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Strategies & Market Trends : The Financial Collapse of 2001 Unwinding -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Elroy Jetson who wrote (12852)	7/31/2024 1:42:31 AM
From: elmatador	Respond to of 13781

The gigawatts controlled by Bitcoin miners could go a long way to quenching the power thirst of the AI giants. Compute Maximalism: The Symbiosis Between Bitcoin Mining and AI A look at how Bitcoin mining and AI can work together to create streamlined data center operations and facilitate efficient power grid management. We anticipate the following: 1. Continued increase in energy demand for both forms of computing. 2. New data center construction as the next bottleneck of expanding High-Performance Computing (HPC_ footprints, with large swaths of bitcoin mining facilities being repurposed for higher margin use cases. 3. Mining hardware will relocate to the fringes, seeking remote locations and variable inefficiencies that HPC workloads are ill-suited to monetize. 4. Co-mingling of both bitcoin mining and HPC in “mullet data centers” will leverage the high revenue potential of HPC and the flexible nature of bitcoin mining to effectively balance power draw and local grids, while outcompeting traditional data center strategies. bitcoinmagazine.com

To: Elroy Jetson who wrote (12852)	8/1/2024 2:29:14 AM
From: elmatador	Respond to of 13781

Nvidia and chip shares soar as Microsoft increases AI spending Chipmaking stocks become increasingly sensitive to investment plans of a handful of Big Tech groups Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang, left, said during an onstage conversation with Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg: ‘You’re operating larger than just about anybody,’ to which Zuckerberg replied: ‘We’re good customers’ Camilla Hodgson, George Steer and Tim Bradshaw in London and Jennifer Hughes in New York YESTERDAY Chip stocks rebounded on Wednesday as investors grew increasingly confident that big companies would continue to spend heavily on the technical infrastructure underpinning artificial intelligence. Stocks including Nvidia, Arm and AMD had fallen sharply on Tuesday amid anxiety about the sustainability of the past year’s huge AI rally, highlighting investors’ sensitivity to the spending plans of a handful of Big Tech groups. Jitters about the AI-related rally grew last week after Google’s quarterly numbers, triggering a rollercoaster few days for technology investors that wiped nearly $500bn off the value of Nvidia in little more than a week. Wednesday’s gains were initially spurred by comments late on Tuesday from Microsoft indicating it would continue to invest heavily in AI. Nvidia closed 13 per cent higher, adding $329bn to its market value in a single day. UK-based chip designer Arm added more than 8 per cent ahead of its earnings due after the market close. AMD — which reported strong demand for its AI chips on Tuesday evening — rose 4 per cent. At one point, the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite had gained more than 3 per cent, but eased to close 2.6 per cent higher. Florian Ielpo, head of macro at investment manager Lombard Odier, said stocks got a boost from a relatively dovish stance by Federal Reserve chair Jay Powell. While the Fed held interest rates steady on Wednesday, investors increasingly believe the central bank will lower them as soon as September. “With that, markets can decide to look through the ups-and-downs of the current earnings season and think of a better-looking macro and micro future,” Ielpo added. Microsoft was the only one of the so-called Magnificent Seven megacap tech stocks to close Wednesday lower, down 1 per cent. The Seattle-based company narrowly missed lofty expectations for cloud growth in its Tuesday earnings report, even as warnings from executives that demand for its AI services continued to exceed available supply of computing power boosted market sentiment around semiconductor suppliers. Microsoft said sales in its closely watched Azure cloud computing platform had risen 29 per cent year on year in the quarter to June 30, missing forecasts for a rise of between 30-31 per cent and below last quarter’s growth rate of 31 per cent. Microsoft’s capital expenditures for the quarter to June 30 hit $19bn, nearly 80 per cent higher than the same period a year ago and ahead of Wall Street’s forecasts. “Nearly all” of that was cloud and AI-related spending, said its chief financial officer Amy Hood. Analysts at TD Cowen said on Wednesday that they had raised their forecasts for Microsoft’s capital spending from $70bn to $84bn for the 2025 financial year. Hood said that half of Microsoft’s capital spending went towards land, building and leases, which “really will be monetised over 15 years and beyond”, while the other half was spent on technical equipment, including chips and servers, which would be “based on demand signals”. Analysts at Deutsche Bank said in a note on Wednesday: “We believe this new disclosure will go a long way to relax investor concerns regarding the timeliness of converting capex to revenue.” Tech companies including Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta are investing tens of billions of dollars a year in data centre capacity to support what they believe will be a huge wave of AI applications, following rapid adoption of OpenAI’s ChatGPT app since its launch nearly two years ago. Analysts at CFRA said they expected Amazon to “ramp up” its capex this year to support its logistics network and the infrastructure underpinning AI, predicting that the total for 2024 was likely to be about $64bn, up from $52.7bn in 2023. Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang said during an onstage conversation with Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg at an annual conference focused on computer graphics that the social media group had installed about 600,000 of its latest AI chips. “You’re operating larger than just about anybody,” he said, to which Zuckerberg replied with a grin: “We’re good customers.” But even as tech leaders boast about their AI firepower, investors have been growing increasingly cautious about the near-term returns from that spending in recent weeks. “The market is turning on the realisation that the rate of profit growth at these Big Tech names is almost certainly going to slow,” said Manish Kabra, head of US equity strategy at Société Générale. “Is Nasdaq going to rise more than 35 per cent every year? Perhaps, but probably not. So the market wobbles, and traders rotate in and out of names like Nvidia.” Chip stocks were further boosted by a Reuters report on Wednesday that new US export restrictions on semiconductor manufacturing equipment to China would exempt allies including the Netherlands and Japan, home to key suppliers ASML and Tokyo Electron. ASML shares rose 5 per cent on the report.