China Tells Companies to Stop Buying Nvidia Chips

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China's Internet watchdog Taels, Ali Barber, Byte Dance and others to terminate orders for an Nvidia AI chip, plus.

Microsoft OpenAI among the tech giants announcing plans to spend tens of billions on AI infrastructure in the UK and in President Trump's visit this week.

And ticket reseller stub hub begins trading publicly today, will be joined by its CEO, Eric Baker, live from the NYC.

Meanwhile, let's get to the rest of the public markets. Ed, we're in wait and see mode, maybe a bit of profit taking after what's been a significant run up in the nasback of late. We're down about five ten percent on the NASBAK one hun anticipate a fed rate cut that is being priced in by the market, But what does it signal for the rest of the year. That's a key question. On the macroside, what's you've.

Got on the micro Well, a big part of the drag at the index level is in video. We are down almost three percent on a four trillion dollar market cap company, down for a third straight session, two hundred billion dollars in market cap loss. The headline's really simple, the ft, reporting that China's Internet regulator is saying to big Chinese tech companies cancel orders for the latest depowered.

Variant of Nvidia's AI chip for that market.

At the same time, Jensen Wong's in London with the President of the United States in the UK on that state visit. There's a lot of focus on this name right now.

There certainly is. Let's get to it over in Washington.

Our tech editor is with us Mike Shephard.

Look, this is going.

To be a key conversation that Jensen Wang is likely to be having with the President of the United States because once again another chip designed for China been pushed back by the country itself.

Well, that's Ray Carol and Jensen Wang has been having those kinds of conversations with President Donald Trump since he took office in January. Jensen has been trying to reshape the picture when it comes to export controls in a

And to be clear, the chipping question here is RTX pro six thousand and d, not h twenty, which is largely Blackwell architecture related and doesn't use HBM, and we're trying to get more on that story. Bloombergs Mike Shepherd, thank you very much. Microsoft, Open Ai, and other American companies announced plans to spend tens of billions of dollars on tech infrastructure in the UK, from AI to quantum computing.

AMH.

What do we need to know what happens in the next couple of days.

Well, it's tens of billions of dollars, as you've said, when it comes to a massive dump of capital from these UK US tech firms into the United Kingdom, massive win for the Prime Minister Keir Starmer, especially at a time when he's dealing with a lot of political fallout here in the United Kingdom, really drowning in the polls and has been on thin ice.

We've seen a.

Number of individuals resigned or ousted from his government, most notably Lord Mandelssohn after revelations of his close relationship with Jeffrey Epstein in Bloomberg News reporting.

So this idea that UK tech firms.

Want to make sure that they are in the United Kingdom and building the United Kingdom is definitely a win

So there's a lot of tech ticals to.

Be had, and this evening, the President at a banquet is going to be flanked by Jensen Wang, who was of course with him as well on the Middle East trip, Sam Altman of Altman, Ai Sati Nadella of Microsoft. And also I think the name to watch, of course is Apple's Tim Cook, because notably, that was the individual that was missing in the Middle East that the President continuously wanted to remind everyone he was absent. He's joining him on this state visit to the United Kingdom.

Blomberg Zamorie Horden.

We thank you so much from Windsor Castle. Talk more about TikTok now, because it's US operations would be acquired by consulting that includes Oracle Andrewson Horowitz and a private equity firm Silver Lake, under a deal President Trump is set to discuss with Chinese President Hugime Ping this week. This framework agreement would create a US based version of the popular social media app that's bringing in Greenberg. Social

TikTok has been throughout many a year.

Does it feel like we're getting some semblance of that framework that still might not actually occur.

Well, Look, the issue has never been can the US come up with buyers that China likes the issue has really been the can China part with the algorithm, which is the secret sauce of TikTok, which is what makes

So everything we're discussing is according to Bloomberg reporting and Bloomberg sources, and when we did speak to a White House official, they basically said that any details of this framework a speculation until such time that the White House

Well, look, I think that TikTok users have proven that they are an extremely loyal base. We saw that earlier this year when TikTok was on the verge or last year when TikTok was on the verge of being banned and TikTokers called their members of Congress and deluged them with messages saying keep the app, don't be on the app. But I think one thing that'll be really important to watch is just the limbo that the people working at the company will be in. And also, a lot can

Bloomberg's Alexandra Levine, thank you very much. Now coming up on Bloomberg Tech, shares of the ticket reseller stub Hub begin trading today. Stick with us for a front row seat to a conversation with CEO Eric Baker.

No ticket required. As snacks. This is Bloomberg Tech.

Shares of stub hub will start trading today with the shares haven't been priced at twenty three dollars fifty. That values a company in around eight point six million dollars. The ticket reseller is the latest company to go public in a USIPO.

Market experience a bit of a hot streak.

Let's speak with StubHub CEO Eric Baker, who joins us now from the NYSC Eric, the history. You set up this company in the year two thousand, sold it to eBay, bought it back, amalgamated with a European giant. You had already built a Now it goes public. How does it feel.

It's tremendous, A lot of gratitude to reach the milestone for the company. It's certainly been a long journey, as you say, from two thousand, but now we're really focused on the next twenty five years and the bright future ahead.

Take us to the next twenty five years. Because there are regulatory headwinds, there are people worrying about bots.

There are a way in which you.

Can beef up this business to add more things in secondary market ticket sales.

Where do you go? Where do you focus.

Yeah, So our.

Focus really is we've always wanted to make it easier for people to access live events, and so what we started with is, as you noted many years ago, was to make the resale market safe and secure and easier for people to access tickets. What we're focused on now is we realize consumers don't care whether it's a primary ticket or a secondary ticket. They just want to access the live events that they want to go to and

You look at going public in a time where Taylor Swift had gone through the Ears tour, there was a lot of hype and mentum, and you hit pause. You're doing it now, And I think a big question everyone's got for you, Eric, whether they're a consumer or not, is what happens next with a regulatory crackdown, the practices of your industry are very much under the microscope at the moment.

Well, I think, first of all, we're always excited to be at the intersection of technology and live events because we're very bullish on the future live events.

And we think that doesn't change.

To your question about regulatory focus, I think two of the things really people have looked at. One was transparency and pricing that we at subbub have always advocated for, and that all in pricing that we lobbied for a pass at the federal level in May, and that's just a better experience for consumers, and the key is it's now a level playing field for everyone in the market.

Eric he is also Fisher Intelligence a headwind or a tailwind for the secondary ticketing market.

Yeah, we see it as a tremendous opportunity to tremendous tailwind. And I think if you think about it again, we're a technology and product company, and I think Alex Karp at Palentier.

I don't want to miss a.

Tribute and put it really well that he said, the artificial intalence technology for companies that have tremendous data allows you to provide a better product while increasing your revenue tremendously and reducing costs so.

That everyone wins.

And we're seeing that across the board, how we deal with customer service, how we're releasing new features in the product to make it easier for people to locate the tickets they want.

So we're very excited about it.

And again with the leadership position we have and the skilled propriety proprietary data we have, we think this guy's the limit.

We are speaking with Eric Baker, found a CEO of stub Hub.

To our radio and TV audiences.

You say AI can help drive revenue tremendously. Let's talk about your revenue thus far, because in the first half of the year is about three percent growth. That is significantly slower than the previous Now we know that maybe we haven't had Taylor Swift on tour this year, but Eric, are you seeing a slow down in demand?

Yeah? So, thank you.

Note we're really seeing people continuing to buy tickets and growth. I think you note it's important to note two of the things that happened that are unique this year. One is Taylor Swift and her tours behind us, and there is only one Taylor Swift, so.

I think she's so tremendous.

We even broke her out in the s one, so it's great to be that popular. Second is, as I mentioned all in pricing past in May, and when we lobbied for it, we knew that creates a one time hit to the market as consumers just adjust. We've seen that already in states like New York that had passed it before. So when you look through those headwinds, the business is growing extremely nicely, north of twenty percent.

I'm interested, though, on your profitability or lack thereof, Eric, because it's interesting you've gone to public without that story to tell. When will it become the story you can tell?

Yeah?

No, I think what you're referring to is by the accounting metrics like net income that it shows a loss. But I think when we went on the road show and when investors look, they really look at EBITDA, which is your earnings before interest, tax, depreciation amorization, as well as your cash flow and on that dimension, we've been profitable for a long time and generating hundreds of millions

We went out on the road show and buy our new partners.

Eric Bloomberg did some deep reporting on the FTC looking at ticket master arrival on the issue of bots who ring up sale tickets for resale and they're inaction. Have you discussed that issue with the regulator and how are you addressing the problem.

Yes, we've always and bots, and it's interesting, as you note, is really about how these tickets are distributed in the first place, and so one of the things we've always lobbied for is enforcement of the Bots Act, and that's really because we believe that these tickets need to be distributed in a way that's safe, secure, democratic, through open channels.

Very quickly.

Next year's soccer or football World Cup, how big an opportunity is that for sub Hub.

Look, we love the World Cup.

It's been a phenomenal event because think about it, we run the largest global platform in the world for ticket exchange for all kinds of events. And if you had to say what is the largest global event in the world, I think you can honymously say it's the World Cup. It's people from all over the world traveling to come see events.

It's going to be in North America.

It's extremely exciting and we're excited to hopefully help as many fans as possible make their dreams come true to access getting to the World Cup.

So we're we're all football fans, so to speak. In twenty twenty six.

We're football fans here too.

Eric Baker, founder and CEO stub Upholding's great to have you on the program.

Thank you. Compute provider Gros just closed.

A new seven hundred and fifty million dollar funding round, valuing the company as six point nine billion dollars, highlighting investor interesting companies seeking to alleviate a shortage of chips and computing.

Power for AI workloads.

ROX CEO Jonathan Ross is with us, and I always like to go back to basics with Jonathan, Like, Rock stacks up against Nvidia and Google's TPU, and we're largely focused on inference. Why did you raise this round in that context? What is it going to allow you to do to be more competitive against those two giants.

Well, the bottom line is that the demand for inference is insatiable. The total amount of capacity that people are trying to deploy is mind boggling, the numbers that people are putting up, and that's only growing. And in our case, we don't feel that we're competitive. We feel that we're differentiated. If you're not differentiated, there's no point. And in our case, what we're able to do is we're able to provide

Inference meaning running the models as opposed to training. Have you done the math on that, Jonathan? How much inference does the world need.

It's insatiable for the reason that, unlike with the industrial age, where as you're producing oil and compute is the new oil. Let's be clear about that, you can only consume as much oil as you had hardware built that it could consume it. In the generative age, every model that you train, you can scale it up to the amount of compute that you have available. As such, people are scaling as much as they can possibly get compute.

And so that compute needs data center capacity. Where do you add that? How much is it the US or internationally focused?

Jonathan?

Actually, that's one of our primary advantages. So the GPUs that are being deployed today often need liquid cooling, and those are new data centers. In our case, we're deployed in North America, so the United States, Canada, we've deployed in Europe, We've deployed in the Middle East. Our first deployment in Europe was actually an air cool data center that one of the hyperscalers was moving out of because

So the language processing unit, the LPU that you offer, I mean you're taking on the TPU that you helped design over at Google. We understand and indeed, in video technically speaking, how is it achieving this the run rate that you can get at a lower temperature point.

Yeah, So the architecture is very different, and I took a page out of what I learned at Google. With respect to distributed systems. Everyone knows that Moore's law means that the number of transistors doubles roughly every eighteen to twenty four months. What I think not so many people have noticed is that the number of chips is more than doubling every eighteen to twenty four months.

So we asked.

Ourselves if we were going to be increasing the number of chips. Was there an architectural change that we could do, and the answer was yes, and so, without getting into the technical detail, what we do is we take the models AI models and we spread them out across a large number of chips, and that allows us to operate much like an automotive factory. And the more chips that we use, the cheaper it gets, the faster it gets, and our advantage is how many chips we can bring

Bring to bear, the better.

That hasn't been the case in inference. Typically you'll see eight GPUs, and it's just a technological limitation that prevents you from bringing more. In our case, we're running some models for inference with four thousand or more chips, and the more chips that we can bring to bear, the faster and the cheaper it gets.

Jonathan has Grock signed any deals that would see you benefit from the commitments we've had in the last twenty four hours in the United Kingdom at the Hyperscala level and also some of the AI names that have committed tens of billions of capital to that market.

Yeah.

So Gronk has deployed some large clusters around the world, as an example in the Middle East, and so we worked with Commerce to be able to get that deployment done and they were very helpful and we appreciate that. And also in Finland. Of course, we're looking at the UK very closely and I'll actually be there in less than a week.

The world right now is GPUs and XPUS or in your case LPUS.

Why do we need both?

The architectures are quite different and they have different bottlenecks. No architecture is perfect, right. This is why we don't use CPUs anymore.

For AI.

We use predominantly GPUs and now LPUS. The difference between the two is that GPUs are very good at parallel processing, that is, if there's no sequential component to it. But when you're talking about language or other reasoning or logic problems, you can't produce what's called a token. You can't produce the hundredth token until you've produced the ninety ninth, or you can't produce the hundredth word until you produce the

What the LPU.

Does is it's really good when you have both a lot of parallel and a lot of sequential components to the problem, and that allows us to output tokens at a very fast rate. And the experience difference. It's the difference between broadband and dial up, but at the much lower cost than you would expect given the speed.

Jonathan Ross, CEO and founder of Grock on the latest fundraise, We thank you for joining us today.

Welcome back to Bloomberg Tech. I'm going back to semiconductors. We talked in the show about how Nvidia shares are under pressure. Well at the index level, they're putting a drag on the sock. So Philadelphia se Conductor Index. Over the course of ten sessions, you're up eight point two percent. But actually, as of last night's close, the socks had its best streak of gain since twenty seventeen. As it stands that street's over, we're down four ten toeven percent

It has someone who's not in the UK, is Mark Zuckerberg. Why because Metaconnect is kicking off later today, Analysts they're anxiously watching for any groundbreaking announcement like well, maybe some smart glasses project. Brad Erickson, internet analyst at RBC Capital Markets, joins us. Now smart glasses has been where it's at from a hardware perspective. For meta how can they push that story forward with?

Yeah, I think it's just integrating more of the capability with Marcu's vision on Meta AI, right, Like they've given some applications in terms of some of the translation capabilities, being able to have some of the augmented reality capabilities, and I think you'll just see, you know, we expect to see more of that tonight.

So really the vision of generative AI coming in the heart and why Meta AI is really amplified with the hardware story. But the competition's coming. We know Google's got them in the works. We know that, of course Apple might or might not in the future. But Brad, therefore, what sets their deal with ray ban apart? How can they continue to offer a little bit more to the experience than an augmented reality vibe.

Yeah, it's always going to come down to the same things that arguably made Apples so successful over the last nearly twenty years, which is tight integration of hardware and software.

Right.

Meta has the platform that people already know it for for the various family of apps they've created AI have more than a billion users. The utility that that creates and the stickiness that that creates for their customers, that's going to be the key thing.

The hardware everybody's going to be able to.

Do right, just like they've always been with any piece of consumer electronics hardware. It's the software that's going to keep people coming back.

If they're going to come back, Rad, thank you for bringing up Apple, and you also reference translation. Last week at the iPhone event, Apple shares swung from a decline to positive territory, and Duolingo shares plunged when Apple demonstrated simultaneous translation through the airport's Pro three a year ago, Meta demonstrated simultaneous translation through that generation of rayband metas. Why did Meta not get the same credit for that technology that Apple did a week ago?

Yeah, I think part of it is just it was so new. Secondarily just relative to the stock. You've also got a giant core business right that you're compying, and that's clearly not going to be the focus of it, or is it necessarily clear how you would how you would yield an.

Advertising business out of that.

So I think that's just mechanically that's kind of the primary reason. But clearly this is going to be, you know, a capability for a lot of companies here going forward, and certainly could be a super cool compliment as you know, again, Meta looks to build in all these capabilities to these new glasses.

A lot of people still don't understand the Meta AI story. With Chat GPT, I just have an app on my phone or on my MacBook. I use it every single day. Right With Meta, I have a standalone app. It's integrated into Instagram, WhatsApp. I am an owner of the RayBan metas a different interface or medium to use it. But do you see kind of what the end thing is going to be for meta how consumers actually interact with the work they've done on the model side.

I don't think anybody does candidly. I think one of the things that I'm always struck by is we all stay and learn AI every day is that, you know, week by week, month by month, we kind of all have to expand our minds on what the capability is. Vibe coding is a great example something we've been spending a lot of time in lately with the web design companies.

People are using these things to.

Develop applications, not to build businesses necessarily in the traditional sense that's where everybody's brain would have gone.

But they're creating daily productivity.

Tools enterprises, they're using them to create actual internal work processes right unrelated to their core software. So there's all sorts of new things. I think METAAI is very similar in that, you know, we know that it's going to be able to provide like you said, chat GBT functionality with the app. What we don't know is how else might people build that into their day to day lives, whether it's for.

Work, personal or productivity or what have you.

That's going to be value add and get to a point where you're going to say, hey, I can't live without this new capability in my life.

And we don't exactly know what that is yet.

We're learning about it, we're trying to sort of expand our minds, but we haven't gotten there yet.

Well, I mean, Mark Zuckerberg's been expanding the amount that he wants to spend on it and the appetite and ambition that's for sure brand and he's been given a pass. And you think the stock could climb even higher up to eight p fifty of another to nine percent gain. And where we currently are, how much does the TikTok story bear into its bread and butter right now?

It matters, But TikTok is a very small business compared to the size of metas overall ad business.

I will say that, you know, for a quarter or.

Two now in our channel checks talking with advertisers, what we have heard was, you know, the stalled or the uncertain future of TikTok and really caused advertisers to pause any spending growth. They're still spending to be clear on ads on TikTok, but there wasn't nearly as much growth to the degree that we get a deal here at some point maybe that provides clarity becomes a little bit

Brad Ericson of RBC Capital Markets, thank you very much. Lift and Weimo are partnering to bring self driving taxis to Nashville.

Customers will be able to.

Request driver US rides on both companies platforms, and Lift will provide fleet management for Waymo's national operations. Let's get to more with Lift CEO David Rischer. This is something you've been working on for some time. That's right, and the state of play is very clear. Weimo also has a partnership with Uber in different markets. You now have a partnership in Nashville. Just explain the rationale for you on why this is a great go to market for ROBOTAXI.

Well, as you know, we've been saying for a while, we think self driving cars are going to be hugely market expanding for ride share. It's a really good product.

And then when we looked at.

Potential partners of course Weemo has to be at the top of the list. The great thing about this partnership is it does two things. It supplies demand, So if you're in the self driving car business, you got to have demand, and we got lots of demand every single day, and we do it in a very integrated way. But the other thing is, as you just mentioned, it supplies

So you're emphasizing the sort of capital light business model for you, right. The counter argument is the Tesla or the zooks one, which is control the full stack hardware, software, operationally, the app the consumer in faces with. Would you argue that you can scale this faster, going this route, go to more cities quicker?

I would?

Yeah.

I mean this allows every company to specialize, right, so Wimo can really focus on providing great self driving technology. The way Moore Driver is obviously a great product. They partner with OEMs, the car manufacturers that can choose the best car, and then we can provide the fleet management as they say, that keeps the cars clean and charged and ready to go, as well as the demand so that anytime a person wants a car, they can get one or they can get a driver car, right, I mean,

Let's talk about that fleet management flex drive, because you're going to be building, you're going to be putting some capal expenditure to work David, Why does that make sense and when will that be finished?

So we've been in the flex drive world. Let me explain for a second.

So about a decade ago, Lift decided that for a certain type of driver, it really makes sense to have cars that they can rent right on the platform and they can do we can take care of the maintenance and making sure that those cars are always ready to drive. So that's what we've been doing for about a decade now. So when we look at the autonomous vehicle world, you know, look, when you see a car driving around the city, it

Ready to drive.

Think about so when you travel on an airline and you know that of course they want the airplane in the air, but they also needed to be ready to fly at all times. They want that turnaround to be super fast. And that's what flex Drive does. It means that people like Waymo can get the most out of our asset, which is super good for them.

Look today, investors love this announcement and the shares a rising. Shares have been doing well all year because you've had three straight quarters of profitability. David, how are you going to finance what is a little less asset like is building these facilities to help keep all our auto cars clean.

Yeah.

So, as I say, because we've been in the flex drive business, the subsidiary business for a long time, we've actually had capital deployed to that for a long time. We have about twenty four locations in about fifteen different states across the United States, which I think gives you a sense of how this kind of partnership could scale over time. And we own some of those cars ourselves, others of those cars or financed by other groups. So the good news is this won't be a significant change

Autonomous okay, scale over time.

This morning, Bloomberg Tech producer Marguerite Gallery, and he put this table together. You know the table, right, It explains the roadmap from here, So let's look at it together. This is twenty twenty six and it focuses on WEIMO principally.

Yeah, So I think the way I would look at That is one of the reasons we were so patient in working through this deal because it took a while. It was we wanted to come up with something that is good for Weimo, good for Lyft, and good for riders, and that's hard to do. It's hard to have, you know, kind of a three away win. We feel really good about it and feel like this is a great model for us to expand to other cities in the future.

Look, people are going to accuse me of wanting to create a headline here, but it's a really important question. Tesla and Zeke's are committed to their own go to market model. Right, we talked about they control the full stack, But have you held discussions with both Tesla and Zeke's to say like, look, this is the model we're doing with Weimo, we can do something similar.

Do you see that as being realistic?

So of course I don't want to come in on, you know, conversations we might be having. What I can tell you is we're talking to everyone who finds the partnership model interesting. You know, there are, of course always companies. Whenever you see a new industry, you have some companies that say I.

Want to do it all.

And frankly, if you look back a couple years ago, just about every company in the self driving space was in that zone. They wanted to do everything, you know, top to bottom. I think over time most companies find, particularly when it's capital intensive and quite complex, like ride share is and self driving is that a division of labor where everyone does what they're good at, is the is the best model. But we'll see, you know, it's still such early days.

But you struck deals with interesting players in Europe. I do, what's it like working with a Chinese giant? What were those negotiations like? You know that?

Actually, I'll tell you what was very interesting. It came together fairly quickly and in part I think is you know, frankly, Chinese companies are kind of built for speed. You know, they for those of you who don't know, you know, by do you can sort of think of them as kind of the Google or Alphabet of China. They have many businesses, but self driving cars are a very important one for them, and we committed that we would roll out some of their technology in one to two markets.

It's still very.

Early days there, but I can tell you they've got really high standards for their technology. We're super excited about working with those guys in the wall to have more to say about that next year once we start to roll out in Europe.

One minute, how hard is it to get to New York?

I mean I can take a flight there pretty easily.

But also the ROBOTAXI how hot? When am I going to have it here?

I love that?

You know, it's going to take a little while. New York is a complex place to do business. The streets are complicated, you know, there's a lot of interest there. Look, you know this Caroline, I mean lift has been there for many years. It's super strong in New York. We also run the city bike program. As you know, super excited bring self driving there someday, but that was probably gonna take a little while.

Sorry about that.

You can have to work for all.

My addiction with the bikes will just have to continue.

Lift to see David so as a joy to have you on the show. Take Care.

Mentioned earlier in the show that Microsoft will invest thirty billion dollars in the UK. It's part of a push to expand AI infrastructure. We also heard from GROC about its data center plans. Of course, tech companies are pledging to build more data center steer around the world. Let's bringing Maria Davidson, CEO of Kojo. It's the largest construction procurement platform in the US, giving her a unique insight

Oh absolutely. I mean when you think about how much potential there is in the UK, I think it is extremely exciting and very very untapped. So I love to see companies like Microsoft and Google coming in and investing in the UK, and the US and the UK actually working closer together.

You say a lot of potential in the UK.

Why, I think because one, there's extremely talented workforce in the UK, and you know, you have world class universities. You have incredible research like deep Mind coming out years before anyone would have expected an outcome like that in the UK, and so I think that means that in the UK right now, if we keep on investing, I think we're going to see a lot more deep Mind like outcomes.

I've got to say, You've got three Brits around a table talking about the opportunity in the UK. So I'll diverse us a little bit because we're three Brits that sit in the US right now. Maria, you're building businesses to try and make supply chains clearer for contractors for builders out there, and I'm interested as to what the scale is like here in the United States and what the key bottlenecks are that you're trying to fix.

I mean, the scale is enormous. So just this year, we have forty billion dollars going into the construction of data centers in the US, that's expected to grow more than ten percent a year, so by twenty thirty that's going to be sixty five billion dollars. That's unprecedented. And the biggest issue with building these it's not getting GPUs, it's getting the materials and finding the electricians to be able to actually meet this demand.

Okay, so your role is ensuring that when the contractor, which is very hard to come by and labor is short, and we've seen immigration policies hit that, but when you get the on site, they've actually got the pieces in the parts to work with what has been some of the most complex areas when it comes to particularly the hyperscaler's need and the data center build out.

It's a lot when you think about the construction industry in the US. Even though they're building some of the most sophisticated infrastructure out there right they're building projects that involve huge amounts of technology and AI infrastructure specific needs, they still largely have to rely on pen and paper and Excel to track where things are. It's hard to

I actually think it's worth going a step earlier in the process than what Caroline just asked about. Right, We've kind of learned over the course of a lot two or three years about how it works in the United States. You have a financing partner, you have someone like Cruso putting it all together.

You need to select a site.

Then you've got to talk to the utility because you need to power that site. The utility has to think about where they get the electricity from. Is that going smoothly and well that that initial process it depends.

It's definitely gotten a lot faster. If you think about your average size data centers right as data centers on the smaller side maybe ten to thirty megawatts. Those previously would have taken that's say, twenty four months to thirty six months to build. Now you're seeing data centers build probably twice as fast, in part because things like site readiness, inter connection, they're all being dealt with in advance.

Now.

I think prefab is a huge subject here because the more that we can lean into modular construction, the more we don't have to rely on the sequential building, but we can actually build in parallel.

There's also like a self fulfilling prophecy in the sense that all of the AI names who actually just end up leasing the capacity, right, they don't even own the thing, but they would say, Oh, all the work we're doing in AI is actually going to benefit the planning and execution of these buildouts. I guess that's what you'd say. You also help.

With Yeah, absolutely, I mean a lot of it is. The better planned that you can be in advance, the better the project is actually going to go. And so if you know all of the components that you're going to need, if you have the mapped out schema, if you have all of those interconnection blocks ready to go, then of course contractors can be much better prepared.

I want to talk about you about Kojo, about what the ninety four million dollars you've thus far raised six hundred construction companies that you're working with. You've just had an add on to your CERC I think I believe how much are.

You seeing inbound?

How much are you.

Fighting off people wanting to put money into your company because they're realizing it's about bricks and mortar, it's about the very underlying infrastructure.

Right now, well, we're seeing a huge amount of inbound. The focus for us has always been how can we empower contractors, how can we take the contract is that for a really long time were completely ignored by the tech industry, and specifically there I'm talking about the trades, right, the electricians, the folks working in mechanical and HVAC and drywall, They for a very long time had very few solutions

Well, you're just completing a ten million dollar Series C extension.

Come back when you're raising yet more.

I'm sure Maria Davidson's CEO, Kojo, it's great to have you on the Showwow, that does it for this edition at Bloomberg Tech, we've done our whole host of things zed, but we're going to count down to Metaconnect tonight. Of course, tune in tomorrow for an interview with NEA's Chief product officer, Chris Cox live on the show tomorrow, which ed.

You'll be doing.

Yeah, looking forward to that.

I have a lot of questions about the relationship between software and hardware.

After all, that is technology. Check out the pod.

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