Market View: Is the AI Trade Changing? Grab’s Big BNPL Bet, Nvidia and Oil Shock

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Alright, let's get a check of what's happening with markets. Good afternoon. Six minutes past twelve now.

Grab, making a $1.5 billion bet. It is expanding its business and it's betting on buy now, pay later. So Grab is to acquire a majority stake in BNPL platform Atome for $1.5 billion. Starting here at home, Southeast Asia Super App is making a really big bet on consumer finance, buying that 60% stake in Atome Financial for $1.5 billion in cash. Atome is best known for its buy now, pay later.

You know, that's what it does, right? But this deal goes considerably further than installment plans. Atome also offers consumer cash loans, BNPL cards, and digital lending. And that gives Grab scale. Atome operates across Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, and has had 25 million cumulative transacting users. Wow, 25 million. The deal essentially plugs that lending operation into Grab's enormous ecosystem of consumers and merchants. Grab not hiding its ambitions here. The company says Atome and the rest of its financial services segment, that's the keys, and it could generate more than 500 million in adjusted EBITDA by 2028 with a gross loan portfolio combined of more than 6 billion. Now, Grab has also agreed to buy the remaining 40 percent roughly two years after the initial transaction closes with the eventual valuation depending on Atome's performance. So there you have it, Grab expanding its business. Are we literally watching Grab transform from a ride hailing delivery company into something much closer to regional financial services platform? I'd like to say, I'd like to give myself a pat on the back for calling this many, many years ago. I think it's even on my Facebook somewhere, where I said this, you know, that it's really not about ride hailing. They want to be a wallet, right? They want to be your regional financial services platform. By the way, are we friends on Facebook? I hope so. Or on Instagram, I'm at Michelle Martin Radio. You can add me. All right, next on to AI when extraordinary philosophical divide is opening up among the people building the technology on the one side of leaders, including Anthropics Dario Amodei and Open AI Sam Altman, arguing the development of frontier AI may be moving faster than our ability to manage the risks on the other side of the debate. We have Nvidia's Jensen Huang. So finally, we have a contender Huang pushing back against the more alarmist view of AI risk. And this is a distinction that's interesting. And I think matters to Nvidia investors. Because Nvidia's fortunes are tied to the exact opposite proposition, right? Nvidia investors want more AI development. They want the need for more computing power, more data centers, more chips. So this is not just Jensen Huang and his philosophical disagreement about the future of humanity and the existential crisis caused by AI. There are hundreds of billions of capital expenditure riding on this answer. And Jensen Huang is also, you know, apart from weighing in and saying, no, you know, I diverge. What did he say? Amodei told everyone, I think that's the way to lead the industry forward, to set an example so that everyone can always be better.

Jensen Huang, who appeared shortly after Amodei on that same sort of stage, you know, they were at Salesforce's Dreamforce Conference, right? And he said, Huang said, market forces already exist and that the industry doesn't need new laws or regulations, and that speed and safety are not mutually exclusive. Companies should pace themselves until they are sure they're releasing something that the market will appreciate. So Huang described this as a choice that you could have both at the same time.

And that it's up to model developers to act responsibly with their products. Huang's saying, run as fast as you can. But if you feel at any given point in time, the company is out of control or the product is not going to be safe, then take a pause and make sure that you get it right. A day earlier, Huang was on stage in LA for the All In Summit where he took a call from President Donald Trump. The president, while on speaker, addressed concern about people trying to stand in the way of AI data center construction. And Huang, speaking to Trump publicly, said, we're not going to let that happen, sir.

Also, Reuters reporting that Nvidia's CEO, Jensen Huang, is expected to attend President Donald Trump's state dinner for Chinese President Xi Jinping when Xi visits Washington next week. This puts the heads of the world's dominant AI chip company in the room as the leaders of the world's two biggest economies meet.