Meta to Become the Biggest Nuclear Buyer Among Hyperscalers

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Meta agrees to a series of electricity deals to power data centers, making it the biggest fire of nuclear power among the hyperscalers plus Minimax, one of China's largest generative AI startups.

Goes public in Hong Kong.

For that means with China's AI ecosystem and Snowflake plans to buy Observe, an AI powered observability platform. We're going to discuss the move with Snowflake's c EO. Let's get right to it and what's happening in the markets. Later in the program, we're going to go big on Intel. Lipbutan, Intel CEO has spent the last twenty four hours in Washington, d C. In the White House with the President and

More to come.

Then there's the big one investing in a multi gigawatt deal with some big names in nuclear energy. Opkloat up fourteen percent on that deal. Of course backed by some outman district corps. Up thirteen percent, Meta up eight ten to one percent. We said at the top of the program. This puts them among the biggest energy buyers, among the hyperscalers, and we remind ourselves Meta is not technically a hyperscaler.

Please.

Yeah, So three different agreements and they actually are different in form and functions. So this is about supporting up to six point six gigawatts in nuclear energy, but it is both about ensuring that existing nuclear power plants continue to thrive and investing in future nuclear power. Meta's head of global energy told me last night that they heard that there's real concern about the amount of energy that's

I'll find this fascinating because while Meta is not a hyperscale or a hyperscale of being a cloud computing company that basically leases capacity, Meta is doing this on its own behalf right. It has been aggressive in in securing the supply of energy it needs for its own data centers, which principally I use for training and inference of its own activity in AI. What else has it done and where does this bring them to date?

Well, I want to note that you made a really important important point there. Prometheus and Hyperion. These are two of their biggest AI plays. Prometheus actually is in Ohio and these agreements are in Ohio and Pennsylvania. So some of this energy presumably is going to go to the Prometheus data center cluster, which is one of their biggest plays. But we're also seeing Meta turn with Hyperion to natural gas.

We're going to get to the sort of available energy sources around the world in a little bit. There is an interesting point you co reported this with Will Wade, who's just been really on top of the nuclear side of the story. There does seem to be some anxiety from the technology companies that the existing NUCLEME infrastructure that does exist in America, limited as it may be, is also at risk at being shut down. Is this kind of future proofing a little bit.

Absolutely, that is what I'm hearing from metas head of Global Energy. They started back a December two years ago and they were looking into what nuclear needed to keep going, and they heard we need investment now into plants that could potentially shutter. So this is a future proofing, as you say.

Bloomberg's Riley Griffin leading our coverage of Meta with a must read, Thank you very much. Access to power has been top of mind in AI. We spoke about that with Nvidia CEO Jensenmong earlier this week.

In order for our new industry to emerge, you need energy, and so I think it's safe to say that we wish we had more energy in the United States. Your wis should have more energy. I think the world all wish we have more energy, and so we have to invest in all sorts of different forms of energy.

Let's bring in Paul Meeks for more.

He's managing director and head of Technology research of Freedom Capital Markets. And when I was reading your research last night, Paul, A little bit relieved coming up this morning when I saw the Meta headline, because you're very focused on the real terms footprint of data centers. That's what we're talking about here. You heard Riley's reporting on the specifics of what Meta has done to secure future capacity. How much of a bottleneck is that to your mind right now?

For this sector?

It is absolutely critical of all the bottomnecks. It is the most important. I like what Meta is doing here, but folks need to realize that if you ramp up nuclear capacity, we're not going to really see power generation until twenty thirty earliest, maybe even not until twenty thirty two. So what do we do for the next four to six years? So the immediate draw is probably that gas.

You know, pool.

I played you just just some of the interview that we conducted with Jensen Wong earlier this week, and when I was sitting in front of him, you don't really get any sense of anxiety from him, right Think about the mechanics of how this transaction works and video brings GPUs actually that's probably not fair. Increasingly they bring more of the content of the server, but there is an

So when they are public facing, particularly somebody like Jensen Wong, who is essentially the spokesperson for the entire industry, they have to exude optimism. However, behind the scenes, particularly when I'm talking to companies about my financial models, which of course the revenues and then the follow on cash flow and earnings come from.

Do you have the power?

Yes, they are anxious, and I think they're actually very anxious.

There will be people watching Bloomberg Tech that work at Meta or in the AI industry. There will be Meta investors watching this program, and some of these people may never have heard of an outclow.

Have you had to.

Change the remit and breadth of your coverage if you say I cover AI data center to include future sources of electricity supply, Yeah.

It's really interesting, ed that years ago, you know, nobody in my line of work covering tech sector like I have for decades, would be interested in any utility company. It's the antithesis of tech. They are boring, regulated, slow growth businesses. However, now they've come to the four and of course these are not just your regular utilities, you know, they're your new era utilities. But yes, if you are a good analyst, you have to cover the entire supply chain,

Pol is there an adequate federal level framework regulation to support the energy requirements of the AI industry in this country?

You know, there is not. And here is my problem. We are still suffering from a lack of solid regulation for the Internet because even today in the US the Internet is operating under nineteen ninety six legislation when Bill Clinton was president, and so I'm hoping that we're not too restrictive.

Right.

We need to embrace our entrepreneurial companies and give them room to roll, but we need to have some guards else on everything AI because what happened last time is we end up abdicating the legislation to the EU because we didn't have the will to do it ourselves. So we missed that opportunity in the Internet. Here is the

In your research pro it's very interesting to see you approach data center from the perspective of yes, you know, energy supply, but also real estate. The reats right, and what you want to ask you is away from the GPUs, where are the frailties in that industry? Is it literally the folks building the tin can around the outside of the data center, the labor, the concrete.

Yeah, we've seen some hit in short term revenues because a couple of the number or a few of the players have subcontractors. Now this is not them, this is their subcontractors.

That are delayed.

What we call building a powered shell. So it's more than a quandset hut that you might find the army in. These powered shells are a little bit more sophisticated. But one company I cover had a one hundred and fifty million dollars revenue deferral from twenty five to twenty six because at one of their forty one data centers someone

I just go back from Vegas.

With all the attention on artificial intelligence in the digital world, we have an industry that's getting hit by a rainstorm. Pool meeks, buckets, unbelievable. It's great to have you on Bloomberg Tech. A lot more to come and coming out an exclusive interview with the co founder and COO of Minimax after the company just went public in Hong Kong, and that's the debut trade.

And this is Bloomberg Tech.

Minimax, one of China's largest generative AI startups, backed by Ali Barber and Abadavi Sovereign Well Fund, is now public. Shares surge in Hong Kong after an IPO that raised six hundred and nineteen million dollars, closing up one hundred and nine percent in its Friday debut trading. Bloomberg Stephen Engel spoke exclusively with co founder and COO Yee Yun about growth and expansion plans as Minimax faces hot AI competition both locally and globally.

We really focus out that capital efficiency caused the efficiency, so we had always spent a round five hundred media USC in the in total, probably only one or two percent of the biggen suspending, So we did all the organization, mad creativity innovations on.

The h How do you compete though, if you're going to go global, how do you compete with an open AI or others that are throwing lots of capital at their business?

Is it viable and what is the.

Technology gap looking like in the next few years.

Actually, I don't think it's a competition. It's more about all the top talents across all the world. They bring the technology break through to the society, to the end users. So you will see each models have pros and accounts, so we focus more resources on building the models, building the best product experience to a more and more uses from all the world.

To use it.

We're hearing as well, the Chinese government might approve in Vidia's H two hundred for China in this quarter. Perhaps is that something you need to look at importing more advanced accelerators for your training.

And the like.

I think in every industry with a really high growth when the new technology comes here, so you will see every startups, all the companies. This please resources comestring probably chief constring computing constring is only one of the challenges. So in the past you will see our model performers and our product performers, so our resources is stable. We can get access to all of them, so we focus

Is your goal to stay indigenously with your chips locally made chips or would you buy nvidio chips as well?

It doesn't matter what kinds of chiefs it is. It's more about which chiefs can give us best ROI, which can help us to achieve our mission to make the best technology too accessible to all of the users across the world.

So when does the emphasis turn from efficiency to profitability and also getting that steady revenue growth that will then justify a higher stock price valuation.

So we put loss of R and D resources and innovations on the efficiency part. You will see our API we have the enterprise business and you will see the gross profit margin of our API is more than sixty five percent, which is probably already one of the highest globally. So we focus more on make the best technology and the best the user experience that people would love to pay for the best performers models for their use cases.

You've also come out of a price war essentially a race to the bottom some have called, because of you're trying to keep costs down and you want to survive as well. There was a battle of survival and you have been one of the survivors. But at the same time, the startups are not the only ones. The big players Ali Baba, by Dads, tens and others. How do you compete with them at a low cost basis?

Actually it's not. I don't think that's a press word. It's more about the performers the competition, So you need to make your model best. And the people I mean and the user are interpress customers. They don't choose your model because of its cheap or expensive. It's more about its performers. So that's the key. As you said, I think it's not about the competition between like all these

Many Max co founder and COO Yaun speaking exclusively with Bloomberg Steven Engel. Public listings in Hong Kong are hot right now. Chinese industrial robot maker in Events is now also considering a second listing in Hong Kong, according to sources. Let's get out to Bloomberg Executive Tech editor Peter Elstrom.

To discuss this.

But also like this growing trend of more of China's sort of post chat gbtai firms going public. The team that you lead out in Asia busy right now. In Events's case, what are the details in our reporting that we need to know about.

Yeah, there are a lot of these IPOs that we're seeing, and we're seeing a much more forward move into the public markets for a bunch of these companies and events has already gone public in the mainland and Shenjen now it's looking at an IPO in Hong Kong.

Two.

That's partly a reflection of how hot demand is from investors for these kinds of companies. When you're talking about Minimax in particular, they went public, as you mentioned, their shares more than doubled in the debut. The founder of the company is very fascinating. These are some people called them the AI tigers, some people the AI dragons. But these are startups that really have very very different strategies

PETE in the world of technology or in financial market's like a term like an AI tiger or AI dragon.

You know, it's kind of commonplace. We bandy it around.

But for those watching Bloomberg Tech that are saying, what are you talking about? How do we define the AI tiger? What are we talking about here?

Well, we're talking about a whole series of companies coming out of China. In Stevens interview with the Minimax COO, they talked about the competition there. We've of course heard a lot about Deep Seek and how good their model is, how technically good it is, but also how low cost it is. Behind Deep Seek, you have a whole bunch of other companies like Minimax, like Jipou, which just went

Bloomberg's executive editive for Tech, Peter Alstrom. Great to catch up with you, Thank you so much. Now coming up on the.

Program, Love Musks Grock image generation tool faces backlash after reports that's generated thousands of undressed women and children.

Go more on that data. Next, this is Bloomberg Tech.

Elon Musk's AI startup Xai is burning cash quickly. The company spent almost eight billion dollars in the first nine months of the year. That's according to internal docs that

Robots in the Optimus program.

Right Sticking with XAI, the company has limited access to Grock's image generation tool for most users, following widespread criticism that the feature was producing thousands of explicit images of women and children. Bloomberg reporter Cecilia Deannastasio broke, the story has been tracking the developments, Cecilia, that we just summarized the issue, right think, let's start with the methodology, how we went about looking at the data, how we got the data, and we'll go from that.

Thank you for having me. Bloomberg worked as a researcher who scraped thousands of images produced by groc and published to the platform X between the period January fifth and

Where are these images showing up?

You know, to the uninitiated people may not know the sort of interconnects between XAI the AI company, and x the social media platform, for example, but they are now kind of one entity as they combine last year.

Well, that connection is exactly why x has become one of the biggest deep fake websites on the internet. Anybody can well not anybody now, now you have to pay to do this, But over the last couple of days, anybody could just at rock on the X platform and say, put this woman in a bikini under an image that a woman had post on the internet. And a lot of women women primarily are the victims of this, took to complaining to GROC directly and arguing with GROC in their comments.

GROC would apologize for posting.

These images, but then continue posting them and not take down Many of the images that the women felt were violating.

Succeed That did X or XAI respond to our reporting, engage with us on it.

X has not responded to our numerous requests for comment over the last couple of days. Elon Musk himself, in a reply to a post on X said anybody using groc to make illegal con tent will suffer the same consequences as if they upload a legal content, and Musk there was referring to allegations we believe of child sexual abuse material that's been posted to X using the croc app.

Okay, Bloomberg's the CID Danna Slasio important reporting.

Read the story on the Bloomberg terminal on bloombuw dot com. Thank you.

Now, coming up from the program, we're going to speak with Snowflake CEO Shrida Ramaswami. Is the company enters into an agreement to buy AI powered platform observe. We'll get his observations on that piece of M and A that's coming up next. You're halfway through the program, and this is Bloomberg Tech. Welcome back to Bloomberg Tech. I've been using the power of my Bloomberg terminal. It's been a long week with cs and Las Vegas. The power of

Now using more of the power of the Bloomberg terminal.

If Apple was full for a ninth day, we think that would be the longest run of decline since the early nineties. And obviously we are only nine days into twenty twenty six. But so far year to date, this is a stock that's down five and a half percent. You saw the letter from Tim Cook to shareholders talking up the company's progress of late and last year, but right now that stock heading down and will continue to

But it's an interesting deal. Why do you do it?

Hey?

Great to see you.

Snowflake's acquisition of Observe is a game changer for our customers. As you pointed out, observability is basically looking at applications, websites, AIA agents to make sure that they are functioning properly.

It's a diverse and messy problem. It's a big data problem.

And because observer is built right on top of Snowflake, they are able to use our very efficient storage as well as computer platform to help customers find problems ten times faster, often at three to four x less cost. Take a company like Top Golf, it's a customer of a Observe. I go to Top Golf all the time with my team, not much of a golfer, so I'm

That's the power of this acquisition.

Increasingly, capabilities like observability are going to be a core part of a platform like Snowflake. And we have great customers folks like Barclays, Capital One, Commonwealth Bank of America, and we're super excited to bring this to over ten thousand plus customers on Snowflake SHREDA.

Let's get it out the way if we can. The report saw that it's about a billion dollar deal. What was the structure of the deal and the financials on it?

Please?

We can comment on the structure of the deal it is, you know, some of it will come out in the some of it will come out in the filing.

Signal that there might be some more pieces of M and A, particularly on that layer that you sit on right you know, as you know very well you were there on Monday at the video event Jensen talks about the five layer cake and one of the layers you occupy. But as observability evidence is, there might be pieces of competency missing. How are you going to use M and A to plug those gaps.

We've been pretty open that we want to be an end to end data platform for our customers from the moment. Data is barn when you interact with an application, for example two, bringing it in for analysis, analyzing it, and then acting on it increasingly with AI agents. We've been systematically going through this process of both acquiring customers and building up.

Functionality from within.

Things like observability or data clean rooms are adjacent functionality that sit on top of a data layer. You will continue to be super act about both spinning up new projects internally and acquiring companies. I think the environment is right for that, and honestly, our customers want that because they're spending entirely too much time just stitching things together, and we make it seamless and easy to use for that.

How competitive is that m and a environment right now?

Because when I look at Observe and what it's offered, you, you know, the analysts looked at that deal and said completely logical that Snowflake would do it. But one would imagine that there would be others in the market for a name like Observe as well.

Well.

There are many things that we're going for this particular deal. As I said earlier, Observer is built on top of Snowflake, which means that we didn't have to deal with a long integration cycle. The products are super tight. We've been collaborating closely with the team as partners for a very long time. I've actually gone and visited the Observed team

We think this is a good combination that's.

Worth some academic debate, you know, should I'm not a computer scientist or an engineer, right, so so take that into account. But the thing that we argue about with a truly autonomous AI agent is that it's exactly that it is supposed to act. With autonomy and observability raises the question of if a human is required at some point in the process to check.

In, what's your point?

You know, well, it becomes a matter of how many people you need in order to accomplish a problem. So I live and breathe agent Kai. I mean, I really mean that I use these products every single day. And

A lot of this, as you know, is low value work.

Copying information from one screen or one app to another is just tedious, it's no fun. I think the power here with Agentic systems is going to be all that boring stuff is going to be automated, so that when a problem comes in, you go reach out to the ten tools that you need to collect information from, you analyze it, and then you show that somebody to that person who decides what action to take.

But furthermore, if they have to go write.

Some custom gode to solve a new problem, they'll do it two three times and turn that into a skill that can be used by everybody else. I think it leverages people enormously. I can tell you again from personal experience that I can get stuff done in a matter of a couple of hours on top of Snowflake building things that would honestly have taken me two to three weeks just last year to get done.

That's the game changer that's here treat us. Snowflake rose forty two percent last year. What are the goals that you're holding you and the team to for twenty twenty six and the things that you want to achieve this year in AI?

As you know ed, it's important to focus on the things that you can control. What we're super excited for twenty twenty six is making agent ki.

Come alive for all our customers.

Snowflake Intelligence is our agentic data product and it's been a game changer again for me to do things like do research on customers before I meet with them. This is the fastest product in terms of customer adoption and revenue in Snowflake's history. We want to make sure that we drive adoption of these products, and in turn, what this does is it enhances and makes the power of

It is really that in and yang that I'm super excited about. We started the week together in Las Vegas at the Nvidia keynote. We end the week together talking about the roadback from part four the Snowflake. Snowfake CEO Shreeta Ramaswami. Great to have you back on Bloomberg Tech.

Thank you.

Now coming up, we're going to take a look at the state of media mergers as one of brows sticks with its buyout by Netflix and it's trying to shake off that paramount takeover.

We have the details. Next, this is Bloomberg Tech.

Lairs of Netflix have tumbled nearly twenty eight percent since October, but the streaming giant stock still appears to be too expensive to many investors. Here of more is Bloomberg Stock Reporter, All Things Terminal, authoring Squawk Police Morantz.

This is a really important write up.

Right there is so much hype and a lot of headlines around what's happening with Warner Brothers Discovery.

And you do what you needed it.

You go back to basics, look at the fundamentals, look at the stock to must read on the Bloomberg Tamila dot com. But just I guess give us the top line of the reporting.

The top line is that this stock has really plunged since investors started questioning whether this deal was a good idea or not.

You have questions about cost, You have integration risk as.

Netflix doesn't have much experienced swallowing large deals, and you also have a big regulatory fight that's looming. So there's not a lot of extreme enthusiasm about the stock right now.

In fact, it's down.

You can see it's down about two percent today on an update for the S.

And P five hundred.

The people you speak to it in the piece, you know, one of the anecdotes is like Netflix is not screaming by right now. Right But you also, I guess, look at multiples, current multiples and historic multiples and compare them.

What would that tell us?

So there are various different kinds of multiples.

But if you look at a basic price to earnings ratio, the stock is not expensive historically, but Nora is it very cheap.

It's training a.

Bit below its historic norm, but not enough to really grab people.

Bloomberg's police morans is awesome and it's been great to have you back on bloombog take this Friday.

Thank you very much. I want to get deep. You're welcome. Let's get deeper into that deal.

Part the future of streaming the Warner Brothers Discovery Saga and then the two bids Matthew Dolgan, morning Star Senior around equity and this covering communication services.

Felice did a good job right going over the stock.

But there's a piece of the deal that I asked the team to find someone to dig in with us on, which is do we value the cable networks part of Warner Brothers Discovery at zero?

Which paramount?

When it reaffirmed it's thirty dollars a share bid came out with your take on that.

No, we don't think it should be valued at zero. However, well, first of all, there is a risk that it could be. We don't think that that's right. But this is going to be a very heavily debt laiden company and that leads to more risk, and so it's possible that zero

So I'm just going to recap for the Bloomberg Tech audience. Here's where we stand. Netflix has offered twenty dollars twenty seven dollars a share for the streaming and the studios and would plan to spin out the legacy cable networks. And as we've said for five days in a row on Bloomberg Tech, Paramounts Guidance want the whole enchilada, all of it, but at thirty dollars a share, saying that they assume a zero dollar value for that cable network.

Well, we continue in that cycle for a little bit.

Yes, January twenty first is a critical date that we should circle on our calendars. That's when the tender offer for the Warner Brothers Discovery shares by Paramount is currently set to expire. So we'll see what happens at that point. It doesn't appear that right now Paramount is likely to get a sufficient number of shares by that date, but they can extend it, extend the date, and they can

We spend a lot of time this week talking about the Warner Brothers Discovery rationale for rejecting Paramoun's guide on so we included debt. It included a discussion either negative or positive about Larry Allison being the bank stop on the deal, and it talks about the restrictive covenants on Warner Brothers not being able to make major investments what

Well, we think Paramount is the company that I guess needs them more and probably would benefit from them more. As far as getting them out into the world, that well, arguably would be more Netflix a side with the business they already have in place in the streaming service and

It's out there.

You heard Felice's reporting on the stock why very quickly we just have thirty seconds? Has that sentiment with Netflix soured since the deal first kind of got announced.

As far as the deal goes, I think there's been some fear that Netflix would even pay more. There's also some fear they've overpaid with what they've agreed to already, so that may not be worth it. I also think it's maybe just brought to light some things that we had been thinking about for some time, even apart from what's going on with Warner, which is the growth is set to slow at Netflix, and therefore the multiples that

We got to leave it there.

But that brings us a nicey full circle to what police was talking about at the start of the block.

Matthew Dog in the morning, so thank you very much.

Now coming up, Intel CEO was at the White House to deliver a progress report on its activities. The US government is its big shareholder that it's being accounting to. Bit more on that next, as the Bloomberg Tech for Talking Tech first up, Vodafone Idea is considering raising debt financing to accelerate growth.

That's according to sources.

This comes after Delhi decided to cap annual payouts for past spectrum fees, forerring a lifeline to the country's third place carrier that's out in India. Plus compensation for Apple CEO Tim Cook held steady at a cool seventy four million dollars last year. Just three million of that comes from salary, though the rest is in the form of

For more.

Let's get out to Bloomberg's Ian King, who of course leads our coverage of Chips. Actually, where I wanted to start in is the President in his post talked about the result of the government's investment in Intel, yielding I think said tens of billions of dollars for the American people. It's important probably to do the math on what the actual return would be at this stage.

Please.

Yeah, no, I mean, as taxpayers, we own currently about eleven billion dollars worth of Intel stock, and that's a nice return, roughly twice what we owned when we made the investment as a nation last year, and not in the tens of billions. For that to happen, obviously Intel's share price would have to go up a lot more, and or some ex extra kind of arrangements that exists would have to be bigger.

All the same that there has been some stock performance here since lit Bhutan kind of had this improvement in relationship with the president. What do we know about yesterday's meeting and kind of where Intel's focus right now in what it's trying to tell the US government.

Yeah, I mean, you know, the fact that he's in the White House is important because that is basically drawing attention to the fact that this investment that we saw last year from the US government from in Nvidia, from SoftBank has really stabilized Intel's kind of balance sheet, and so it's in a much stronger position than it was. But where we are and where we really need to be is to have much better operations and much better performance from the company, and that is going to take

And again a large portion of the government's ownership of Intel is contingent on performance of those goals. Bloomberg Z and King, Happy Friday to you and thank you very much. That does it for this edition of Bloomberg Tech in what's been a monster week. Frankly, just back from Las Vegas and see yes and the headlines keep coming, particularly in the world of AI. Great place to recap the show, the week, the interviews and the reporting is on the podcast.

Happy Friday. This is Bloomberg