Just an ancient pharaoh trying to navigate these things called markets. Numbers? Too complicated. Narratives and anecdotes? Yes.
***Not Investment Advice***
$NVDA CFO Kress at MS TMT Conference
Q: Did you foresee this DC demand a year ago?
A: Intro of Gen-AI was still ramping. We had been working with Open AI for years. We saw it as part of our long planned journey. Things have definitely changed, because of the interest
$SNOW CFO Scarpelli at Goldman Communacopia & Technology Conference
- Recent consumption patterns are encouraging. Top 10 customers, 7 are above my expectations.
- Feel very good about hitting $10B Product Revenue FY29 target, especially in light of our new products like
$META $NVDA
Zuckerberg on buying H100s back in 2022, initially for Reels:
"The corpus of content candidates that we could potentially show you expanded from on the order of thousands to on the order of hundreds of millions. It needed a completely different infrastructure. We
$NVDA
WSJ:
Chinese cloud companies—some of Nvidia’s biggest customers globally—aren’t so keen on buying its lower-powered AI chips.
Alibaba Group and Tencent are among China’s biggest cloud companies that have been testing Nvidia samples since November. They have indicated to
$DDOG Another insider BUY by Director Jacobson, $20M after $50M last week
@ashwinibirla
@BigBullCap
SEC Form 4: Jacobson Matthew bought $19,999,978 worth of shares (296,965 units at $67.35)
$CRWD CFO at Jefferies Cybersecurity Summit
On Gross Margins:
- big picture, ability to collect data once and re-use it many times
- each additional module that customers costs very little incrementally for us
- I think I am only CFO in the valley, invites my devops team
@dnystedt
Cleveland Research note from yest. was the original source of this rumor. It painted a very rosy picture for GPU demand for NVDA for 2024 (3x 2023) while stating that MSFT would still grow meaningfully but pull back slightly. Not sure if this Chinese article is add'l news.
$SNOW CFO Scarpelli at JMP Tech Conference
Competitive landscape:
GCP
#1
competitor, MSFT
#2
, Databricks
#3
. We partnered with Databricks in our early accounts before we released SnowPark, but now the release of SnowPark is to handle Spark workloads directly in Snowflake
$AMD CEO Su at GS Communacopia + Tech Conference
Key Priorities
- We are all about high performance computing. We spend a lot on roadmaps, big strategic bets.
- I spend a lot of time with customers, where market inflection points are.
- And today, it is AI, AI, and AI
$DDOG
Director Jacobson bought another $1.4M worth of shares (price = $70.42). Smaller buy than the earlier monsters before, but he keeps going anytime the shares get close to $70
@BillAckman
@Uber
Slapping this up on X without waiting to do proper due diligence seems almost as bad as what Business Insider did with your wife. Should you not be making sure about lags and other factors? Maybe wait for Dara or someone else from Uber to respond and explain?
Stealing by Uber
$META
The Verge:
Meta’s ‘set it and forget it’ AI ad tools are misfiring and blowing through cash / Advertisers report that costs per impressions on the automated ad platform Advantage Plus have skyrocketed and performance has dropped.
The Verge spoke to several marketers and
$AMZN
Jassy: AWS faces short term headwinds.
Jassy: Companies are being more cautious in their spending.
Jassy: Confident about plans to lower costs, reduce delivery times, and build "meaningfully larger" retail business with healthy operating margins.
$AVGO $GOOGL
WSJ:
Broadcom’s custom-chip division had a surge in business after Google rapidly increased production of TPUs recently, Chief Executive Hock Tan said during a March internal presentation. The increase, he said, was partly in response to Microsoft incorporating AI
$GOOGL new features for Google Flights today, including pilot in U.S.:
Some flights will also feature a price guarantee badge, which means Google is confident the fare won’t get any lower before departure. If it does, Google will refund the difference via Google Play. This is
$NET
Morgan Stanley said it estimates low-mid single digit percentage tailwind to Cloudflare's topline growth from FY25-27 as AI penetration within Apple's base grows.
At the Worldwide Developers Conference 2024, Apple announced its Private Cloud Compute, or PCC, its cloud
$NVDA $AMZN
The Information:
Last year, Nvidia made an unusual proposal to Amazon Web Services and other cloud providers that have long been the biggest buyers of Nvidia’s specialized artificial intelligence server chips. Nvidia wanted to lease Nvidia-powered servers in the
$AMD $NVDA
AMD replaces Nvidia on Wolfe's top stocks list
Wolfe Research said Thursday it has made a tactical shift by replacing Nvidia stock with AMD on its top selection of stocks known as Wolfe Alpha List.
“Our views on NVDA and AMD haven't changed, but the relative move in
@jimcramer
mentioned today on Mad Money, during his game plan for next week: $UPST has been hired by Wells Fargo...also shown in text on this link:
This is massive if true, what does Jim know???
$AMD $NVDA
Robert Hormuth, corporate VP of architecture and strategy for AMD’s Data Center Solutions Group, told Silverlinings there are millions of old servers gumming up the works in data centers. That’s a big problem for data centers, which are already struggling with power
$SNOW CFO Scarpelli at Barclays Global Technology Conference
Highlights:
- September after Labour Day, had some of the strongest growth in last 2 years.
- Not saying this is a recovery where we will see a big acceleration now, but things have stabilized as well as
$CRWD CEO Kurtz at GS Communacopia + Tech Conference
Charlotte AI
- A Tier1 analyst today in their 8 hour day, logs in, goes through alerts, priorities, takes actions. A lot of work even though we have some automation, but a lot of triage.
- Charlotte will help create more of
$DDOG CFO @ Barclays TMT Conference
Land and expand, most of our customers stay short relative to what they will evolve to. Second concept is we have been a value increaser through investment. We have gotten clients to increase wallet share with through workload expansion.
$MSFT $SNOW
Conceptually, Microsoft Fabric seems formidable and presents another option to Databricks and Snowflake.
But it's basically a rebranding, stitching together a bunch of services...lipstick on the Synapse pig.
Let's see how traction goes.
$AMZN
Insider:
Amazon expects the ad tier of Prime Video to reach more than 115 million people in the US each month, according to a briefing document sent by Amazon to ad buyers and viewed by Insider.
The document cites internal Amazon data revealing that 54% of Prime Video
$GOOGL Post-I/O Notes:
Oppenheimer said Google I/O event should assuage fears over AI competitive position. Relative to OpenAI's limited product demo the day before, the firm believes Alphabet demonstrated its strong competitive position, driven by an essentially unlimited R&D
Reuters on the story, hitting mainstream news now
$AMD $NVDA
(Reuters) - Artificial intelligence chips from Advanced Micro Devices are about 80% as fast as those from Nvidia Corp, with a future path to matching their performance, according a Friday report by an AI software firm
$SNOW To be clear, the exact quotes: "we are in the midst of renegotiating our contract with AWS, Microsoft will follow". The "80% of our business with AWS" comment on the earnings call got Microsoft execs to call Snowflake to "tighten the relationship"
$NVDA CFO Kress at MS TMT Conference
Q: How have you managed to grow this quickly. This scale, size, complexity. Growing 4-5x is remarkable.
A: Ramping up supply, had to come from many different perspectives. Decades long supplier relationships, seeked out new suppliers to
$META $MSFT $NVDA
WSJ:
Meta is currently building up the data centers necessary for the job and acquiring more H100s, the most advanced of the Nvidia chips used for such AI training. While Meta joined with Microsoft to make Llama 2 available on Microsoft’s cloud-computing
$AMD $INTC $MSFT
FT:
China has introduced new guidelines that will mean US microprocessors from Intel and AMD are phased out of government PCs and servers, as Beijing ramps up a campaign to replace foreign technology with homegrown solutions.
The stricter government
$MSFT at MS TMT conference
On Copilot:
It hasn't been that long, but let me just kind of recap where we are right now. Very, very exciting time. At the individual level, we've done quite a bit of work that you may have seen published Microsoft that people are definitely seeing
$AMD
Just presented at BofA. For Data Center biz:
- current climate still one of caution
- 2H will be better, keeping 50% growth guide
- will be a combo of ASP growth and unit growth
- MI300 wins to be unveiled June 13th event as well as broader AI strategy
Notes from $DDOG presents at Needham Big Data
Q: Feels like you are seeing less pressure on growth vs hyperscalers, why?
A: 1. We are indexed to the highest growth segment in cloud workloads
2. Our platform as expanded, prevents a cushion against cloud optimization
$NVDA
Q1 Revenue Estimates:
Sell-Side: $21-23B
Buy-Side: $23-25B
SemiAnalysis: $27B
How much will flow through to the bottom line?
Super tough compares coming in future quarters, growth will come in significantly (consensus already there but won't stop the sensationalist
$SHOP $AMZN
Interesting
$SHOP President: We are going to make a deal for "Buy with Prime" with Amazon if it is in the best interest of merchants - post earnings comments
$NVDA
From FT now, adding 2024 H100 estimate:
Nvidia now plans to at least triple the production of its top H100 AI processor, according to three people close to Nvidia, with shipments of between 1.5mn and 2mn H100s in 2024 representing a massive jump from the 500K this year.
$META $NVDA
Zuckerberg:
We're building a massive amount of infrastructure. At the end of this year, we'll have ~350k Nvidia H100s -- and overall ~600k H100s H100 equivalents of compute if you include other GPUs
The two major parts of our vision -- AI and the metaverse -- are
$SNOW
Growth durability:
- Some investors don't appreciate how long the migration takes with customers. Some will take 10 years to move their on-prem data,they are big and move slower.
- Less than 20% of our customers are big on-prem
- There is a long tail of data to be moved.
$ZS
Zscaler today announced a collaboration with NVIDIA to accelerate AI-powered copilot technologies. Zscaler will leverage NVIDIA AI technologies to deliver new user experience and security-centric copilot services to the enterprise. The introduction of new AI capabilities,
$META $NVDA
By when will the Llama models be trained on your own custom silicon?
Zuckerberg:
"Soon, not Llama-4. The approach that we took is we first built custom silicon that could handle inference for our ranking and recommendation type stuff, so Reels, News Feed ads, etc.
$AMD at Deutsche Tech Conference
On Macro:
- PC one of the worst down cycle in 3 decades. Definitely Q1 is the bottom. Q2 grew sequentially, and 2H PC is better. Next year is Windows 10 EOL and AI applications will help refresh cycle. Inventory and sell-through has been
$AMD $MSFT
Microsoft will launch its custom Cobalt 100 chips to customers as a public preview at its Build conference next week, TechCrunch has learned.
In an analyst briefing ahead of Build, Scott Guthrie, Microsoft’s executive VP of the Microsoft Cloud and AI group, directly
$SNOW
Highlights from MS TMT Conference
- Just crossed 3B queries a day
- Unistore in private preview, will be public preview by end of year
- We do not have any large optimizations planned for this year
Cont'd
$NVDA CFO Kress at MS TMT Conference
Q: Regarding longer term prospects, TAM.
A: Lots of different
#s
out there regarding the accelerator market. Let's step back and our position. We have talked about the installed base in DC and our focus on being a DC computing company.
$NVDA EPS and Revenue Raised Higher, EPS to $41 for CY2025
UBS raised its price target for NVIDIA to $1,150 from $1,200 in a note Tuesday, maintaining a Buy rating on the stock ahead of the company's next earnings release on May 22.
The bank cited strong demand for its target
$CRWD $NVDA
CrowdStrike today announced a strategic collaboration with NVIDIA to deliver NVIDIA's AI computing services on the industry-leading AI-native CrowdStrike Falcon® XDR platform. Combining Falcon platform data with NVIDIA's GPU-optimized AI pipelines and software,
$PANW
Highlights from MS TMT Conference
- Pace of digital transformation is not letting up
- On the margin, we have seen a tick up, not tick down
- No let up in the demand env
- Scrutiny, deals taking longer, all happening, just means we need to work harder.
$CRWD insider buy
SEC Form 4: Austin Roxanne S bought $1,534,500 worth of shares (15,500 shares at $99.00), increasing direct ownership by 15% to 115,919 units
$DDOG
BTIG analyst Gray Powell downgraded Datadog to Neutral from Buy without a price target. The analyst continues to view Datadog as a "best in class player" in the observability space, but says field checks have worsened over the last few weeks.
Cont'd
$ZS acquires Airgap Networks
Combining Zscaler's Zero Trust SD-WAN and Airgap Networks' agentless segmentation technology will transform how enterprises implement Zero Trust Segmentation to IoT/OT devices, and critical infrastructure across branches, campuses, factories, and
Snowflake $SNOW, the Data Cloud company, and $NVDA today announced at Snowflake Summit 2023 that they are partnering to provide businesses of all sizes with an accelerated path to create customized generative AI applications using their own proprietary data, all securely.
$CELH at GS Conference
"Last week (post earnings call), which was another record week. The data came in at a 12.1 share in the category and it was another record week. So right now, we've had 2 back to back weeks of record sales at the register. So demand is there, momentum is
$SNOW
- Neeva shutting down consumer facing search
- Shifting to enterprise focus with their LLM expertise
* Note Snowflake rumored to be in talks to acquire Neeva
$ZS at BofA Global Tech Conference:
"So we still don't run into Fortinet much. They have been talking about SD-WAN for a little while, and now zero trust SASE. But in the end, architecturally at the large enterprise, that isn't what they are looking for. It's not the true zero
$AMD
From Digitimes overnight, as recapped by Tom's Hardware. Sell-side, and more importantly buy-side, not expecting AMD to capture much of the accelerator market. Any surprise on that front would be...huge I would say:
In a bid to meet the demand for compute GPUs and other
$AMD
July 17th: Citi opens 'downside catalyst watch'
July 27th: Citi says Big Tech earnings 'bad news' for AMD
August 2nd: Citi upgrades to Buy
This is an example of the old adage 'keep the emotions' out of investing. Sell-side can be just as guilty of it.
$AMD
"The recent report from Baird regarding Instinct MI300X demand is inaccurate. The analyst has falsely attributed statements to Samsung that were actually from unnamed third party suppliers. Our engagements with Samsung and our other HBM suppliers are progressing as planned.
$SNOW
Public Sector opportunity:
- FedRAMP certification very soon, within 2-3 months.
- Public sector is < 1% of current biz, so meaningful upside, we think up to 10%
- Not just in U.S., but seeing interest outside, i.e. Korea, U.K.
$NVDA CFO Kress at MS TMT Conference
Q: Inference 40% of DC revenue, is it really that big? How do you know?
A: It was a great exercise for us to work on, our work that we did, we do know our largest systems and we know engineering teams at all the customers. And we can
$NVDA
FT:
The most advanced LLMs are owned by US companies including Microsoft-backed OpenAI and Google. These groups are also the primary buyers of Nvidia’s H100 and A100 chips.
According to multiple sources close to Nvidia and its manufacturer, Taiwan Semiconductor
$DDOG CFO on 5 yr vision: Very early on digital transformation, most companies are potential customers. Monitoring, security, workflows, all these things, we want to be the one platform that they can rely on.
$SNOW $MSFT
TechCrunch: Microsoft will announce a partnership with Snowflake. Fabric will now support Snowflake’s Iceberg format (in addition to Databrick’s Parquet), which will enable “seamless interoperability with Snowflake and enable any data that’s in Snowflake to show up
$NVDA
UBS raises to $1,100
- sees $150B revs in CY2025, 30% growth
- “We anticipate NVDA is at the verge of experiencing increased demand from global enterprises and governments, with each government potentially having as much impact as a major US cloud customer.”
$NVDA CFO Kress at MS TMT Conference did not really hold back on what is in front of the company, demand-wise and overall TAM. Interesting, was wondering if she might temper the enthusiasm a bit.
Recap: Sold $NVDA $INTC on weak IT spending concerns. Plan is to be not involved/short into earnings this week on concerns over online ad spend- $GOOGL $META, weak PC demand recovery- $MSFT, cloud spend- $AMZN $MSFT $GOOGL. $TSLA $T $NFLX earnings reactions are warnings.
Piper chasing some software names
$CFLT raised to $40 from $30
$ZS raised to $145 from $130
$DDOG raised to $88 from $75
$PANW raised to $250 from $240 (also raised to $260 at TD Cowen)