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...
Its battery life first and AI second. It turns out that as good as the Copilot+ features are, they need a bit more refining before they are widely adopted meaning that the main draw of an AI PC is its battery life where Arm wins hands down over x86. The early reviews of s running the X Elite and X...
Higher shipments at negative gross margins are not good news. Lucid Motors has preannounced its shipments for Q2 24 where it managed an impressive jump in shipments despite the weakening market but, as ever, cash flow remains critical and here there is likely to be less good news. Lucid Motors produced 2,110 vehicles and delivered 2,394 vehicles to customers, way...
Samsung confirms the AI party is still on. Samsung has reported another set of excellent results confirming that the spending on AI is continuing apace and that it may be a few quarters before reality catches up with the hype. Q2 revenues and operating profit will be KRW73tn-KRW75tn / KRW10.3tn – KRW10.5tn in line with the revenue estimate of KRW74tn...
Baidu is now the biggest & cheapest AI ecosystem. While OpenAI is withdrawing from China, Baidu has already moved to fill the void as its users have jumped by 50% since April confirming that Baidu now has the largest user pool of any generative AI service in the world. At its Create 2024 developer conference (see here), Baidu announced that...
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.
TSMC Q2 24 – Still Rolling
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 /...