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This is Bloomberg Tech coming up.
Mark Zuckerberg personally assembling a super intelligence team to help Meta hit artificial general intelligence.
Plus.
Apple expands its relationship with Open AI and introduces a new software redesign called liquid Glass. We'll recap WWDC.
And we speak with the ULA CEO about the spat between Elon Musk and Donald Trump and what it means for the space industry.
But first we check out what's happening in the markets, some cautious trading. We've got big bond sales, fifty eight billion dollars, a three year debt coming due. We keep an eye on what the yields are doing, but we also keep an eye on what's happening in London, China. The talks continue. We're cleaning onto games up about a tenth of a percent. Remember the S and P near a record high ed. What are you looking at?
Our top story and that is Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg assembling this super intelligence team. Bloomberg Reporting citing sources that he wants fifty people. He wants them sitting close to him at HQ all to go after Agi and in Meta's case, the stock kind of up with the focus of the markets on trade talks right now. But this is very much Caro founder mode activated.
Let's tick in on the founder mode. Brnimbos kert Wagner joins us now, who helped break down this story, and it feels as Oh, Mark Zuckerberg is rallying his troops, has got his own personal WhatsApp for this well party, he calls it.
That's right.
We've been told that he's essentially more involved in recruiting for this team than he has ever been at the company in more than twenty years. This is something that has you know, he's had a fire lit under him back in April when their Lama four model was released and quite frankly disappointed people, right, not only disappointed experts outside the company who are reviewing the model, but disappointed people internally. And we're told that Zuckerberg at that time
really said, Okay, I need to be heavily involved. I need to go out and recruit these people myself to get the absolute best talent and that is what he has spent his last two months doing, literally hosting people at his homes in Palo Alto and like Tahoe to try and close these deals and sign these these AI experts and scientists.
I've been hearing for a while that Meta is offering like salaries of two million dollars plus to a lot of engineering talent. But Mark Zuckerberg is doing the phone calls right. The question now is what is the motivation, you know, Meta versus the rest of the field.
When it comes to the pursuit of Agi.
Yeah, everyone's going after Agi.
And the way it was described to me by someone the other day is, look, you know, it doesn't matter if you're the third person, the third company to get to AGI. It only matters if you're first.
Right.
Not only is that going to be a feather in your cap for future recruiting for you know, kind of the symbolism of being the first company to get there, but it's also going to give you a massive head start, as you know, for your products. So if Meta is to get their first Meta AI's chatbot is going to be more widely adopted, their ray banglasses will be more widely adopted.
So the idea of getting to AGI is.
A massive race because of all of these other implications. And that's one of the reasons that Zuckerberg, who is super super competitive by the way, that's why he's putting himself at the forefront of this effort.
At Meta right now, chez.
Been winning nineteen percent if you're looking at the competitive street code. But what about Scale AI and the investment there, how does it fit in?
Yeah, So, as we reported over the weekend, a multi billion dollar investment is expected to go into Scale AI.
I think there's sort of two parts to this one.
There's the investment in what SCALEI is doing as a business, the tech. Also the sort of relationships that they've developed with with the government and having clients like that, I think is something that's appealing to Meta, who has not historically been in that bitline of business. But I think there's also a recruiting element to this story. Right Alex Wang, the CEO of Scale AI, is expected to join this new super intelligence team that we reported about last night.
I believe there are other Scale AI employees who were probably contribute to this team as well, So there's sort of a sharing of talent as well that I think is a part of this expected deal which I imagine we may hear about sometime in the very near future.
Kurt, when Zuckerberg is inviting these engineers into his homes like in Lake Tahoe, What is his pitch? What a source is saying that he thinks Meta is doing well? What Meta has an advantage in over the rest of the field.
He's leaning quite heavily into Meta's resources.
You know, he's from what we've heard, he's talked about the cash flow at the company, the strong advertising business, and the fact that they have the tens of billions of dollars on hand to go pursue these very spense of AI improvements.
Right.
A lot of the other companies aired as you know, they're about raising money. They're out fundraising constantly to try and get that cash flow in the building. Meta already has that. So here's out saying, look, we have the resources. I'm giving you the runway to do all of this stuff. You know, come work for me where you will never want for anything, essentially, right, So a big part of the push is Meta as a financial behemoth here, who can actually get this thing done?
Behemoth. I wish we had more time to discuss that. Bloombo's Kurt Wagner, thank you very much. Sticking with AI, Apple introduced AI powered features at its Developers conference, including an expanded relationship with open Ai, but a new software redesign called liquid Glass, with a transparent menu and a glassy look.
Bloombo's Mark gum And has.
All the details in our discussion of Apple WWDC. We say that liquid Glass is the most significant design overhaul for an OS interface ever.
What did you make of it? And what do we need to know?
Yeah, So the significance of this interface change is how broad it is.
Right, It's available.
On all of Apple's devices. This is the first time they're doing a user interface revamp across all the devices. And it's also interesting because it sets the stage for future Apple devices. Right in terms of hardware, the Apple devices are going to get more of glassy, Right. You're going to see curve glass edges on the twentieth anniversary iPhone in two years. So having an olive glass interface with a lot of transparency sets the stage for that.
And so from that standpoint, it's great. I've been using the new UI on all of my devices since yesterday when the betas came out, and I think it's really great, and I think it's also going to improve dramatically between now in September when it's all released. And so if you're a developer and you have an extra phone or you want to take a little bit of a risk, I would encourage anyone to try out the new look.
So that's cool. But why then, unless like Angelo Zino saying this whole event was a dud, why is there such a deafening silence around Siri?
For example, Mark Well, because Wall Street basically cares about buzzwords because buzzwords are wike at the share price moving in either direction. And you didn't hear a whole lot as we anticipated and talked about in advance about AI or Siri. Apple is essentially taking an AI gap year at the worst possible time. They're not promising any new AI features right now. I don't anticipate that they're going to start doing so again until June of twenty twenty six.
Apple Intelligence obviously was a flop. They're doing their best to try to show people that they are here too with AI without going too far and making these promises. What they have done is partnered with Chat GPT and a few more features, so you can take a screenshot now and chat, GPT can analyze what's on your screen. Of course you could have done that with the app already, but this is a bit of a shortcut. And then they have new developer tools that happened to third party lms,
including JGBT. But yeah, to be clear, as we've been talking about the fact that Apple is nowhere near any of its competition in AI is a massive failure on all levels.
The stock fell one point two percent yesterday Monday. It's now up around one point two percent, so we've kind of balanced out the trading in this Market's more to do with trade talks than I guess anything idiosyncratic. I found that probably the most significant piece of news relevance WWDC to be that access for third party developers to on device llms, because you think about the app store that we have today and the ecosystem across operating systems.
The whole point of WWDC mark is the developers right explain that piece of news and why the developer community cheered it.
So the foundation models that are available for Apple's own AI features are now available to third party developers, so there are frameworks and software tools now for developers to build their own AI Features'll be making it easier than ever for developers, and by the way, there's millions of them on the Apple platforms to develop AI futures for
their own apps. But just a step back in terms of the features themselves, right, Most consumers who use these devices just want them to be better, want them to be easier, and so Apple went after the core competencies.
If you look at the.
Three apps that were revamped and improved yesterday, the three were Safari, Phone and Camera, which are probably the most used apps on most people's iPhones.
And then two additional apps that.
Got a little bit of love were Photos and Messages, which probably rand out the top five. They weren't as significant as the first three. So Apple made major improvements to the apps that people are using every day. For iPad users, the new iPad operating system finally makes the iPad like a computer, right, and so that is a huge feature that people, including myself, have been asking for
for years. So there's a lot of us in the Apple community who are actually pretty thrilled with the improvements that were made. But taking a step back still, this is focusing on these os franchises that have been around for decades rather than pushing us into these next generation in our faces based around AI. So you have to juggle both. Apple's doing a great job managing the current, but we've not seen a lot that's giving us confidence about the future.
Bloomberg's Mark German, We thank you so much on the Apple round up. Meanwhile, let's just look at what Alphabet, the parent company of Google, is up to in terms of it stop climbing following a report from Reuters that it has signed a deal to provide cloud services to open Ai. Open Ai will use the additional computing capacity for training and running its models. Both companies declining to comment Reuters it's a game of front of.
Me zed okay, coming up, Trade talks resume in London between the United States and China. We're going to have the latest details next. This is Bloomberg Tech.
We are doing well with chin China's not easy.
We want to open up China, and if we don't open up China, maybe we won't do anything.
But we want to open up China.
It'll be a great thing for China, a great thing for the rest of the world.
That was President Trump commenting after the first day of trade talks between the US and China in London, and day two is now underway. Bloomberg's Amory Horden joins US from London. Amh what do we need to know?
Well, you need to know is at the moment there is no update. We still see both delegations having another day of trade talks. They did have a break around two o'clock local time. They have been back at the negotiating table inside Lancaster House. We were waiting to hear for potentially any breakouts in terms of the United States getting what they want, which is an advanced pace of rare earth and magnets, and the Chinese side getting a bit of an easing of export controls, which is what
Kevin Hassett, the NEC director had said. At the moment, talk are still ongoing, but there is really a time clock to this because Treasury Secretary Scott Besson has to be back on Capitol Hill tomorrow he is testifying in front of the House Ways and Means Committee, So they really are in a time crunch to wrap up these negotiations.
Talking of timing, Amory an interestingly timed piece in the People's Daily over in China the front page Huawei found us saying, look, these restrictions on us, then I'll say about.
Right, And that's what a lot of people were talking about, remember during Deep Seek. And this is something that the Nvidia CEO, Jensen Wang had said to me when I caught up with him briefly before he had that meeting a month or so ago with Donald Trump in the Oval Office, the President of the United States. Obviously they likely were probably going to talk about their chip controls. And he told ed recently that China has become quite formidable and that China is neck and neck really with
the United States. They are not far behind. And that's really what the Huawei founder was saying in this local daily. It is really notable that in these talks in London, very different than the talks four weeks ago in Geneva, that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik is here.
It means that those chips.
Potentially those export controls are on the table.
I'm Marie Hoden doing amazing work in London. We really appreciate it. Look, let's just check in on how Chinese stocks have reacted to all of this. They have been volatile. We've been higher early in trade, but at the beginning it really was down and down. We remain in the red once again. This is the trade talks that we say have been resuming. You're seeing Golden Dragon index and as that golden draggoning an index off by three tenths of a percent as we speak, Ali Baba off by
eight tenths. JD off by more than a percentage point. Tiffany Wade is here on place to say, senior portfolio manager at Columbia thread Needle Investments manages a cool six one hundred and twenty one billion dollars in assets. Tiffany, how much is riding on these days of talks? How much do you think ultimately does make a decision for you within your portfolio.
Yeah, I think we've seen the market react really well over the last couple of weeks to certainly a reduction, and some of the terriffs are China and other companies countries as well. This would be very critical, I think, especially for the tech sector, especially talking about export restrictions. There are certainly parts of the tech sector, like Nvidia most recently the electronic design automation companies that have been
very hurt by export restrictions in tariffs. So for certain pockets of the market, I think this would be very impactful to see some of these trade negotiations play out.
Tiffany, how much of a risk premium is the president when you look at any corner of the technology market and you say, I am going to bet on a company that this president has recently spoken favorably about or not favorably about, as the case may be, and talking of course about the volatility that he brings to any trade negotiation, Yeah, I think.
It creates a lot of pause when you're thinking about companies that may be in focus from the president. Companies that have been talked about are sectors that have been talked about recently. But the worry as an investor is what will happen next that we haven't planned for or
that we didn't see coming. So I think that, you know, companies that have been spoken about, have been targeted, are reflecting a bit of a risk premium, and you see this in a lot of the tech companies that are trading, you know, at discounts to where they were trading over the last couple of years, certainly relative to their own multiples, but also relative to the index as well, so I
think that's reflected in some of the stocks. But again, the concern is what happens next because it's hard to predict.
Boy does Tim Cook want to know what happens next as well? And his own salt trading below usual multiples. They've been in the eye this storm. When it comes to the supply chain side of things, what do you make of the desire to make companies ultimately build a US perhaps be less profitable. Does that make them as appetizing as an investment?
It certainly doesn't. It hurts the profit margins, as you mentioned. I think it'll be interesting to see how all of this plays out because it takes multiple years to build a factory here. It probably takes longer than you know President Trump is going to.
Be in office.
So the announcement we've seen from companies building here, you know, maybe some of them make sense economically, maybe some of them are paying lip service.
To the administration. But it'll see.
It'll be interesting to see how this plays out. But it's it's interesting that Apple specifically has has been a little bit more defiant.
More defined, but perhaps more distracted. Is what people worry about the fact that they are not playing catch up to this AI game is people had hope with WWDC. What did you make the event?
Yeah, I thought the event was a little bit disappointing for Apple. We were expecting to hear more exciting updates around Apple intelligence, around AI, maybe around AI being incorporated into Siri, and instead I think we saw more updates on improving the user interface, more features on existing applications.
You know, the applications that maybe incorporate the most AI would be their updates on visual intelligence or live translation, but those also feel like they're playing a little bit of catch up versus applications that are already in the market from other providers.
And my Bloomberg terminal, Apple seems to be the top holding in the Columbia Large Growth funds, so let me know if that's right. But I think like so far this year, Apple has been trading on trade risk, right on tariff risk, And when we were like literally in the car on the way to APPLEWWDC, we're asking ourselves, has this name started trading on that AI concern yet or not.
I think we've seen that a little bit around the WWSDC event, and we certainly saw that after the event yesterday where people were a little bit disappointed that there wasn't a big AI announcement coming out of the keynote presentation. So I think we're seeing that a little bit. But Apple, like a lot of big tech companies, I think, are still trying to figure out their strategy around AI and are putting a lot of money behind it.
Tiffany, you set yourself up for this by saying the big question is what happened happens next for the technology sector?
What happens next?
I think we're still very positive on the tech sector for the rest of the year. There's a lot of good tail wins for the sector. Obviously, tariffs and next four restrictions could come out of field for the rest of the year, but there's a lot of good tailwinds for earnings growth, including AI investment that continues to be
very strong across multiple parts of the market. If we look at earnings growth expectations for the rest of the year or for the full year, the tech sector is still expected to grow much faster than the rest of the market. And as I mentioned before, a lot of the valuations across certain subgroups of tech look very attractive versus their history.
So we're still very positive on the sector.
Are you positive on the commitment of capital coming from these companies? Look at what Mount Zuckerbug's doing, devoting his own time, his own dining table, but also shape quantities of cash to make sure that he tries to win agis.
Isn't it?
Yeah? Absolutely? And he's not alone.
Microsoft, Apple, Alphabet, Amazon are all making huge investments into AI, and I think that has a great knock on effect for parts of the semiconductor equipment, parts of software, other parts of the economy, including industrials that all feed into that AI infrastructure.
Tiffany wade Be of fread Needo Investments, thank you very much.
Uber and Wave. They are set to plan their first trial run of fully autonomous vehicles in London. It is a move that could pay the way for commercial robotaxi services in the United Kingdom. Let's get on what this really means with Andrew Grant of Bloomberg NEF and really your focus and analysis here is what London means for the growth story of robotaxes. More broadly, why is it difficult to trial run there?
Well, I mean, let me start by saying that London is a big market for Uber. They often cited as one of their five most important cities globally and the earnings calls and their reports. So this is a big development that they are working with their partners to start
deploying to planning to deploy robotaxes in London. But these types of streets are different from where we've seen the majority of robotaxes in the past, places like Phoenix, Arizona in Austin, Texas, where you have varying weather conditions, roads that haven't been around for nearly as long as some of the London streets which have their own quirks.
You lead our coverage of mobility right at BNF, and you know that in any robotaxi setup, you have the self driving tech, hardware, software, somebody owns the vehicle, somebody operates the ride hailing app, and somebody manages the fleet. I'm looking at this announcement from Uber and Wave and I think there's a few names and pieces missing.
Yeah, exactly.
In a robotaxi service, it really does take a village. You need different parts of this value chain that are going to contribute different skill sets and different capital requirements and different payoff periods. So if you are looking at what is essentially a partnership here between two tech companies Wave and Uber that mostly work with software, there's a few other players that need to manage the hardware and
manage the on the ground operations. So as you mentioned, that will be things like people like Company that will
actually end up owning the vehicle. And in the past, Uber's been a bit hesitant to own and operate large fleets of vehicles, but they have shown that they are willing to take over some of the operational aspects with some of their partnerships, for instance, their partnership with Weimo in Austin, some of their partnership with with we Ride which is underway in the United Arab Emirates, where they're
taking over some of the fleet operating aspects. But you did right there, we're missing kind of who's going to own these fleets, who they're going to work with on the charging side, if they are electric vehicles, which they do seem likely to be at this stage, and all the other details around maintenance and repair of these vehicles as they function as robotaxis.
Andrew Grant, a Bloomberg ne ef these on ability coverage. We really appreciate it. Welcome actively Medtech and Caroline Hyder.
New York and I Meed love Low in San Francisco.
When I look at technology markets right now, it's kind of the mag seven, those big megacap tech names that are driving the narrative. Part of that is because investors keeping YEM trade talks in London. But there are some iliosyncretic items, some news items. We talked earlier about the reports of open Ai looking to Alphabet and Google for more cloud capacity.
Sign called liquid Glass. We'll recap WWDC and.
We speak with the ULA CEO about the spat between Elon Musk and Donald Trump and what it means for the space industry.
But first we check out what's happening in the markets, some cautious trading. We've got big bond sales, fifty eight billion dollars, a three year debt coming due. We keep an eye on what the yields are doing, but we also keep an eye on what's happening in London, China, US. The talks continue. We're cleaning onto games up about a tenth of a percent. Remember the S and P near a record highed.
What are you looking at our top story, and that is Meta CEO Mark zuckerberb assembling this super intelligence team. Bloomberg reporting citing sources that he wants fifty people, he wants them sitting close to him at HQ, all to go after AGI. And in Meta's case, the stock kind of up with the focus of the markets on trade talks right now. But this is very much Caro founder mode activated.
Let's tick in on the founder mode. Primos kert Wagner joins us now, who helped break down this story, and it feels as oh, Mark Zuckerberg is rallying his troops, has got his own personal WhatsApp for this well party, he calls it.
That's right.
We've been told that he's essentially more involved in recruiting for this team than he has ever been at the company in more than twenty years. This is something that has you know, he's had a fire lit under him back in April when their LAMAFOV model was released and quite frankly disappointed people, right, not only disappointed experts outside the company who are reviewing the model, but disappointed people internally. And we're told that Zuckerberg at that time really said, Okay,
I need to be heavily involved. I need to go out and recruit these people myself to get the absolute best talent. And that is what he has spent his last two months doing, literally hosting people at his homes in Palo Alto and like Tahoe to try and close these deals and sign these these AI experts and scientists.
I've been hearing for a while that Meta is offering like salaries of two million dollars plus to a lot of engineering talent. But Mark Zuckerberg is doing the phone calls right. The question now is what is the motivation you know, Meta versus the rest of the field when it comes to the pursuit of Agi.
Yeah, everyone's going after Agi.
And the way it was described to me by someone the other day is, look, you know, it doesn't matter if you're the third person, the third company to get to Agi. It only matters if you're first.
Right.
Not only is that going to be a feather in your cap for future recruiting for you know, kind of the symbolism of being the first company to get there, but it's also going.
To give you a massive head start, as you know, for your products.
If Meta is to get their first Meta AI's chatbot is going to be more widely adopted. Their ray ban glasses will be more widely adopted. So the idea of getting to AGI is a massive race because of all of these other implications. And that's one of the reasons that Zuckerberg, who is super super competitive by the way, that's why he's putting himself at the forefront of this effort.
At Meta right now, chez.
Been winning nineteen percent if you're looking at the competitive street code. But what about Scale AI and the investment there, how does it fit in?
Yeah, So, as we reported over the weekend, a multi billion dollar investment is expected to go into Scale AI.
I think there's sort of two parts to this one.
There's the investment in what SCALEAI is doing as a business, the tech. Also the sort of relationships that they've developed with with the government and having clients like that, I think is something that's appealing to Meta, who has not historically been in that bitline of business. But I think there's also a recruiting element to this story. Right Alex Wang, the CEO of Scale AI, is expected to join this new super intelligence team that we reported about last night.
I believe there are other Scale AI employees who were probably contribute to this team as well. So there's sort of a sharing of talent as well that I think is a part of this expected deal, which I imagine we may hear about sometime in the very near future.
Kurt, when Zuckerberg is inviting these engineers into his homes like in Lake Tahoe, what is his pitch? What a source is saying that he thinks Meta is doing well? What Meta has an advantage in over the rest of the field.
He's leaning quite heavily into Meta's resources.
You know, he's from what we've heard, he's talked about the cash flow at the company, the strong advertising business, and the fact that they have the tens of billions of dollars on hand to go pursue these very expensive AI improvements. Right, a lot of the other companies, and as you know, they're about raising money. They're out fundraising constantly to try and get that cash flow in the building. Meta already has that. So he's out saying, look, we
have the resources. I'm giving you the runway to do all of this stuff. You know, come work for me where you will never want for anything, essentially, Right, So a big part of the push is meta as a financial behemoth here, who can actually get this thing done?
Behemoth? I wish we had more time to discuss that. Bloombo's Kirk Wagner, thank you very much. Sticking with AI, Apple introduced AI powered features at its Developers conference, including an expanded relationship with open Ai, but a new software redesign called liquid Glass, with a transparent menu and a glassy look. Bloombo's Mark Gunman has all the details in our discussion of Apple WWDC. We say that liquid Glass is the most significant design overhaul for an OS interface ever.
What did you make of it? And what do we need to know?
Yeah, So the significance of this interface change is how broad it is. Right, it's available on all of Apple's devices. This is the first time user interface revamp across all the devices. And it's also interesting because it sets the stage for future Apple devices. Right in terms of hardware, the Apple devices are going to get more of glassy.
Right.
You're going to see curve glass edges on the twentieth anniversary iPhone in two years. So having an old glass interface with a lot of transparency sets the stage for that.
And so from that standpoint, it's great I've been using the new UI on all of my devices since yesterday when the betas came out, and I think it's really great, and I think it's also going to improve dramatically between now in September when it's all released, and so if you're a developer and you have an extra phone or you want to take a little bit of a risk, I would encourage anyone to try out the new look.
So that's cool. But why then analysts like Angelo Zino saying this whole event was a dud? Why is there such a deafening silence around Siri? For example, Mark.
Well because Wall Street basically cares about buzzwords because buzzwords are wok at the share price moving in either direction. And you didn't hear a whole lot as we anticipated and talked about in advance about AI or Siri. Apple is essentially taking an AI gap year at the worst possible time. They're not promising any new AI features right now. I don't anticipate that they're going to start doing so again until June of twenty twenty six. Apple Intelligence obviously
was a flop. They're doing their best to try to show people that they are here too, with AI without going too far and making these promises. What they have done is partnered with chat GPT in a few more features, so you can take a screenshot now and chat GPT can analyze what's on your screen. Of course you could have done that with the app already, but this is a bit of a shortcut. And then they have new developer tools that tap into third party lms, including jet
GBT but yet to be clear. As we've been talking about the fact that Apple is nowhere near any of its competition in AI is a massive failure on all levels.
The stock fell one point two percent yesterday Monday. It's now up around one point two percent, so we've kind of balanced out the trading in this market's more to do with trade talks than I guess anything idiosyncratic. I found probably the most significant piece of news relevance WWDC to be that access for third party developers to on device lllms, because you think about the app store that
we have today and the ecosystem across operating systems. The whole point of WWDC mark is the developers right explain that piece of news and why the developer community cheered it.
So the foundation models that are available for Apple's own AI features are now available to third party developers, so there are frameworks and software tools now for developers to build their own AI features. So this will be making it easier than ever for developers. By the way, there's millions of them on the Apple platforms to develop AI
futures for their own apps. But just to step back in terms of the features themselves, right, most consumers who use these devices just want them to be better, want them to be easier, and so Apple went after the core competencies. If you look at the three apps that were revamped and improved yesterday, the three were Safari, Phone and Camera, which are probably the most used apps on most people's iPhones. And then two additional apps that got a little bit of love were Photos and Messages, which
probably rund out the top five. They weren't as significant as the first three. So Apple made major improvements to the apps that people are using every day. For iPad users, the new iPad operating system finally makes the iPad like a computer, right, and so that is a huge feature that people, including myself, have been asking for for years. So there's a lot of us in the Apple community who are actually pretty thrilled with the improvements that were made, but.
Taking a step back still.
This is focusing on these OS franchises that have been around for decades rather than pushing us into these next generation in our faces based around AI.
So you have to juggle both.
Apple's doing a great job managing the currents, but we've not seen a lot that's giving us confidence about the future.
Bloomberg's Mark German, We thank you so much on the Apple round up. Meanwhile, let's just look at what Alphabet, the parent company of Google, is up to in terms of its stock climbing. Following a report from Reuters, then it has signed a deal to provide cloud services to open Ai. Open Ai will use the additional computing capacity for training and running its models. Both companies declining to comment Reuters. It's a game of front of me zed okay.
Coming up, Trade talks resume in London between the United States and China. We're going to have the latest details next. This is Bloomberg Tech.
We are doing well with China. China is not easy.
We want to open up China, and if we don't open up China, maybe we won't do anything.
But we want to open up China.
It'll be a great thing for China, a great thing for the rest of the world.
Trump commenting after the first day of trade talks between the US and China in London, and day two is now underway. Bloomberg's Amory Horden joins US from London.
Amh what do we need to know?
Well, what you need to know is, at the moment, there is no update.
We still see both delegations having another day of trade talks. They did have a break around two o'clock local time. They have been back at the negotiating table inside Lancaster House. We were waiting to hear for potentially any breakouts in terms of the United States getting what they want, which is an advanced pace of rare earths and magnets, and the Chinese side getting a bit of an easing of export controls, which is what Kevin Hassett, the NEC director
had said. At the moment, talks are still ongoing, but there is really a time clock to this because Treasury Secretary Scott Bessett has to be back on Capitol Hill tomorrow he is testifying in front of the House Ways and Means Committee, So they really are in a time crunch to wrap up these negotiations.
Talking of timing amory an interestingly timed piece in the People's Daily over in China, the front page, Huawei found us saying, look, these restrictions on us, then I'll say.
Bad, right, And that's what a lot of people were talking about, remember during Deep Seek. And this is something that the Nvidia CEO, Jensen Wang had said to me when I caught up with him briefly before he had that meeting a month or so ago with Donald Trump in the Oval Office, the President.
Of the United States.
Obviously they likely were probably going to talk about their chip controls. And he told ed recently that China has become quite formidable and that China is neck and neck rearly with the United States. They are not far behind. And that's really what the Huawei founder was saying in this local daily. It is really notable that in these talks in London, very different than the talks four weeks ago in Geneva, that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik is here.
It means that those chips, potentially those export controls are on the table.
Iri and doing amazing work in London. We really appreciate it. Look let's just check in on how Chinese stocks have reacted to all of this. They have been volatile. We've been higher early in trade, but at the beginning it really was down and down. We remain in the red once again. This is the trade talks that we say have been resuming. You're seeing Golden Dragon index and as that golden dragging an index off by three tenths of a percent as we speak, Ali Baba off by eight tenths.
JD off by more than a percentage point. Tiffany Wade is here when place to say, senior portfolio manager at Columbia thread Needle Investments Manages is a cool six one hundred and twenty one billion dollars in assets. Tiffany, how much is riding on these days of talks? How much do you think ultimately does make a decision for you within your portfolio.
Yeah, I think we've seen the market react really well over the last couple of weeks to certainly a reduction in some of the tariffs on China and other companies countries as well. This would be very critical, I think, especially for the tech sector, especially talking about export restrictions. There are certainly parts of the text actor like Nvidia most recently the electronic design automation companies that have been
very hurt by export restrictions in tariffs. So for certain pockets of the market, I think this would be very impactful to see some of these trade negotiations play out.
Tiffany, how much of a risk premium is the president when you look at any corner of the technology market and you say, I am going to bet on a company that this president has recently spoken favorably about or not favorably about, as the case may be, and talking of course about the volatility that he brings to any trade negotiation.
Yeah, I think it creates a lot of pause when you're thinking about companies that may be in focus from the president. Companies that have been talked about are sectors that have been talked about recently. But you know, the worry as an investor is what will happen next that we haven't planned for or that we didn't see coming.
So I think that, you know, companies that have been spoken about, have been targeted, are reflecting a bit of a risk premium, and you see this in a lot of the tech companies that are trading, you know, at discounts to where they were trading over the last couple of years, certainly relative to their own multiples, but also relative to the index as well. So I think that's reflected in some of the stocks. But again, the concern is what happens next, because it's hard to predict.
Boy does Tim Cook want to know what happens next as well? And his own stop trading below usual multiples. They've been in the eye this storm. When it comes to the supply chain side of things, what do you make of the desire to make companies ultimately build a US perhaps be less profitable. Does that make them as appetizing as an investment.
It certainly doesn't. It hurts the profit margins.
As you mentioned, I think it'll be interesting to see how all of this plays out because it takes multiple years to build a factory here. It probably takes longer than you know, President Trump is going to be in office. So do the announcement we've seen from companies building here. You know, maybe some of them make sense economically, maybe some of them are paying lip service to the administration, but it'll see. It'll be interesting to see how this
plays out. But it's it's interesting that Apple specifically has has been a lot little bit more defiant.
More defined, but also perhaps more distracted. Is what people worry about, the fact that they are not playing catch up to this AI game as people had hoped with WWDC. What did you make the event?
Yeah, I thought the event was a little bit disappointing for Apple. We were expecting to hear more exciting updates around Apple Intelligence, around AI, maybe around AI being incorporated into Siri, and instead I think we saw more updates on improving the user interface, more features on existing applications. You know, the applications that maybe incorporate the most AI would be their updates on visual intelligence or live translation.
But those also feel like they're playing a little bit of catch up versus applications that are already in the market from other providers.
And my Bloomberg terminal, Apple seems to be the top holding in the Columbia large cap growth funds, so let me know if that's right. But I think like so far this year, Apple has been trading on trade risk, right on tariff risk, and when we were like literally in the car on the way to Apple WWDC, we're losing ourselves. Has this name started trading on that AI concern yet or not.
I think we've seen that a little bit around the WWSDC event, and we certainly saw that after the event yesterday, where people were a little bit disappointed that there wasn't a big AI announcement coming out of the keynote presentation.
So I think we're seeing that a little bit.
But Apple, like a lot of big tech companies, I think, are still trying to figure out their strategy around AI and are putting a lot of money behind it.
Tiffany, you set yourself up for this by saying the big question is what happens next for the technology sector?
What happens next?
I think we're still very positive on the tech sector for the rest of the year. There's a lot of good tailwinds for the sector. Obviously, tariffs and nextpoor restrictions could come out of left field for the rest of the year, but there's a lot of good tailwinds for earnings growth, including AI investment that continues to be very
strong across multiple parts of the market. If we look at earnings growth expectations for the rest of the year or for the full year, the tech sector is still expected to grow much faster than the rest of the market, and as I mentioned before, a lot of the valuations across certain subgroups of tech look very attractive versus their history. So we're still very positive on the sector.
Are you positive on the commitment of capital coming from these companies? Look at what mort Zuckerberg's doing devoting his own time, his own dining table, but also share quantities of cash to make sure that he tries to win agis.
Isn't it? Yeah? Absolutely? And he's not alone.
Microsoft to Apple, Alphabet, Amazon are all making huge investments into AI, and I think that has a great knock on effect for parts of the semiconductor equipment, parts of software, other parts of the economy, including industrials that all feed into that AI infrastructure.
Tiffany Wade of Columbia Freadnido Investments, Thank you very much.
Uber and Wave. They are set to plan their first trial run of fully autonomous vehicles in London. Move that could pay the way for commercial robotaxi services in the United Kingdom. Let's get on what this really means with Andrew Grant of Bloomberg NEF and really your focus and analysis here is what London means for the growth story of robotaxis More broadly, Why is it difficult to trial run that.
Well?
I mean, let me start by saying that London is a big market for Uber. They often cited as one of their five most important cities globally and the earnings calls and their reports. So this is a big development that they are working with their partners to start deploying
or to planning to deploy robotaxis in London. But these types of streets are different from where we've seen the majority of robotaxis in the past, places like Phoenix, Arizona, in Austin, Texas, where you have varying weather conditions, roads that haven't been around for nearly as long as some of the London streets which have their own quirks.
You lead our coverage of mobility right at BNF, and you know that in any robotaxi setup, you have the self driving tech, hardware, software, somebody owns the vehicle, somebody operates the ride hailing app, and somebody manages the fleet. I'm looking at this announcement from Uber and Wave and I think there's a few names and pieces missing.
Yeah, exactly, in a robotaxi service, it really does take a village. You need different parts of this value chain that are going to contribute different skill sets and different capital requirements and different payoff periods. So if you are looking at what is essentially a partnership here between two take companies Wave and Uber that mostly work with software, there's a few other players that need to manage the
hardware and manage the on the ground operations. So as you mentioned, that will be things like people like a
company that will actually end up owning the vehicle. And in the past, Uber's been a bit hesitant to own and operate large fleets of vehicles, but they have shown that they are willing to take over some of the operational aspects with some of their partnerships, for instance, their partnership with Waimo in Austin, some of their partnership with will we Ride, which is underway in the United Arab Emirates, where they're taking over some of the fleet operating aspects.
But you did right there, we're missing kind of who's going to own these fleets, who they're going to work with on the charging side, if they are electric vehicles, which they do seem likely to be at the stage, and all the other details around maintenance and repair of these vehicles as they function as robotaxis.
Andrew Grant, a Bloomberg nef these on ability coverage, we really appreciate it. Now's the breaking news for you because talks are ongoing in London and according to US official US and China trade talks will continue. We're going to bring you any details of what is being discussed at the moment. Amory Horden has been outside of course Lancaster and been thinking about how these talks are evolving, what ultimately it means ed for the focus on semiconductors in particular.
What's we got coming up?
Okay, we're going to be joined by Tory Bruno, United Launch Aliance CEO to discuss the outlook for the space business in the midst of Trump and Elon's spat.
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