Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news. Bloomberg Tech is alive from coast to coast with Caroline Hide in New York and Vow in San Francisco.
This is Bloomberg Tech coming up. Energy prices tumble and global tech stocks rally after the US in Iran agreed to a two week ceasefire.
Pas Anthropics new myth Us model is so powerful. It's giving tech firms and competitors early access to get ahead of possible cyber attacks that could reach havoc.
And Apple's first foldable phone it's still on track to launch in September, despite reports of major manufacturing delays.
First check on those markets that you just pointed us towards ed extraordinary moves as we have a tentative moves towards a ceasefire. We of course have up to the moment reporting of concerns in some ways that's being well inflated upon at the moment, and Pakistan is speaking out. But I'm looking at two and a half percent higher on the nast that one hundred. We are off five percentage point from the original highs.
As we worry about how this is.
Fire continues to unfold, but I'm looking at Brent crude off like thirteen percent. This is a record move. At one point it had fallen as much as seventeen percent on the international contract. But let's get out to the latest with Tyler. Kendall stands by in the White House and Tyler, look, we are hopeful, but there are signs of concerns.
Yeah, hey, Caroline, Well, at this point, it does appear that the ceasefire is very fragile. This White House has maintained that the US has achieved all of its military objectives, touting tactical successes as what led to this truce in the first place. But still we heard from Secretary Pete Hegseth earlier today who said that the US military remains ready to be redeployed and resume military operations if needed.
After the Vice President Jade Vance indicated earlier today that the ceasefire or at this point, is something to watch very closely because there's already been these reports that attacks are continuing in the region, as a person familiar with the matter confirms to Bloomberg News that Saudi Arabia's key East West oil pipeline was hit by a drone earlier today, though it appears that the damage is limited to pair that with other reports about attacks against the UAE as
well as Kuwait now, Pakistan's Foreign minister, in a post just within the last hour, said that Iran could be at risk of pulling out of the truce if operations against Lebanon continue. Keep in mind, Lebanon was not part of this agreement. As Israel continues its military campaign against the Iranian backed hesbela militant group ed in Caroline, Iranian state media is now reporting that traffic in the Strait of Remus has been halted amid Israeli attacks against Lebanon.
This is going to be something to watch very closely, considering we know that this White House's position has been that the strait needs to be reopened and there has to be freedom of navigation in order for this truce to be maintained.
President Trump is said to meet.
Later today with the NATO Secretary General Mark Rutta here at the White House, and no doubt securing the straighter removes will be the top topic of discussion.
Tyler Kennall, with the breakdown, we appreciate it. Look markets are certainly higher after the Ceasphile has really boosted morale on Wall Street. Now the analyst take Dan ives over at web Bush. So the recent geopolitical tensions had pushed tech into oversold territory, especially across the mag seven software broader AI winners. He sees room for a remound on the buy side. Let's get the take cook Dane gomman' sacceass in management, who is leading on the bullishness, pointing
to AI Capex, saying stronger for longer. Brook, I'm so happy to have you here because there is fragility that is also potential to stop buying some beaten up stocks.
What do you make of today's news?
So, first, thanks for having me on. It's great to be here today. So you know, our perspective is that investors need to be focused on the size and the magnitude of this shift that we're seeing and our baseline forecast. So when we do our bottoms up work, continue to point to acceleration and CAPEX spending and it being durable for much longer. So we feel like investors need to have exposure to the companies that are directly benefiting from that.
I don't think there's any question in anyone's mind right now, as you're seeing these latest models come out about how impactful they're going to be, how much they're going to change,
how much they're going to be able to do. And so while there's uncertainty about how you know which sectors get impacted in which way is and how it all plays out, fundamentally, right now, we're in the start of what's going to be a multi year CAPEX build out and investors need exposure to that, and so our baseline is, you know, you want to still be involved in the semiconductor names, the networking names, things like that that are the direct beneficiars of the spending.
Brook The corners of the technology market that are rallying the hardest in this moment are memory, logic, storage. I'm talking right now in response to the cease fire, but that would indicate if you look at some of the names that returned to the prices they were at prior to the start of the war in Iran, that this con has done nothing to divert the trajectory that you believe capital expenditures are on when it comes to the AI build out.
And our fundamental belief is is that there's been nothing that's changed in that backdrop that the plans and expectations that we had from these companies in terms of their levels of spending, where they were putting the capacity, how tight compute is right now. None of that has changed. And yes, the world is more uncertain today than it was four months ago, and risk premia have probably moved higher structurally because of that. It doesn't change the direction
and the magnitude of what we're seeing. You remember that in this cycle right now, Compute and all the associated parts around compute are the most restricted and hardest to get the thing in the marketplace. And if you want these models to perform better and to keep you know, doing more and more, the key ingredient is compute and power and memory and all of the things that get pulled on by that. So you know, there's nothing that would change the outlook. We're very close to the big
spenders around this area. So when you think of the mag seven companies, we spend a lot of time meeting with those management teams and understanding what their plans look like. None of them are wavering in their commitment and their belief in the opportunity in front of them.
Behind this just very quickly did supply chains for chip and chip manufacturing prove to be more resilient in this moment than they were in the early days of the pandemic.
Yes, but I still think that those supply chains are an area where there's a tremendous amount of focus in building more resiliency, creating more chip capacity, doing it in more geographies, and that build out is likely to persist. But as of today and what we've seen through this latest geopolitical crisis, there hasn't been any material impact on supply chains there.
What's been really interesting is when we think about the semis in video Marvel Broadcom names that you're in, you're like, exposure to is there any hit longer term to the margin or any of you point on how you get into the picks and shovels still, because when we think about the energy.
Prices, for example, it does inflate a little bit.
Yeah, So our perspective is just like you said, like we need you investors' neat exposure to the picks and shovels and this build up because it's still early and still happening. You know, the margin structures right now are high relative to history, but we think durable because of the fact that you know, this relationship between your ability to put compute in the ground and generate revenue for the model companies and for the cloud vendors is still
very tight. So you know, there isn't a big discontinuity event happening from either a supplier a demand side that would upset margin structures. So you know, you mentioned a couple of the names. One of them that we think you know right now the market hasn't fully gotten its arms around is what's happening with Marvel and last year there's a lot of controversy around Marvel and their ability to you know, hold share at Amazon and some of the other big vendors. But we think the market's missing
is around all of the acic business. Marvel has this great opportunity to you know, attach XPU attached products and grow substantially. So we think that's a specific company where there's a real opportunity around the upside.
I mean, I love the fundamental analysis and cunning through the noise of the moment from a macro perspective, Go go to the anthropic news. Then we started this conversation while you're saying, like, look at the changes and the in step changes are seeing in models you like the likes of Well Pallel to Networks. They're one of the key forty companies that's helping stress test and understand what a cyber.
Risk is from that.
Yeah, so I describe myself a little bit as a reformed software investor.
I grew up.
Following the entire software suite and IBOs. The software has some headwinds right now that we can talk about, but within that whole industry set, we think that companies that are involved in cybersecurity have a massive opportunity in front of them. Some of the companies that are helping with
data problems have really big opportunities in front of them. So, you know, the news from Anthropic last night is, you know, the power of those models is incredible and it is exposing a whole bunch of vulnerabilities out there that people didn't know existed. That is really good for the cyber companies. You know, just from a business standpoint, there's going to be more vulnerabilities exposed. Bad actors are going to try
and take advantage of that. Enterprises are going to need to be defended in the right ways, and so owning leading edge next gen security providers is a really good place for INDUSTRISS to.
Be a brook.
I want to end this by going back to the ceasefire and the war in Iran. You are an investor in some of the biggest hyperscalers and the deployers of capital expenditure, right and this president central policy was to deregulate expedite permits and hold those names accountable to energy spending.
Then we had the war in Iran. And so just from the technology investor's perspective, how your desk analysts and you are modeling for the wild card that is a president who on the one hand has an AI policy grounded in deregulation and letting them move quickly and then move to an escalated conflict in Iran.
Yes, So with every investment we're making, we're running lots of scenarios on different parts of the business and what can happen and what can change. So if you're talking about like changes in the fundamental input costs of creating compute to run these models and to do things as we project out where we think, you know, p and
LS and cash flows can look like. That's one of the factors that we're stress testing and we're saying, look, if power you know, goes up by x factor, what does it do to the ultimate return on a dollar of GPU investment and how does that get priced in? Similarly on other things, like you know, on memory supply, and if we can't get enough memory to fund these things, you know what happens there and how does that impact stuff.
So all of this comes into the fundamental frameworks and the risk reward that we're managing, and we're looking through with every investment we make. And what I would just tell you, as a guy that's been investing in the sector for a long time, I am skeptical of my ability to be precise, but I'm really good about my ability to understand ranges of outcome, and so we're always looking for when those range is favor us and favor
us putting capital all the work. And so, you know, to sort of end where I started with, we still think this buildout of capex that were very early in it, that were not late cycle, were early cycle to mid cycle in this and that there's plenty of opportunity to continue to compound wealth and growth in you know, the fundamental chip pixel shovels, chip Ecosystems of AI.
Brooke Dayne of Goldman sax Asset Management doing the math for us. I really appreciate that, Thank you very much. Coming up, a massive Oracle data center could get roughly fourteen billion dollars of debt financing from Pimco with the details. Next, this has been big tech.
A flurry data center related news today. First, Fine Capital's Bridge Data center has dropped neocloud supplier Magaspeed from Malaysia Computing harm Now. That's according to the sources citing and internal memo. The changes follow a US government probe into Magaspeed over its ownerships, ructure and allegations it smuggled.
Advanced in video chips to China.
Meanwhile, here in the US, a city in Wisconsin has passed the nation's first referendum restricting future data center construction, according to the county's unofficial count now, Port Washington is home to a one point three gigawatt project from opening I on Oracle that won't be impacted by this vote. Still, when the AI build out just getting underway, it's a signal of the growing tension between local communities and developers.
Said.
The AI build out is still in early days and over in Michigan, a massive Oracle data center could get roughly fourteen billion dollars of debt financing from PIMCO. That's according to sources. The deal, if finalized, would make the bond giant a key backer of the project, to mark its second jumbo financing for a data center within the past year. Let's get out to bliding Boks Brady Ford Brady. Let's go to the details here. And something that has come up in conversation with you in the past is
the debt backs the project. It doesn't necessarily go straight onto Oracle's debt load. Explain the mechanics of this and what we need to know.
Yeah, zooming out. You know, these centers costs an incredible amount of money that a company like Oracle, even with its cash flowing database and SaaS applications, it needs to bring a lot of partners in. So Pimco in this case would be providing some debt essentially loans to get this thing built. That would go on to the books of related digital and intermediary who's actually building the site,
who then Oracle is going to rent from. If this sounds like a lot of steps, it's because it is because these projects are just so expensive, and so Oracle has been kind of testing the market's appetite for financing big data centers, and there have been moments where it looked quite rocky. But you know, getting a cosign from a company like Pimco which appears in the works, this is a good sign for their build out.
And it's interesting as they name a new CFO that they brought over from Schneider Electric, but also as they tried to out lining to the market and put to bed any anxiety that they were going to take on more debt themselves.
Right, they've been doing some pretty incredible financial maneuvering, right, I mean, they issued equity which nobody thought they would do, they laid out the exact amount they're going to borrow, and they named a CFO from the world of heavy industry now from software. I mean that reflects that we're in a new era where software companies are acting more like ge or Boeing or industrial giants of the past because of just these incredible capital outlays.
The most brady forward is always all across Oracle. We approciate, appreciate it.
Now coming up Anthropping launches a new program aimed at giving cyber defenders early access to its powerful new model why to help them spot you threats were on that Next is Bring Bad Tech.
Thropic is giving tech firms including Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft access to a powerful but not widely released AI model no as Mythos. It's part of an effort to prepare for possible cyber attacks that could result from wider adoption
of the technology. Bloomberg cybersecurity report of Margie Murphy's with us and MARGI yesterday just after this news here was on stage with Mike Krieger, who co leads the labs Anthropic, and he basically explained mythos at the model level incredibly powerful relative to what's gone before it, and they don't know if they'll release it generally. That was a big question.
So they have this set of limited technology companies and one capability is cyber What do we need to know about the kind of roll out and what on earth these companies will.
Do with it?
Correct, So they created this model, realized it was incredibly powerful and really really good at finding bugs and flaws in a lot of open source software that's out there, things that's been around for decades, and that companies. You know, all the apps and services we use are dependent on and they realized that not only could their model find these bugs, it could automatically exploit them. And so their concern was if we let that out into the general public,
that could be abused in some way. So we'll do a kind of limited release, getting the people who might be most affected by it, and will allow them to play around, find some of those bugs, fix them, and then feedback, and then they'll figure out from their what they're going to do about a general release.
I mean, it's interesting.
There's cyber companies like Palata Networks. There's also potential competitors to Anthropics own ai that are using it. What's interesting is a competitor open Ai had already as well sort of piloted the idea of getting its technology into the hands and defenders before the main public. How much is there something written large that everyone has to think about.
Yeah, you're right, it's.
A really unusual agreement for competitors to be coming together, for someone to be sharing their IP in this way, you know, and not you know, claiming not to be.
Profiting off it.
But it shows this wider, real existential threat not only to the cybersecurity industry, but to software at large. And I have just been hearing so much from my sources about how can concerned they are about this incoming potential vulnerability apocalypse. They're describing it as which could really impact so many of the things that we know in our normal day to day use.
And it.
Shows a kind of coming together of cyber defenders and trying to do the right thing in this new age of.
AI and Probert continuing to work with the government, even though of course they're in a legal battle with.
Part of it at the moment.
Bloomberg's Margaret Murphy, thanks so much for the reporting. Let's stick with AI with cyber threats and bring in Teresa Payton. She's the CEO of FORTELLSS Solutions, which brings strategic cybersecurity services to leaders navigating high stakes environments.
You're also with the White House Chief.
Information Officer during the George Bush administration, and Teresa, I mean, an apocalypse is what we just heard from, Margie.
Is that what you're thinking.
I mean, I think it's interesting. So it could be from the standpoint of isn't it interesting that Anthropic self report that they found thousands of vulnerabilities that could be fixed very easily. In sort of the early release of this tool, that means that it was outpacing the ability of cybersecurity products all the big names on the market, which happen to also be now in this cohort. And so it is interesting from an apocalypse standpoint. It depends
on I think your point of view. Is it an apocalypse or do we now finally have a tool that, in the hands of cybersecurity practitioners can make sort of this limited skill set even more powerful, to be able to cover even more than they have in the past. I see AI as being an incredible assistant here. The one concern is if we don't have the right governance and guardrails, we could find that this tool or a tool like it could end up in the hands of
the cyber operatives who have negative and criminal intent. And I think that's the concern here.
That last point is key, and it relates to what we've been talking about in the show right the war in ira On for many weeks. We've been saying that Iran, as an example, has a competence in the domain where if you're on the defense or you use a US based technology for defense that there's every chance that those going on the offense have access to similar technology, although as Margie outlined, you know mythos is at the cutting
edge in terms of models. How do you see the field in that conflict offense versus defense.
Yeah, well, first of all, even though there is thankfully a ceasefire has been announced, that does not mean that the Irani and cyber operatives have taken their fingers off keyboards. So we need to continue to have a heightened sense
of vigilance and alertness around these issues. But what I will say is, you know that they are obviously leveraging AI and different types of tools to be able to carry off attacks like they did against Striker and some of the other attacks that are ongoing against critical infrastructure
in the United States. Bulletins have come out. If people are listening to the show right now and you're thinking, I don't feel like I'm in the know in this information, I certainly can't give it to you publicly, but you can contact your local FBI office and they will tell you all the things that you need to look for as it relates to Iran and some of the cyber
attacks on critical infrastructure. What I would say is you know, I would love to hear more from Meanthropic once they have this cohort, do sort of an alpha pilot, I guess is the best way to put it. What is the beta pilot and what is a you know, sort of a rollout to trusted vetted you know, smaller maybe privately held firms look like to make sure that all offensive and defensive teams have these capabilities and are able to use them against the attackers. Time is of the essence.
We're in a race, and we.
Want to make sure that everybody who is on the ethical side of cybersecurity is actually empowered, engaged and has all the best state of the art tooling possible to fight back these attacks.
And Teresa, you make a good point, and it's actually we've been hearing Fromanthropic as they've outlined what glass wing really looks like. And you can see what certain Newton Cheng who's the Anthropics Frontier Red Teams cyber lead, has been talking about how this is an industry wide problem, you know, for the smaller companies that would like to be able to help. There is obviously a chunk of change being offered Bianthropic as well. In terms of computing tokens.
How much have you been working perhaps with open ai with its well prototype, it's been letting and working with others in the security space to try and ensure that defense has its tools ahead of others as well.
Yeah, I think there's a lot going on in this industry, and so I have been talking to all of the different sort of leading AI providers to find out what are the best offensive defensive tools, what are some things that are yet to be built, what is on the roadmap, and then what are really the best solutions depending on the size company you are, how much money you have.
Because you're right, everything is token based, how can companies learn if they don't have a big technology team, how can they learn to optimize the use of the tools so that they're spending their token sparingly and get the most value out of the money that they're spent. And so there's definitely an arms race, you know, a healthy competition across the different AI companies, and some of them
are now cooperating as part of this anthropic rollout. The other thing I do want to mention is that answers did actually self report that Mythos went rogue and so I think that's something also that we need to be discussing, is that although it's going to help, it also has the fine tunity that needs to happen.
Teresa, Paide and CEO for the list Solutions. We'll have you back on the program and we'll discuss it more detail coming up. Apple is on track to launch its foldable phone later this year. Right now, markets off session highs but rallying. This Bloomberg Tech Welcome back to Bloomberg Tech. Technology socks are rallying. There is outside performance, particularly in chip names in memory and the chip name's extent to logic as well.
The other part of.
The story is that oil is down Brent the global benchmark below one hundred dollars per barrel. The story is that we are in a two week ceasefire in the war in Iran, broken by Pakistan. There is still ongoing headlines about activity in the region and supply chain disruption, but that is what the main driver and main story
is at this moment. We're off session highs when it comes to the Nazak one hundred, but actually the Philadelphia Semiconductor in edental socks, those chip stocks continue to rally pretty hardcater I certainly do.
And let's focus in on kind of area of supply chain right now, because Apple's first foldable phone, it's still on track to launched in September now, despite some reports of major manufacturing delays.
Bluemogs Mark German is here with the latest reporting. Yesterday Apple was lower.
Today of course we rise with the rest of the market, but there is an anticipation here Mark that you'll make it clear they're still going to have that foldable phone on time.
Yeah.
So a couple of days ago, the Nickay out of Asia put out a report saying that there are major engineering and manufacturing snags related to the company's first foldable iPhone,
which could mean a several month delay. What I'm told is that the foldable iPhone will be introduced in September during the normal cadence, alongside the iPhone eighteen Pro and eighteen promacs, And as of this week, there's a very strong likelihood that the foldable phone will actually even go on sale at the same time as the new eighteen Pro models, which means no shipment delayed. Now things are fluid.
Mass production has not begun yet, but everything that I have been told by several people close to the situation is that there are no major engineering snags at this point. Things are moving as planned. Again, these things can change, but as of now, I do anticipate the foldable phone to go on sale either at the same time as the non new foldable madel or very soon thereafter.
The other way I'm looking at it, Mark is that come September, we're going to get a foldable phone from Apple. You know, what do we need to know about? Nice speeches? If it's super exciting, if it's on track, how big is product? Is this going to be in Apple's evolution?
Well, I think initially it's going to be quite niche I anticipate this to be, in the words of one person, very very expensive. Apple believes it has solved some of the quirks of the current foldable models. A few things I'll point out. One, some of the current foldables from other players, they have lots of durability issues. You get dust or stand in it, you could break the screen. Obviously, Apple has very high specifications for durability, and so the
foldable phone meets that, I'm told. The other quirk related to displays, there are creases in many of the foldable phones today when you open and shut it. Apple has reduced that crease working with Samsung some new display technology Samsung, of course, is going to bring to its devices. The third thing, if you look at the phone, it looks
like a small little reporter notebook. You open it up and it goes wider than the narrower foldable phones you see on the market today, which means it's an excellent device for watching video and for gaming, but overall it's a foldable phone. Samsung has had these on the market since around twenty nineteen twenty twenty. All the Chinese phone makers have them, Google has it, But now that Apple's entering the market, it's going to get a lot more popular.
Bloomberg, Smart German, thank you very much. What was driving Apples stock in yesterday's session was that concern manufacturing engineering delays and how it impacted a foldable phone. The stock today's rallying for a very different reason, right, and that is the cease far with Iran. As geopolitical tensions rise. In the context of that ongoing war in Iran, global tech supply chains and as well as US China relations are being tested. As bringing Reva Goose on, director at
the policy and economic research firm Rhodium Group. You know, I'm looking again. I'm going to go back to what's rallying. We're showing it on the screen. It's technology stocks that are pushing higher right now. And one of the reasons is, Okay, helium comes from the Gulf, critical in stabilization, cooling in the etching and deposition process and chip manufacturing. Energy prices
have been impacted by this war in Iran. Why is it to your mind that the tech industry is seeing some relief from the idea of a ceasefire.
Well, because we're not going to all out war is the short answer. And so I think everyone is taking this bit of good news that there's a two week seeds fire and running with it. But the reality is that the Pandora's box and the Persian Gulf has been opened. And by that I mean, you know, even if we have an extended seasfire and cessation of hostilities that last
longer term. Here, we have now seen Iran demonstrate capability and political will to strike critical infrastructure across this region, to include very high value targets like data centers multi billion data centers, including explicit threats against Opening Eyes Stargate project in the UAE, not to mention the number of AWS sites that have been struck already in Bahrain and UAE. So that's just a completely different investor climate overall for
this region. But coming to supply chains though, as you said, when we talk about helium supply, bro mind just energy supply overall, Iran also has an interest in allowing transit through the strait. But that's where we come back to political conditions that will be attached to the ceasefire.
Caroline and I discussed in detail the vulnerability of data center assets in the Gulf as it relates to China. For example, there is a long term threat to Taiwan and the concentration of semiconductor manufacturing. With that taken all into account, how conscious are companies like Apple on now changing where they plan to build future products and have a footprint in the future for their manufacturing operations.
Well, there are multiple drivers in play here, not just geopolitical risk obviously, but also the evolution of US trade strategy, which is still in play as we know. There's a pending Section two thirty two still on semiconductors that could contain component tariffs right that implicate the devices that contain those semiconductors, not to mention looking beyond tariffs content requirements right so far, for example, we have regional value content
requirements for automotive parts. Imagine that applied to electronics more broadly. So I think you know companies like Apple are looking at these these issues in parallel to say, yes, there is a lot concentrated still in Taiwan device manufacturers also
in China, that geopolitical risk is is only amplified. But at the same time there are going to be a lot of disruptors coming from the US who tried to drive more not just onshoing, but more regionalized trade and bring more of that manufacturing based to the Western hemisphere as well.
I want to just go a little bit further with where it took us in terms of China, because there's a lot of really well read stories on the Bloomberg today thinking about how maybe the US has reduced its overall well power among allies and adversaries at the moment because of what's happened in Iran in particular when it comes to China and the Iran campaign has been quote a serious setback for Trump is what one particular Chinese foreign ministry advisor.
Had told us. What does that mean for.
US China relations What does that mean about AI access, cheer access, the relationship that we have.
Yeah.
Absolutely So if you contrast where we are today in the wake of this Iran miscalculation on part of the US, and then compare it to where we were late last year when the Busan truth was struck. Back then, the US was caught flat footed by Chinese expert controls on critical raw materials, and so the US was in a
very reactive mode when it went to Busan. Those truce terms were set, and I think the whole intent going into the next summit in Beijing was to come with a more assertive position with China, to say, look, we're doing things to reindustrialize the US, protect critical infrastructure. We're not explicitly calling out China in these measures. So you know what, you don't get a vote on these areas, and the US is going to be forging ahead now
because of the Iran dynamic. That certainly tamps down the confidence, right that the ability of the US to assert itself in the same way, and Beijing sees that. Beijing certainly is in a more confident position going into the summit. It has very explicit demands. For example, not just to reduce, you know, maintain tariff levels at the Busan Truce level, but to reduce them, not just to restrain the US
technology controls, but to actually roll them back. And this is where the US has been doing more country agnostic measures as well, trying to say, look, China, we're not out to get you, but Beijing's messages I see what you're doing here and it's got to stop. And so their interest is to make everything a red line, which means that we have a number of friction points heading
into the summit. Not to mention there where the status of the Iran issue is is also going to consume a lot of oxygen going into that meeting.
This has such broad implications and you help break down many of them today. Riva Boujon, thank you, director of the Rodium Group. Now coming up, let's return to all things AI because that's old. That's talking about it the Human Next conference in San Francisco. We speak with the Snowflake CEO Rabaswami as.
A blom Meg Tech. It's time now for talking tech and first.
S up Resolve AI it's going straight to shareholders with a hostile bid for Commerce dot Com. This after negotiations with the board our management brote down. According to a letter to investors seen by Bloomberg, Resolve is now offering one of its own shares for every two Commerce dot Com shares and says it's earlier one for one proposal that gave to the board is no longer valid. Plus, Morgan Stanley has become the first Wall Street bank to
launch its own bitcoin tracking ETF. Now, the Morgan Stanley Bitcoin Trust is debuting under the ticker MSBT Bitcoin, touching three week highs today. Of course, because the US and Iran tentively agreeing that sees fire and prompting a surge and risk assets and super Micro says a committee of independent directors hired an outside law firm.
To investigate the circumstances tied.
To last month's indictment of two employees and a contract a religed server sales to China. In a statement, giper Micro said it will share an update what's the inquiry is complete.
It won't comment further until then.
Aad okay human X is underway here in San Francisco, bringing together industry leaders focused on turning AI into real world results. Snowflake CEO Tridah Ramaswami is set to speak at the conference and says it's not about big bets but execution. He joins us, now there's something I want to take up with you, Shreda. And you and I
have discussed this before. You have projects snow work, and the idea is that you have this big customer base that goes from running agents that give you answers to running workloads, And I go back to is an agent that only gives answers? Actually an agent? Is it a real piece of agentic AI that acts with autonomy? It seems like now we're getting to that part.
Yeah, I mean a lu storm.
It is a looser. It's all about it's fundamentally ABODA models using tools and learning from how they are using it. And for example, or first generation of agents with Snowflake intelligence, which gave analytic insights into data, and then Cortex code made acting on Snowflake a lot easier. Snowork is a natural culmination. What it's able to do is take the one hundred tabs that you have open on your computer and create a single environment that brings together things like that.
So not only can you get information about something you want, how is the customer doing, she can also take an action, send them an email, or make a recommendation for them. It's that power that's increasing by the day as AI models get stronger and stronger.
The idea, you know, every time you go to an event like human X, you're trying to say, what is the thing that people are excited about what they're talking about. And one of the concepts is you go to bed and you leave your computer to do work overnight and you wake up to tangible results. Is that the idea with this that.
Can be It's one of the consequences we've always said scheduled things like scheduled reports. I'm sure you get something in the morning that's a summary of all of the things that you should know.
You can think of agents as very summary that.
Has taken an action. It hasn't performed a piece of work on the microphaf.
That's right, that's right.
But with these agents, absolutely you can. I have people that are writing code twenty four to seven. They just like set the agent on the task of writing new code to get some feature done, and they give you some instructions, come back check in the morning. I think absolutely these agents are getting better and better at taking actions on your behalf. But part of the magic is
how do you do that in a government bay. How do you have a control plane that says these kinds of actions are fine, but those have large outside world consequence. They really need to be subject to human scrutiny. Increasingly, that's going to be what is needed to make AI succeed.
At scale outside world consequences. You are the man to speak to you today about well, the few or the concern the anxiety of the latest Anthropic model that is being stress tested by forty tech companies because it's so powerfully I can't get into the hands of US made models. What do you make about the step changes that we're seeing models right now and how powerful they were coming.
I think the impact that they're having on software is profound. Software is getting easier to create, and this also means that people can create value faster. I think Anthropic is doing an incredibly responsible thing by taking a model like that which has breakthrough capabilities, especially in code generation, and giving it to a set of their closest partners to ensure that when it comes to security, for example, we are able to plug gaps. Security has always been a
difficult hand done, human led kind of motion. And actually think of this as a big advance where we can systematically make all of our systems they're so critical for our nation, for our own survival a lot more stronger. I actually see this as a positive outcome.
You're at the cutting edge of models.
Of course, you're the co founder Niva, you came on to Snowflake and you work for a long time at Google.
I'm interested actually in how.
You're finding the narrative around Snowflake right now. We actually had the top of the show Brooke Dane on from Golm and Sachs as the management. They love Snowflake and in particular they're liking and wanting to see from application names and from software companies well, more cost optimization, more capital return. Is that something you're having to think about when you've got some of your coders working twenty four hours because they're able to just plug and play while they sleep.
How is that affecting your costs? Well?
I think the return that we get from investing in AI comes back to us many many manyfold. Used to be Last year we had maybe a dozen demos that we would show our customers. They were all kind of cookie cutter. But today I and my sales team is a lot more capable can generate a demo for you in ten minutes if I want. But and that is a lot more personal, It's much more relevant to your business.
AI is making a real difference in how we show people what is possible with Snowflake, and we are getting huge returns in areas like support or even now what we call our SR team. There's a team that keeps Snowflake the system up. They're using the power of Agent DKI to be a lot more effective. SAI has cost, but the returns we get from it. Problems that used to take multiple days to debug and get to the bottom er we can get answers now in ten to
fifteen minutes. There is cost, but I think the returns are more than worth it, definitely for us and for a lot of our customers that are able to do things that honestly were just inconceivable. Just like a year ago where companies like United Drenttals basically just released an app to their sixteen hundred branches, and what are questions these branches have about the current state of the business. They can just get it interactively. That is game changing for that.
That's Bloomberg Intelligence are in house research arms thesis that as company use of agents grows, you will benefit just very quickly. Where you seeing that written true, The most.
Beautiful part right now is across the data life cycle. It's increasing migrations because getting data into a place like Snowflake where the data is AI ready has an added impetus Because of AI, it's also automating the process of migration. So people are bringing in more data sets, they're building more with products like Snowflake Intelligence because they can get value faster, distributed more broadly. Just here was I wanted to look up what exactly is United Rentals doing in
other areas. That was just a single question into my Snowflake Intelligence app. That's right on my phone. That's value when I want it, where I want it. That's the kind of thing that every CEO that I show this too wants because they want those insights to be available at their fingertips. So it's actually a broad acceleration across
many many things that we do. And as models like mythos come along, we are able to take advantage of them in our products and get our customers to do even more with Snowflake.
Snowflake CEO should I Ramaswami. Ahead of your talkover at human X, we so appreciate you joining the show. Now coming up, social media companies.
Trying to hand and a rebrand and a work. There's a bluebog tech.
TikTok plans to invest one point two billion dollars in a second data center in Finland. It's part of the company's Project Clover effort to move data storage for European users to the continent, the company says. Earlier this month, TikTok abandoned plans for a second data center in Ireland Cara.
Meanwhile, there's more on big tech's new spin in social media, the new Big Tobacco. Tech giants like Meta, TikTok, YouTube are trying to redefine themselves to escape the social stigma. Merg's Alex Lavine is here to talk about your story your tech in depth today. That really builds upon a narrative that maybe was started by Snapchat almost a decade ago, but basically a lot of companies trying to tell us that they're not actually social media companies at all.
It's striking because fifteen or twenty years ago social media was a sexy thing to be the way that today now everyone is an AI need avis or an AI power that as sentiment has and we've entered this moment where it's common vernacular we talk about social media as brain rod and doom scrolling, and we say going analog
is very in vogue. The sentiment has soured and now the social media companies want to be known for something other than either what they started as or in some cases we could argue what they actually are.
Alex reinventions possible are remember twenty twenty one being at number one, hack away and the top is pulled off and Facebook is then meta. There's some case studies you've looked at and your techond depth.
Yeah, so, I mean we looked at how meta, as you said, was trying to rebrand to a metaverse company, and since then we've seen them get into chip making, into AI, into consumer tech. YouTube very much wants to be known just as TV or as really an entertainment and streaming company. TikTok similarly also wants to be known as an entertainment company. Snap has said in the pass it it's a camera company. I think all these are.
It's understandable why the companies want to move in this direction, but the corporate spin is just not seemingly working.
Bloomberg's Alex Lavine with a must red Tech in debt, thank you very much. That does it for this edition of Bloomberg Tech. But this is the story. We have a two week cease fire with the war in Iran broken by Pakistan. Tech stocks pushing higher, particularly chip stocks, AI, infrastructure, hardware, memory, etc. Bitcoin also pushing to the upside. Carro, but we still see continued activity in the region.
Yeah, we do kuwait sair defenses.
For example, I've been dealing with intense attacks from Iran since eight am Wednesday and it's still ongoing, the country's army says in a post on x So we keep abreast on the latest. When it comes to geopolitics and the effect on tech and supply chains, you have to bring it back to that to a certain extent. I forget to check out our podcast finding on the terminal as well as online on Apple, Spotify, an iHeart from New York and San Francisco.
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