A $165bn insurance policy The more TSMC invests in the USA, the more secure Taiwan becomes because if Taiwan, for some reason, goes offline then the TSMC fabs in the USA will become the most expensive paperweights in history. This is why I view the $100bn commitment by TSMC as being more about incentivising the USA to defend Taiwan against...
Tencent has to become the agent of choice on Chinese smartphones Tencent has passed a crucial milestone in ensuring the durability of the ecosystem it built in China by becoming the most downloaded AI chatbot on Chinese iPhones. This is a must-win because if someone else supplies the agent by which users access their smartphones, then Tencent is almost certain...
DeepSeek can’t count. In a bizarre statement made on GitHub over the weekend (see here), DeepSeek has laid claim to 545% profit margins which is a mathematical impossibility. This leads me to wonder whether this is another attempt to generate headlines to promote the excellence of Chinese AI instead of informing everyone of the true state of affairs. On day...
Competition heats up even more. Amazon has finally announced the new version of Alexa but at the same time, OpenAI has released its new model GPT-4.5 to compete with the rapidly growing field of competitors which signals that the top of the market is close, if not already here. Amazon has launched Alexa Plus which promises to offer a “conversational...
Not too little, not too much, just right. Nvidia reported results that confirmed that the AI spending spree remains on track, but this growth is now captured in the estimates meaning that surprises will be hard to come by. The valuation of Nvidia remains undemanding relative to the growth that it is still experiencing meaning that while the really big...
Irrational exuberance is still with us. The valuations being attributed to certain AI start-ups who have no products and talk like they don’t care about profit continue to defy reality as they are very unlikely to uncover the secret of intelligence upon which their valuations depend. The two companies in question are Thinking Machines Lab founded by Mira Murati (ex-CTO...
I remain sceptical about these claims. Huawei is making some bold claims with regard to the yield that it is achieving on the AI chips it is making which, if verified, would have a substantial impact on China’s quest for technological independence. The FT’s article (see here) that makes these claims declines to name its sources but I suspect that...
Perplexity starts a race to the bottom with deep research. In the space of a month, pretty much everyone now has or will soon have a deep research tool confirming that performance gains are flatlining and that beyond a fat wallet, there are no real barriers to entry in the generative AI game. What will follow now will be a...
AI momentum finally makes it to China. Alibaba reported good results where a jump in cloud revenues allowed the company to justify large investments in AI, which has allowed the AI momentum story to finally come to China after ignoring it for 2 years. FQ3 25 revenues / EPS were RMB280.1bn / RMB2.55 ahead of estimates of RMB275.1bn / RMB2.43....
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.
Alibaba QwQ – 32bn Questions
More questions than answers. Alibaba has produced a model that performs pretty well, but it is so small that China is once again challenging the Western “bigger is better” philosophy. However, there are so few details about how this was created that it is impossible to know whether this represents another step forward for China or if it is merely...