnership to develop and build AI data centers, you guessed it, which will help Nebby us deploy more than get this 5 gigawatts of Nvidia systems by the end of 2030. Again this age old circular financing question comes once more. And Nvidia putting it in to the end customer for its chips. Nebulous though has a fascinating history. Of course it's the Dutch company was the holding company of what was once Yandex in fact is still led by Yandex's co founder, the Russian business.
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And it's basically, you know, it's one of the European names. The stock reaction I guess not that surprising, right. Nvidia has made several multibillion dollar investments in one or another layer of what's happening in AI infrastructure, but at one point up 18% on track for his biggest jump since September. I guess a vote of confidence from the main market leader for GPUs that go into the data centers.
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Yeah, certainly what we've just had news this week of N scale and the fact that they've got new funding, got more people on the board, Nick Clegg, Sheryl Sandberg. So there's a real heating up of those NEO clouds over in Europe as well as cool we've over in the U.S. it's another day and it's another big bit of Asian news. Databricks is launching Genie code. It's a built in autonomous AI assistant for really technical talent. Joining us now in New York, CEO Ali Godsee who's here for a big sales event that you host here in the city. And Ali, what is this particular bit of code equipment going to do for your talent?
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E
Yeah, so what it is is you know we've heard a lot about cloud code and coding Agents and so on. But what they do, they're kind of like interns that can write code for you. That's great, but how do you get that code into production? And for that you need to be sure that you know, it's not, nothing's going to go wrong, that you can measure it and so on. So that's Geni code is really about how do you actually get your code into production? How do you measure the data pipelines that power all of the dashboards that you see? And how do you even start building AI models? So what GENIE code can do is it can build a machine learning model for you that can predict prices or estimate, you know, how much you're going to sell of this. And it can do this, you know, itself. It just goes, builds machine learning models, iterates on them, does a lot of the things that data scientists previously had to do themselves. It just automates all of that for
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you and it's not getting things incorrect. As the work continues, there's still been a lot of concern that these things are hallucinating the longer term that they work.
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E
Yeah, this is a big problem in the industry. So with this, this is like one piece of the puzzle is what I talked about. The other piece of the puzzle is we also acquired a company called Quotient, right. And these are the folks behind GitHub Copilot's quality measurement. So there are folks focused on quality measurement, making sure that they can do monitoring of how things are going. So this is the other piece of the puzzle, so that we can actually do that. So when you launch these things and they're running, how can we oversee to make sure that nothing is going wrong or it's sort of, if it's going off track, we can stop it, restart it. So that's equally important, maybe even more important than the first part.
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B
Ali, it's great to have you back on Bloomberg Tech, like taking an aggregate launch of GENIE code, acquisition of Quotient. How much at this stage for databricks is it about product diversity? You know, kind of broadening the offering or suite or platform for your customers?
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E
Yeah, I mean that's super important. Right? Because this space is moving so fast and you know, it just, you know, just I think six months ago we were talking about things that were auto completing code to now everybody has agents that can write the code. So the question is, how do we actually make these. The code that has been written into production, make sure that they're powering up everything inside of the enterprise and making sure that we're monitoring it, making sure that we can actually start doing more interesting things with it. Can we build AI models automatically for the business that can predict the business? So, you know, to complete that puzzle and have all the different puzzle pieces, you know, you have to expand. So it is about that. And that's why quotient and also GENIE code have been added to this.
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How, how defensive was that move? You know, I think about the interesting cursor right now, what Claude is offering on Anthropic through the coding side. Your awareness of the battlefield in AI.
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Yeah, I mean those are great partners and customers that we work with. And we use actually cursor and we use cloud code internally at Databricks.
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Yeah, we do.
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But those things they focus on how can we write, how can we help software engineers. What GENIE code really can do is it brings it to the knowledge worker, the people that create your dashboards inside of an organization and they make sure that your revenue numbers are correct or the people that make sure that the data that coming in every day into the organization is correct. Nothing breaks. You know, there's not an outage. You don't have like a blue screen, the dashboard is out and you can't see it. Or the people that are building machine learning models that can predict your prices or your costs, or you know, doing risk assessment with machine learning models. It automates that portion. So it's sort of very complementary to cloud code and you know, cursor and
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replicate and I'm interested in vibe coding like we're all talking about it. And indeed you've got some slightly less technical talent inside your business who are using rapid and in fact databricks ventures invested in rapid as of today. So how you, how are you seeing the adoption of AI? What does it mean actually for the, the strength of your data business?
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E
Yeah, so that's a great point. So Geni code is really for data scientists, for data engineers. These are people that, the knowledge worker that understands data. At DataBricks, we have 10,000 employees about, you know, three, 4,000 of them are in this category that they're quite technical and GENIE code will help them. But, you know, we have 5,6000 people that are sitting in marketing or in HR or in finance and they don't have those technical skills. Replit is excellent. They love it. You know, it's just these are people that would never otherwise even touch code and they're now using replit themselves and they're building things that actually work. And the best part of it is you Know, whenever you build a piece of software that works with relet, it uses a database behind the scenes and actually we have very deep partners partnership with them. So it uses our lake base offering behind the scenes. So it uses that database that we offer which is perfect for these kind of agentic tools. So I think Replay is really amazing for democratization to the broader masses. The people that you would never imagine would write a single line of code.
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Alex?
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Yeah, I'm sorry to interrupt. We just got 30 seconds. I got to ask you where, where are we on, on databricks path to the public markets?
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E
Yeah, I knew you were going to ask. Look, I don't think right now is the best time to be public. So I'm pretty happy to be private to this very moment. Right. With everything that's going on in the markets, we are really excited about what we can do with AI. As you can see, we're doing all these acquisitions, we're investing, we're hiring people. So we're focused on this long term revolution that's happening with AI rather than having to be bogged down about, you know, Ebitda and what's happening in the market today. So we will be public, but I don't think now is a very good time.
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Alagozi Databricks CEO had to ask. Up next, Uber and Zoo. This is Bloomberg Tech. Okay. China is moving to restrict state run enterprises and banks from using Open Claw AI apps citing security concerns. According to sources. Notices have been sent to various agencies in recent days that warned against installing Open Claw software. Shares of Chinese AI and tech stocks slid on the report. Here with more Bloomberg Executive editor Peter lstrm I think explain the reporting a bit, you know the sort of rule or notice that was sent out and I guess also what OpenClaw is and how it's used in China in the context of that report.
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Sure, sure.
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F
Well, you guys have talked about Open Claw a few times in the past, of course. It's this agentic AI service that started here with Peter Steinberger who released it to the public and it was kind of a hit a few months ago. What people may not know quite as well is that in the past couple of weeks there's just been a frenzy in China about Open Call and the service and this idea that agentic AI can really begin to do things for you if you connect it to your messaging, your finances, to all sorts of other maybe company documents too. So it's supposed to be a plug in that you can use through your Messaging Service or WhatsApp. Or WeChat in China in particular. And there's been this huge uptake over the past couple of weeks. We've seen companies like Tencent and Mini Max introduce plug ins to be able to use open cloud services that are slightly modified and their shares have really been soaring on this news. So consumers have begun to adopt it, some companies have begun to adopt it. And that leads us to where we are today, where this is an exclusive from Bloomberg where we found out that Beijing has told the state owned enterprises, the military, government agencies that they can't adopt this kind of technology because there are risks. You're giving tons of access to a lot of information that could be confidential through the service and they don't, they don't want these organizations to do that.
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D
I mean, Austrian developer Peter Steinberger who's now gone over to OpenAI. Peter, I mean he was the first to admit that security and safety wasn't his first focus when building out what has become a hugely popular tool. And so therefore is China a little bit late to the party here, not only adopting a western made piece of tech here, an open source one, but also one that had been admittedly already pushed back by US institutions because for fear that it would go rogue?
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F
I think that's right. I think Steinberger was quite vocal about some of the risks here. I think he was more focused on trying to prove that agentic I can be useful and that it can be easily accessible if you're able to tap into it through WhatsApp, for example. So I think he was more focused on that side of it. He was kind of deprecating about what the service could actually be used for. But now we're seeing it being taken up in a number of different places, certainly in the US and Europe also and in Asia with this China explosion of interest, I think the Chinese tech companies have been very quick to pick it up and see how they can adopt it for their own market too. And I think with those advances you've seen these organizations take it on and some of these risks are coming to the fore. I think you're exactly right though. Cybersecurity experts have been quite worried about agentic AI in general at openclaw specifically
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D
play Max Claw being reliant. I mean so many of them taking on the news. Peter Ahlstrom, great to have the breakdown. Thank you. Let's take another look at Uber shares right now because as you see, they earlier in the session had spiked and now still holding on to 3% gains after the ride held company announced it would Offer users the chance to ride in Robotaxis from Amazon Zoos starting in Las Vegas this summer. Earlier, the CEOs of both companies sat down with Ed in his feet of interview.
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A
That hasn't changed. We're doing that. And I've also told you that we'd be practical about our commercial deployment. This is a big market and so talk to Dara and in Las Vegas and L. A we're really looking forward to bringing our experience and sort of this, this way to ride to the Uber platform. In addition to Uber also being available.
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B
The way to ride. Interesting. You know, Uber is not a ride, it is a platform, a marketplace for increasingly different kinds of rides. What is it that you think you can help Zoox do that I guess they wouldn't otherwise be able to do on their own?
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A
Well, we bring enormous distribution on a global basis. And I think that there's this narrative of it's either or, you know, either you go direct to your customer or you go through a platform. And the fact is, because if you look, for example on Uber Eats, you have some of the best brands in the world, whether it's a McDonald's or a Starbucks or Chipotle, having a direct interaction with customers through their own apps, but also using the platform to expand their distribution. And I see the same thing with Zoox as well. You know, Zeus is on his way to create one of the best brands in the business and transportation experience recently.
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B
Right.
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A
It's good, a great experience. It's a purpose built vehicle. And to have that experience on Uber, we think will only magnify what Zoox is bringing to the market.
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B
This is small scale in the first instance, right? You know, Las Vegas and that where you're already active and then, and then L A, the mechanics of it are interesting, right? Because as a rider you are not guaranteed in the first instance that you can choose, as it's algorithmic, it depends on the circumstances, is for you to have. I think the language uses the opportunity to be matched with the zoos. I guess supply in the, in the first instance is why you've pursued that, that plan at first, yeah, but really,
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no, because look, it's a platform, it's a global platform, it's available. You have all kinds of people who show up in Las Vegas. Some might know about Zoox, some might not. And the ones who don't, don't probably know about Uber. So why not take advantage of that? That's really all it is.
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B
This is early, but would you just explain, I guess longer term what the business plan is, is there a per ride revenue share agreement? How do you split the fare when you're able to charge a Farad?
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A
I think for us now the focus is going to be the customer experience. We want to make sure that whether
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obviously the Zoo's direct experience is going
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A
to be best to breed. But also having the experience through Uber is going to introduce you to the differentiated experience on Zoox as well. That's really going to, that's really going to be what Aisha and I are focused on. You know, I would say the economics take care of themselves over the long term.
- [32:20]
B
Data is going to be critically important here. So let's start, I guess, with what data sets can Uber provide Zoox that help them with scale and data to sharing that you've got in place?
- [32:32]
A
Well, we are certainly going to work with Zoox in terms of traffic patterns and now Zoox is going to have access to that data directly as well. But I think the combination of the traffic patterns that we see and the customers that we see, whether local or international, along with Zoox's proprietary data, I think is going to help Zoox be even more efficient as an entity going forward. Yeah, and I'll add to that also the experience of dealing with things or just starting to deal with large events, things that Uber knows how to do in their sleep and will essentially speed up our knowledge of doing that.
- [33:09]
B
That was Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi and Zoo CEO Aisha Evans. Coming up, Michelle Voels, formerly of the American Dynamism team at Andreessen Horowitz, joins us to discuss her new fund and its focus on investing. Investing in technical superiority. What a conversation to come. This is Bloomberg Tech.
- [33:36]
C
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- [34:37]
A
Hello. Hello. I'm Malcolm Gladwell, host of Smart Talks with IBM. I recently spoke with IBM's new director of research, Jake Gambetta. We discussed his vision for the future of quantum computing at IBM Research. What we always do is answer what is the future of computing? Whether it's coming up with new algorithms, coming up with better AI, coming up with quantum, or coming up with just how do different accelerators go together? It's our DNA to answer the question of what is the future? Isn't it a perfect problem for IBM because you kind of need to have a legacy of building stuff, building actual physical machines? Yeah, it's why I came to IBM. I wanted the experience, the culture of building hard things that others have not done before. Where do you imagine we are in the timeline of this technology? There will come a point when it will mature, right? Yeah. My cell phone is a mature technology at this point. How far are we from that point with quantum? By 2029 we'll build the first fault tolerant quantum computer that is one that can run a very, very large, large problem. To learn how IBM is building the future of computing, visit IBM.com quantum.
- [36:01]
D
The conflict with Iran, while it's highlighting a concern some investors and many others have been flagging for a while. Expense expensive, hard to replace weapons are being used to counter cheap Iranian missiles and drones. Now today Michelle Voles is joining us who's a former member of the American Dynamism team over Andreessen Horowitz. Been investing in startups looking to address the costly, the slow, the sometimes missing parts of the US industrial supply chain. And Michelle, you've just launched a new firm, Pax VC. You've raised $50 million. You're looking at early stage, but I'm really interested in just this moment that we're in of geopolitical tension, of conflict. And you as an investor in defense tech, but more broadly in supply chain and American dynamism, what do you make of this moment?
- [36:45]
G
Yeah, I think the conflict has really highlighted the gaps that we have in our industrial base. We've outsourced a lot of our manufacturing overseas to China and now are realizing we need to be able to resupply our weapons. Weapon systems are our components. We need to manufacture these things domestically in house. We need to shore up our critical mineral supply chain. And so many of the companies that I'm investing at and looking at, whether back at Andreessen Horowitz or now are really focused on this industrial base and making sure that we can in any sort of future conflict have the capabilities domestically to be able to fight back.
- [37:25]
D
I mean the name says it all. Because Pax, we think of Pax Britannica or Amana or Pax Americana of like sort of the dominance of one particular global force and the stability that brings. But you've talked about how, how in this competitive area that we're currently in, maybe Pax Americana isn't so solid, but you're looking at Pax Technica. So where in particular are you excited about which particular technology innovations have you found it worth to put your money in?
- [37:53]
G
Totally. And I mean, I think the name Pax, like you said, says it all. Where the eras of relative stability have been defined by who is in power and who has the most technological power. And I think for us in America to be able to ensure continued relative stability in the world, we need to make sure our, our robotic systems are incredible. Our supply chain and our ability to mine and refine fine critical minerals. I invested in a mining company called Mariana Minerals that's working to reshore all of our capacity to, to bring all of these critical minerals to the industrial base. I think looking around corners, what should we prepare against for future threats? We should be looking at biosecurity and biodefense. We should be looking at all sorts of things on the AI and what that does for cybersecurity. And so I think there's, there's an element of like how do we reshore and re industrialize and how do we see around corners for what are the threats coming next?
- [38:54]
B
Michelle, hi, it's Ed. It's good to see you. Welcome to the show. Go back to basics just for a second. So you were Andreessen Horowitz and you're part of this American dynamism team and the thesis was like simply supporting the national interest and you've decided to, to go out and do something almost solo. Right. And I just wonder if you reflect a little bit on the decision making behind that. The pros and cons of going from such a big team within a big firm to doing this with packs.
- [39:24]
D
Totally.
- [39:24]
G
And Andreessen Horowitz is an incredible place, like some of the, the most brilliant people, lots of scale. But I love the early stage and I love the sort of zero to one when companies are just getting off the ground. And at that point you don't quite need the firepower of a big multi stage. You almost need a trusted partner in the trenches with you helping block and tackle for all the small things of getting a company off the ground and then you can bring in these big multi stage firms that have all these resources to really pour gasoline on the fire that starts burning. And so it's just my favorite stage to be and I love being really, really close with the founders there.
- [40:04]
B
Without putting words in your mouth, you talk about this idea that often the founders themselves are kind of ahead of the VCs that backing them. Even if they're like, you know, VCs that have the operator background or the founder background, how are you going to catch up? You know, how are you going to put yourself in a place where you are moving at the same rhythm or pace as the people you want to back?
- [40:26]
G
Totally. I would say my style of founder that I like is somebody that has a lot of experience in the domain they're going after and a sort of unique view or unique right to win. Even if that is a category that hasn't yet been mainstream or people have seen like the founders should be the ones dictating what is the future. And if you start to see patterns of okay, a lot of smart people are working in this category. It feels like even if I haven't seen it, like they are seeing something and I should, should really spend more time and get up to speed. But really it's all about like having a network of experts in these domains to be able to bounce things off of and get the ideas solidified. But like the founders should be the smartest people in the room. Venture capitalists should not be.
- [41:14]
B
Michelle, just really, really quick, did you take any port codes with you? Like how does that work? We just have 15 seconds.
- [41:21]
G
I invested through my fund in some of my old and recent Horowitz portcos which was is a very big honor for them to want me back on their cap table.
- [41:31]
B
Appreciate that. We just wanted to check that one. Michelle Volz, founder and managing partner of Pax vc. Thank you for your time. Carol. Got some more news?
- [41:37]
D
Yeah, it's time now for talking tech, Adam. First up, Anthropic has told a judge it could lose billions of dollars in revenue this year after the Trump administration declared the company a US Supply chain risk. Now the startup made a case for urgency to the San Francisco judge a day after it was sued sued the Defense Department. Now a hearing is set for March 24th. Plus Grubhub. Well, it's going to test drone delivery of takeout orders for the first time as part of a limited three month pilot program in the area of Greenbrook, N.J. starting next week. Now this is the company's latest experiment with automation technologies after using sidewalk robots on some US college campus emphasis and Nintendo shares gained as much as 10 and a half percent in the biggest rally since April, as the surprise success of the new Pokemon game helped offset those worries about rising memory costs. Physical copies of Pokemon Pickopia have sold out at several major retailers in the US with Amazon even raising its price to around $80.
- [42:40]
B
Last year, Synopsis closed a $35 billion acquisition of engineering software firm Ansys. Now the focus turns from integration to execution. We spoke with CEO Sassin Ghazi about how AI is transforming chip design and manufacturing.
- [42:55]
A
Take a listen what our customers are facing beside the supply chain challenges and the global stress that we're dealing with. There's a shortage of engineering. They cannot get enough engineers to deal with that complexity. So AI helps augment the existing engineers. The second aspect of it reducing the cost. You can reduce the cost by improving the yield. Memory is a fantastic example. No matter how much the memory companies try to expand capacity by building factories, you need to be able to have better yield. That's where we come in to help them design the actual physics of manufacturing with the design phase to improve the yield. So those are the components and reducing the design cycle. Traditionally chip design was 18 to 24 months. Now you have customers like Nvidia and other talking about the design rhythm of 12 months. That is not possible without injecting AI everywhere in the flow. And when you go to manufacturing, you're able to improve your yield.
- [44:02]
B
So see, what conclusions did you reach in recent weeks after the sell off in software names about the long term definitive impact that I will have on India. You're one of the biggest DA names, right? But you're not the only one.
- [44:18]
A
Yeah, unfortunately it was a naive approach to say that all software is the same. You're going to have some software where L alarms foundation models. Yes, is a perfect application to let me call it replace. But when you look at the engineering software, I'll go back to the physics aspect of it. We run, we code and we deliver software to our customers. But that's not the moat. The key differentiation are the solvers to translate from an architecture design to an actual manufacturing product. So I believe it was absolutely an overreaction by putting every company that delivers software in the same categorization.
- [45:02]
D
Synopsis CEO Sassin Ghazi there. Let's turn our attention to Google now and it's aiming to battle a slot videos on YouTube and YouTube Kids by backing companies. It sees it actually creating high quality AI content. This includes a very small but focused $1 million strategic investment in an animation studio, Animash. Let's get more with Alexandra Levine who covers social media for Bloomberg. Look, 1 million is but nothing to Google but it's saying something about what content it wants to back. Exactly. One million is nominal not only for Google but also for the company which has raised a ton of money over the last several years. But I think what is significant about Google's backing of this company, Anima much, is that it is really making a bet that I can be used to make really strong quality content for children who are using both YouTube and YouTube kids. They have had a problem over at YouTube, especially over the last year or two with a slop and with content that a lot of parents and child experts think is more exploitative than educational for children. And so this is really a swing to try to take that on.
- [46:07]
B
I'm Alex. For the Bloomberg Tech audience, what is a slop?
- [46:12]
D
A slop is what we are now often calling spammy, clickbaity, repetitive, low quality, slimy looking content that you see not only on YouTube but also on pretty much every major social media platform at this point. And it is often repetitive. Something that I think is particularly concerning for younger viewers because they are really developing their brains at early ages when they start watching, watching a lot of this stuff. And so, so that's why there has been a bit more attention on AI slop for toddlers, babies and children. I mean Adam, co founder back in 2022 is an extraordinary like billions of views. Why is it the first kids media business for Google to bet? So it is not the only kids media business out there. I think the biggest, probably best known competitor of Animage is Moonbug, which Moonbug Entertainment, which is the company behind things like Cocomelon and Blippi. But I think that if you look at some of the Google accelerators, other investments, you'll see that they are very much focused on other companies in the media space. This is the first I think focus on the kids space which, which I think says a lot about its priorities for 2026.
- [47:20]
B
Bloomberg's Alex Levine, thank you very much. Jam packed. But that does it for this edition of Bloomberg Tech Carry.
- [47:26]
D
Don't forget to check out the podcast. You can find it on the terminal. You can also find it online on Apple, Spotify and Iheart from New York and San Francisco. This is Bloomberg Tech.
- [47:38]
C
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- [48:10]
D
with Jan from Toyota. Soften your focus and visualize yourself off roading in a Tacoma.
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C
Now engage your sense of what do
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D
you hear a donkey?
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A
Because you're driving the kids to a farm sanctuary in a Grand Highlander.
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D
Breathe in, breathe out, and go from dreaming it to driving it today.
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C
Dealer inventory may vary.
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A
See your participating Toyota dealer for details. Event ends March 31st. Toyota let's go Places.