Valuations are still going up. Cohere, one of the current group of white-hot AI startups has raised money at $5.5bn confirming that the market’s appetite for overvalued paper remains unabated ensuring that when the correction comes, it is going to hurt some players. Cohere is a little bit different than many of its peers such as Anthropic or Mistral in...
From the ashes of Russia comes something interesting Nebius may not seem very exciting on the surface, but outside of AI infrastructure, the company also has some of the non-Russian Yandex assets which could be more interesting when the current craze around generative AI calms down. Yandex was viewed as the Russian Google and while it operated mostly in Russia,...
The race to the bottom is beginning. OpenAI’s smaller GPT-4o Mini promises to kick off a race to the bottom in terms of pricing as it is only slightly inferior to GPT-4o but is 60% cheaper which is likely to trigger a spiral of price cuts as users realise that there is not much that separates all these models from...
AI party spoilt by China. TSMC reported good results and narrowed its guidance to the top end of the range in a move that added confidence that the AI bubble will not pop yet and prevented the Taiwan-listed shares of TSMC from emulating the 5% – 10% correction witnessed in US markets yesterday. Revenues / EPS were TWD593bn /...
ASML bucks the Chinese trend. Excellent results from ASML indicate that China is still buying as much equipment as it can get its hands on but potential further tightening of restrictions from The USA threatens to turn equipment in China into very expensive doorstops. ASML reported Q2 24 revenues / EPS of €6.2bn / €4.01 ahead of estimates of...
More than meets the eye. Contrary to my expectations (see here), SoftBank has acquired AI chipmaker Graphcore for around $600m which is way below its peak valuation meaning that the shares of many employees and investors will end up being worthless. Graphcore has been in trouble from the time it lost its two biggest customers (Microsoft and Google) and has...
Project Strawberry unlikely to get the cream. OpenAI has come up with a system to rank its progress towards artificial general intelligence (AGI) but apart from the first two, the levels are so vague that they will be of little use other than to help the company raise more money to spend on compute. This goes hand in hand with...
Robotaxis could be a near-fatal disease. Tesla has rallied on a fantasy that I think will never come true even if FSD eventually works but reality has once again decided to intervene as there is yet another delay further denting Tesla’s already battered credibility in robotaxis. In April 2024, Tesla promised that it would unveil its long-awaited robotaxi in August...
AMD emulates Nvidia but has more to do. AMD is building a vertically integrated AI toolkit based on its silicon but there are two elements still missing that will still prevent it from really taking the fight to Nvidia. AMD will acquire Silo AI, a Finnish AI body shop that creates AI on behalf of its clients for $665m in...
Richard is founder, owner of research company, Radio Free Mobile. He has 16 years of experience working in sell side equity research. During his 11 year tenure at Nomura Securities, he focused on the equity coverage of the Global Technology sector.
Alphabet Q2 24 – The disconnect
Big disconnect between words, numbers, investments and revenues. Alphabet reported solid Q2 2024 results, but anyone would think from the commentary that all of the revenues were coming from its new AI products rather than advertising (75%), cloud (12%) and subscriptions (11%). I suspect the generative AI services make up a tiny percentage of the revenue despite massive investment and...