Andrew here. I’m at the Masters of Scale Summit in San Francisco, where one big conversation is taking place across this city: Are we in an A.I. bubble? I’ve heard that question multiple times in one day.
The answer is that we are — we just don’t know when it will end. When the dot-com bubble popped, it wasn’t the end of the internet. It just meant that the weakest companies didn’t survive. And that’s probably what will happen again. We take a look at the latest worries about the A.I. rally and more news below.
Foreseeing trouble for A.I.?
Technology companies, bolstered by market fervor for all things artificial intelligence, have committed eye-popping sums of money to build out their A.I. ambitions.
But as tech observers increasingly question whether the spending makes sense, investors appear to be getting warier of signs that the investment spree has lost touch with the financial reality.
The latest: Shares in Oracle fell as much as 7 percent on Tueday after The Information reported, citing internal documents, that the tech giant’s cloud computing business was generating lower profit margins than what Wall Street had been expecting.
From The Information:
In the three months that ended in August, Oracle generated around $900 million from rentals of servers powered by Nvidia chips and recorded a gross profit of $125 million—equal to 14 cents for every $1 of sales, the documents show. That’s lower than the gross margins of many nontech retail businesses.
As sales from the business nearly tripled in the past year, the gross profit margin from those sales ranged between less than 10% and slightly over 20%, averaging around 16%, the documents show.
The report came after a stunning rally in Oracle’s shares, which pushed the company’s stock up 36 percent in one day last month, after it predicted that revenue of its cloud-computing business would rise 700 percent over the next three fiscal years, thanks to deals with the likes of OpenAI.
That said, some commentators cast doubt on whether Oracle’s business was as weak as The Information suggested. John DiFucci, an analyst at Guggenheim Partners, wrote in a research note that Oracle’s gross margins for cloud would probably start out low but grow over time. “The lower cost is not because they are giving it away, but because they can charge less and still make comfortable profit,” he added.
Oracle’s shares closed on Tuesday down only 2.5 percent, and are up in premarket trading on Wednesday.
Broader skepticism about A.I. valuations and spending is still growing. The latest criticism came on Wednesday from the Bank of England: The central bank released minutes from its financial policy committee meeting last week in which participants worried that stock market valuations appeared “stretched” and that A.I.-focused companies appeared especially vulnerable.
The big risk is if “expectations around the impact of A.I. become less optimistic,” officials said, according to minutes of the Financial Policy Committee meeting held on Oct. 2.
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In other A.I. investment news: xAI, Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence start-up, is raising $20 billion in its current funding round, according to Bloomberg. Reportedly among the investors is Nvidia, which is set to invest $2 billion; some of the proceeds from the round will go to xAI buying more of the chipmaker’s processors for use in data centers.
HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING
Tesla introduces cheaper entry-level car models. Elon Musk’s electric vehicle maker said the new versions of the Model 3 and the Model Y would start at around $37,000 and $40,000, about $5,000 less than previous models. That brings the cars’ prices closer to comparable gasoline vehicles, but they will still be higher than their predecessors before the federal E.V. tax credit expired last week. Tesla shares dropped 4.5 percent on Tuesday after the announcement.
Gold rises above $4,000 per ounce for the first time. The price of the precious metal has gained more than 50 percent this year, as investors sell off riskier assets including the U.S. dollar and government bonds. Ray Dalio, the billionaire financier, said on Tuesday that gold was “certainly” more of a haven than the dollar and that its current performance echoed the 1970s, when it surged during high inflation and economic turmoil.
The E.U. proposes doubling steel tariffs to 50 percent. The move, along with decreasing steel import quotas, is meant to protect the bloc’s steel industry from a potential flood of cheap Chinese metal and came in response to sharply higher U.S. duties. But UK Steel, a British industry trade group, described the proposal as the “perhaps the biggest crisis” it has faced; the E.U. accounts for about 80 percent of British steel exports.
Shutdown update
A brief flicker of hope for an end to the shutdown has disappeared again, as the government remains closed. The focus is increasingly turning to the stoppage’s potential damage to the job market and the economy.
Here’s the latest:
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President Trump suggested that a law he signed in 2019 after a five-week shutdown, the Government Employee Fair Treatment Act, may not guarantee back pay to all furloughed government workers. His comments echoed a draft memo from the Office of Management and Budget that indicated that only workers deemed essential may be automatically entitled to pay once the stalemate ends. The president told reporters in the White House that there were some government workers “that really don’t deserve to be taken care of, and we’ll take care of them in a different way.”
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With the release of government jobs data paused during the shutdown, the Carlyle Group published its own read on the labor market: An estimated 17,000 jobs were created in September, well below the 54,000 increase that the Bureau of Labor Statistics’s nonfarm payroll report was expected to reveal on Oct. 3. The shutdown will delay the release of jobless claims and wholesale inventory numbers on Thursday if it continues.
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Flight data firm FlightAware reported that more than 9,000 flight arrivals and departures at U.S. airports were delayed on Monday and Tuesday. Flights were delayed by an average of two hours at Nashville International Airport on Tuesday after the F.A.A. reduced traffic there because of a shortage of air traffic controllers.
The shutdown odds: About half of bettors on Kalshi again expect the shutdown to last more than 20 days, while more than 40 percent are wagering that it will go on for more than 25 days.
A battery-focused power company’s big new round
As demand for power has soared in recent years, both from homeowners and industrial users like data centers, electricity companies have scrambled for ways to meet that need.
Base Power, a nearly three-year-old start-up, is betting big on fleets of batteries — and has raised another big round of financing to support its ambitions, Michael de la Merced writes.
The news: Base Power has raised $1 billion in new funds, just months after collecting $200 million. The new round values the start-up at about $3 billion, not counting the new investment, DealBook hears, more than double its $641 million valuation in April, according to PitchBook.
Participants in the round include existing backers, like Addition and Thrive Capital, and new investors like CapitalG, the Google-affiliated investment firm. (Michael Dell, the tech billionaire and who the father of Zach Dell, Base Power’s co-founder and C.E.O., is not among the investors.)
Base Power’s business model: The company essentially leases and installs residential backup batteries at a discount to competing systems, and sells customers power.
The company then uses software to fill the batteries when electricity is cheap, and draw from them when power is more expensive, profiting from the difference in price while passing some of the savings onto customers. (Base Power also offers its software to power companies.)
It began operations in Texas, taking advantage of the state’s deregulated energy market that allows customers to pick from different energy providers.
Base Power has big ambitions. It is building battery plants in the U.S., one of which is expected to be finished early next year. Its business model also allows the company to sell some of its fleet’s stored energy to utilities at times of higher demand, which could help them keep up with the soaring energy power needs of data centers.
Though the company operates just in Texas, Zach Dell told DealBook that he expected to announce its next U.S. market by year end, and hoped to expand internationally by the second half of next year.
Chart of the day
Seemingly all of corporate America is racing to incorporate artificial intelligence, and Wall Street is no exception. But in its latest rankings of banks’ use of A.I., the data provider Evident has found some shake-ups among leading adopters.
Two big U.S. banks, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America, cracked the top 10 in Evident’s index, while a third, Morgan Stanley, jumped five spots to No. 5. (Four non-U.S. institutions — Royal Bank of Canada, CommBank, UBS and HSBC — also made the top 10.)
While business leaders have debated the value of A.I. investments, with recent academic work suggesting that their benefit to productivity is overstated, Evident says that’s not true for lenders. “We’re beginning to see clear signs that A.I. investment is starting to translate into tangible financial gains, both in terms of efficiency and, increasingly, via new revenue opportunities,” said Alexandra Mousavizadeh, the company’s co-founder and co-C.E.O.
Exclusive: New York loosens its grip on Coinbase
Starting on Wednesday, Coinbase customers in New York can earn money by pledging their tokens to be used in validating other crypto transactions, Niko Gallogly is first to report. The process is known as “staking.”
Coinbase and New York have history. The state requires digital currency companies to obtain a so-called BitLicense to operate. It issued a license to Coinbase in 2017, but the agreement did not allow for staking. After years of negotiation, the crypto exchange and New York regulators finalized a deal to allow staking, Paul Grewal, Coinbase’s chief legal officer, told DealBook.
The company estimates that the change will open up millions of dollars in annual earnings for its New York customers. It’s a “major milestone” for the company to offer staking to residents of “the capital for financial services globally,” Grewal added.
Staking has been caught in regulatory cross hairs. In 2023, the S.E.C. claimed in a lawsuit that Coinbase’s staking product was an unregistered, and therefore unlawful, securities offering. Several states also sued Coinbase over its staking service. Under the Trump administration, a more crypto-friendly S.E.C. has since dismissed the suit, and many states dropped their lawsuits.
New York’s decision is a sign that “staking is going mainstream,” said Gareth Rhodes, a former deputy superintendent at the New York State Department of Financial Services. Four states — California, Maryland, New Jersey and Wisconsin — still have a ban on Coinbase’s staking service.
Having a “tough regulator” like New York approve Coinbase’s staking product will build investor confidence, Rhodes added. He expects staking to become a conventional part of investing, pointing to Grayscale’s introduction of the first U.S.-listed E.T.F.s that, pending S.E.C. approval, would allow staking.
THE SPEED READ
Deals
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SoftBank agreed to buy the robotics division of the European engineering company ABB for $5.4 billion as part of its focus on artificial intelligence and robotics. (CNBC)
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A UBS fund told investors that 30 percent of its portfolio was tied to First Brands, the auto parts group that recently filed for bankruptcy. (FT)
Politics, policy and regulation
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“White House offers ‘concierge’ service to fossil fuel firms, official says” (WaPo)
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New Jersey’s attorney general is investigating the frequency of sexual assaults during Uber rides and whether the company misrepresented the safety of its ride-hailing service to passengers and drivers. (NYT)
Best of the rest
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The Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded for work in quantum mechanics that paved the way for cellphones and fiber-optic cables (NYT)
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A surge in cocoa prices that squeezed chocolate makers worldwide has finally subsided. (FT)
We’d like your feedback! Please email thoughts and suggestions to [email protected].
Andrew Ross Sorkin is a columnist and the founder of DealBook, the flagship business and policy newsletter at The Times and an annual conference.
Bernhard Warner is a senior editor for DealBook, a newsletter from The Times, covering business trends, the economy and the markets.
Sarah Kessler is the weekend edition editor of the DealBook newsletter and writes features on business.
Michael J. de la Merced has covered global business and finance news for The Times since 2006.
Niko Gallogly is a Times reporter, covering business for the DealBook newsletter.
The post Oracle Fears Add to Doubts About the A.I. Rally appeared first on New York Times.
