💰 Nvidia's $3T Milestone, 🎥 Kuaishou's Video Revolution, and 🚀 SpaceX's Starship Success
Thomas's Innovation Wrap #81
Greetings,
Here’s your weekly wrap of technology, innovation, and finance news.
💲 Finance
Nvidia briefly surpassed Apple to become the world's second most valuable company, reaching a $3 trillion market cap before returning to third place on Friday.
Nvidia has single-handedly driven more than a third of the gains on Wall Street’s benchmark S&P 500 index this year, according to Bloomberg data, raising fears in some quarters of an unsustainable bubble. The S&P 500 rose 1.2 per cent on Wednesday and is up 12.3 per cent year to date.
Tech analyst Beth Kindig believes the company will reach a $10 trillion market cap by 2030. In 2021, she successfully predicted that Nvidia would surpass Apple’s valuation within 5 years.
In other finance news:
Australia issued its first green bond, raising A$7bn from A$22bn in bids. ~FinanceAsia
Tempus, an AI-enabled precision medicine company founded by one of the founders of Groupon, plans to raise $400m in an upcoming IPO. ~MarketWatch
Greek banks are finally able to pay dividends again after a 16-year hiatus. ~Bloomberg
AI drug researcher QuantumPharm became the first company to IPO under Hong Kong’s new pre-revenue tech listing rules (Chapter 18C). The HK$1.13bn IPO was 10x oversubscribed on day one. ~SCMP
Crypto exchange Kraken may be raising $100m in a pre-IPO round ahead of a 2025 listing. ~The Block
BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT), the largest spot bitcoin ETF, surpassed US$20bn in AUM amidst 15 days of strong inflows averaging US$140m/day, demonstrating the sector's resilience. ~CoinDesk
Supermicro has made it onto the Fortune 500 for the first time, coming in at #498 after a blockbuster year fueled by surging demand for AI hardware. ~Quartz
💻 Chips and Computing
GPUs run hot. Supermicro predicts a 2900% surge in liquid cooling demand, with the share of their racks using this technology increasing from 1% in 2023 to 30% in 2025. Quanta Computer echoes this forecast, expecting liquid cooling to be used in 20-30% of server racks by 2025.
He reasoned that GPUs run hot and consume lots of power, so SuperMicro DLC's ability to keep 80kW to 100kW racks from melting down meets the moment.
Nvidia is seeing growing demand for domestic AI capabilities, with the sovereign AI push expected to bring in nearly $10 billion for Nvidia this year alone, up from zero.
Samsung is leveraging AI to supercharge its chip development, dramatically reducing design time from months to mere hours while simultaneously improving performance, reducing power consumption, and shrinking chip size.
ASML is shipping its latest $380 million high-NA extreme ultraviolet lithography machine to TSMC and Intel this year. The machine can imprint semiconductors with lines just 8 nanometers thick, which is nearly twice as small as the previous generation.
More chips:
Intel has announced the Lunar Lake mobile processor, delivering a substantial boost in AI performance with 48 TOPS of NPU and 120 TOPS of total AI performance. ~Forbes
Some OEMs believe Arm-based Snapdragon processors could account for 40-60% of their Windows PC sales within the next few years. ~DigiTimes
💎 Artificial Intelligence
All eyes are on Apple's WWDC event this week, where the company is expected to unveil a suite of AI-powered features branded as "Apple Intelligence." Apple recently partnered with OpenAI to integrate ChatGPT into the iPhone's operating system.
TikTok competitor Kuaishou has released Kling, a new text-to-video model that rivals OpenAI’s Sora. Unlike Sora, Kling is already in consumers' hands in China, and the example videos are quite impressive.
Pika, an AI video-generation startup, has raised $80 million at a $470 million valuation to scale up its technology.
High-Flyer Capital Management, a quantitative hedge fund in China, has leveraged its AI expertise from trading to develop DeepSeek-V2, a powerful open-source AI model that rivals leading western efforts. The model's low cost, approximately US$0.28 per million output tokens, has sparked a price war among Chinese AI providers.
Carr said the model came close to matching Meta’s latest Llama 3 model but with lower pricing. Its price is about 100th the cost of OpenAI’s GPT-4 and a fifth of Anthropic’s Claude 3 Haiku.
Alibaba also unveiled Qwen2, an AI model claiming to surpass Meta's Llama 3 in various benchmarks, while Stability AI has released an open-source model for generating audio clips from text. Meanwhile, Canadian generative AI startup Cohere has secured US$450m in funding led by Nvidia and Salesforce, propelling its valuation to US$5bn as it competes with OpenAI.
Also in AI:
CyberAgent, Japan’s leading digital ad agency, is using AI to dramatically boost advertising productivity, with the goal of fully automating the creation of high-performing ads. ~Nikkei XTech
WhatsApp added a new AI assistant specifically designed to help the 200+ million businesses that use the platform to chat with customers. ~Bloomberg
Microsoft has developed a cutting-edge AI weather forecasting system called Aurora that can make global predictions in minutes, rivalling traditional systems that rely on supercomputers. ~Phys.org
eBay introduced an AI-powered background-enhancement tool that automatically removes and replaces image backgrounds. ~TechCrunch
Shutterstock made $104m in revenue last year (out of $875m) from licensing its collection of images and video to AI companies for training their models. ~Bloomberg
Spiideo, a Swedish sports streaming startup, has raised US$20m to enhance its AI-powered automated camera system. The system can broadcast live sports events with minimal human involvement. ~TNW
A new AI coffee bean sorter developed in Taiwan can process beans twice as fast as manual sorting with an impressive 95% accuracy rate. ~Taipei Times ☕
🛰️ Space
SpaceX's Starship rocket completed a successful test flight, marking a major milestone in the company's plans for reusable spacecraft capable of missions to the Moon and Mars.
Boeing's Starliner spacecraft successfully launched and safely delivered astronauts to the International Space Station. This is a significant milestone for NASA, as Starliner will now serve as a second commercial vehicle for ferrying astronauts to the ISS.
Australian scientists have developed a breakthrough AI system that can detect bushfires from space 500 times faster than traditional methods by processing hyperspectral imagery onboard cube satellites. The technology has the potential to significantly improve early fire detection and disaster response.
Other Space News:
Astroscale, a leader in the emerging industry of orbital debris removal, saw its shares jump 86% above their IPO price on its Tokyo debut. The company is now worth ~A$1.5bn. ~Bloomberg
China's Chang'e-6 mission achieved a historic first by returning samples from the moon's far side. ~Forbes
India's Agnikul Cosmos successfully launched the country's first 3D-printed semi-cryogenic rocket engine. ~Space.com
⚙️ Mobility
Joby Aviation, a leader the electric air taxis, has acquired the autonomous division of Xwing in an all-stock deal that will help accelerate Joby's development of self-flying technology.
Archer Aviation moved closer to flying passengers in electric air taxis after receiving a key certification from the FAA. This effectively allows Archer to become an airline, and they expect to begin offering services as early as next year.
BYD and Nio have won approval from Chinese regulators to test their automated driving technology on public roads, joining an initial batch of 9 automakers to gain this permission in China.
💊 Health
Moderna's mRNA vaccine for RSV has been approved for adults 60 and older, making it the first mRNA vaccine approved for a non-Covid disease. The vaccine showed strong efficacy in clinical trials.
Canadian company Optimi Health has been granted a license to export psilocybin and MDMA pills to Australia for patient use, marking a milestone in the potential growth of medical psychedelic drugs.
A new study used AI to rapidly mine a vast amount of microbial genomic data and identify nearly 1 million potential new antibiotics (see the paper).
79% of the molecules, which were representative of the 1m molecules discovered, could kill at least one microbe – meaning they could serve as a potential antibiotic.
🔗 Blockchain and Crypto
Bitcoin miners are increasingly shifting their focus to artificial intelligence, seeking to capitalise on the surging demand for AI computing infrastructure. Core Scientific, for instance, has inked a $3.5 billion deal to provide power to cloud provider CoreWeave for machine learning use cases.
Core Scientific said the agreement, which expands upon an existing partnership between the two companies, will add revenue of more than $3.5 billion over the course of the contract. Core Scientific shares jumped about 30% on Tuesday morning.
After the deal's announcement, it was revealed that CoreWeave had made an unsolicited proposal to acquire Core Scientific for $1 billion in cash on June 3, which the company rejected.
Robinhood is expanding its crypto offerings by acquiring Bitstamp for $200 million.
The Sandbox has raised $20 million at a $1 billion valuation to continue building out its decentralised user-generated content metaverse platform.
🧱 Advanced Materials
Scientists in the UK and Japan have used AI to develop a powerful iron-based superconducting magnet that could make MRI machines more affordable and accessible. The new magnet meets the strength and stability requirements for use in MRI machines (see the paper).
Australian researchers have developed an ultra-thin film that could make night vision technology accessible to everyday consumers in the form of lightweight, wearable lenses. The new approach uses an efficient metasurface to convert infrared light to visible light, without the bulky equipment required by traditional night vision devices (see the paper).
⚡ Other Snippets
Fast Company profiled Australian startup 5B and its innovative accordion-like solar panel system, which can be installed 5 to 10 times faster than traditional solar installations.
"Historically, solar farms have been built like a multimillion-piece puzzle in a [field], often in extreme heat," says David Griffin, CEO of 5B. "It's expensive, it's high risk, and it's increasingly difficult to cost-effectively scale, as solar farms become larger and more remote."
Palmer Luckey, the founder of Oculus and Anduril, has launched a new "Game Boy" called the ModRetro Chromatic. Priced at A$307, the handheld is set to launch for Christmas but can be pre-ordered now.
“I don’t see this as a way to make money, I see it as the way to make the world’s best tribute to the Game Boy, something that I’ll be proud of for a very long time.”
Have a great week,
Thomas
About Thomas Rice
Thomas Rice co-founded Minotaur Capital, a technology-driven, AI-led global equities fund, and is based in Sydney, Australia. He can be found on the platform-formerly-known-as-Twitter at @thomasrice_au.