#ai-chips

#ai-chips

Our investment in purpose-built government AI and cloud infrastructure will fundamentally transform how federal agencies leverage supercomputing,

After a slow start on Tuesday, all the major indices began to rally by noon and finished well in the green by the close. The initial downturn was sparked by news that Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) was in talks with Meta Platforms Inc. ( NASDAQ: META) to sell them its custom AI chips. Google's own specialized chips, called Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), are optimized for AI and machine learning workloads and are typically used in its own data centers. NVIDIA Inc. ( NASDAQ: NVDA) was down almost 3% by the close on the news, which started the early selling, and while the rest of the indices recovered, the chip giant finished the day in the red.

This morning, the U.S. Department of Commerce announced September retail sales data, which showed sales began slowing even before the government shutdown through the economy for a loop. Sales increased 0.2% in September nationwide, slower than August's 0.6% gain. Worse, essentially all the increase in September "sales" came in the form of price hikes on products. Prices rose 0.3% in the month, and if you back out that increase, shopping-sales actually declined 0.1%.

Apple ( NASDAQ:AAPL ) continues to dominate the tech landscape as a powerhouse in consumer electronics and services, with its stock delivering robust returns for investors amid the artificial intelligence (AI) boom. Valued at over $4 trillion, the company thrives on its integrated ecosystem, where custom silicon plays a pivotal role in driving performance gains across iPhones, Macs, and emerging AR/VR devices.

If Musk's recent responses on X are any indication, it would appear that Tesla's AI8 will be used by the CEO's other companies, and its applications would literally extend out of this world. Tesla's AI8 could extend beyond vehicles Musk's update came on the heels of his recent comments, where he revealed that Tesla was not just working on its AI5 and AI6 chips. The company is also designing AI7 and AI8. This comment caught a lot of attention, with some wondering why Tesla feels the need to design an AI8 chip when AI4 seems on track to be a good fit for autonomous driving.

Amazon added 3.8 GW of power in the last 12 months, expects another >1 GW in Q4, and plans to double AWS power capacity again by 2027. Power is becoming the main bottleneck for the industry, but Amazon is aggressively adding and immediately monetizing capacity. Trainium2 is "fully subscribed," already a multibillion-dollar business, and grew 150% q/q. Today it's mostly very large customers (example: Anthropic training Claude on ~500,000 Trainium2 chips, going to ~1 million).

The $1.65 trillion chip giant Broadcom cut staff earlier this week. The cuts on Thursday affected staff largely in sales, as well as customer success, account management, and solutions, according to LinkedIn posts and a person familiar with the matter. It's unclear how many roles were affected. Broadcom has been making rolling cuts at the company, including at software firm VMware, which it acquired in late 2023. VMware's workforce has been slashed by roughly in half, Business Insider reported earlier this year.