Apple pays for the hubris. Samsung to bust out a quadrillion in cap-ex.

The trouble with all that AI cap-ex
Gesda Capital’s Peter Garnry with a sober warning that while all of that cap-ex may be driving massive profits for some, system-wide profits in the longer run are what counts, especially whether the huge spending will generate the needed return on investment to sustain it.

Microsoft to use DeepSeek for lower cost solutions…
…as OpenAI costs mount. And OpenAI is losing tens of billions a year. Am I missing something?

FT Alphaville coverage of the CME case against the CFTC
Not to feel sorry for CME, but the regulatory regime in the US is a serious governance concern. Great coverage as nearly always.

Another one for the space- and astronomy Nerds
The ESA is launching a cool new space telescope called Plato, hopefully as early as January, that is going to take A LOT of pictures (two 81 mega-pixel cameras taking wide field views every 2.5 seconds, 24 more cameras doing so every 25 seconds - mommy I need some new multi-exabyte storage systems….) to find exoplanets that are closer to earth in size than many of the ones we have found so far. It will use the “transit method” to discover planets, in which planets traversing in front of the stars it is pointed at dim slightly as the planet transits the field of view from our vantage point. However many sun-similar stars there are with earth-similar planets orbiting at earth similar distances, we would only be able to detect 0.5% of such systems, assuming a random distribution of orbital planes. Of course, this rig will find all kinds of stuff - far more systems with close-in planets of size, etc., But it will come up with some really cool stuff to look into at unprecedented detail. ChatGPT tells me there are about 80,000 (plus-minus 20%) main-sequence stars within 10% of our Sun’s that are within the approximate 500 light-year reach of the Plato telescope’s capabilities. Throw away the binary, tertiary, etc. systems and other candidates that aren’t “just right” to study and you still probably have many star system candidates. Let’s call it the lucky 15,000 - surely, given that over 80% of stars are estimated to have planets, we’ll find some cool stuff to look into - maybe 20 or 30 with earth-like candidates we can super-zoom in on at a later date?

Surely not that company again ?!?

The company I teased on today’s SMC podcast was Blackberry, long given up as a slowly asphyxiating basket-case as its device business completely died around a decade ago and it struggled to transition to a software-only company. It now lives on mostly due to its acquisition of QNX back in 2010, a real-time operating system that is geared for security and high reliability, which has helped put it in over 275 million increasingly software-controlled vehicles - in particular for many assisted-driving features. It is also embedded in other industrial and medical devices. In addition to the increasing sophistication needs of cars and potential further growth there, the total addressable market could scale with physical AI growth if it is embedded in robots, etc. The company beat and raised with its most recent quarterly earnings report yesterday, growing top-line at 26% year-on-year. It’s a certainly a great comeback story after having fallen 98% as of late March from its 2007 high. Still, with this big advance, a lot of AI-hype and good news is already in the price - it is selling at around ten times sales and around 55 times forward earnings. I sure still miss that physical keyboard and the typing speed I could achieve on it back in the days of yore - likely no chance for a comeback there.