Nvidia Takes Aim at Frontier AI Developers

Luke Vargas (0:00)

There's a lot of hype and a lot of good news already priced into the marketplace today.

SPEAKER_2 (0:03)

We're entering a period of so much more change that it could be a tailwind for active management.

SPEAKER_3 (0:08)

Women are now in the protagonist seat for the family's financial story.

Joe Davis (0:13)

I'm Joe Davis.

Christine Cascari (0:14)

And I'm Christine Cascari. And this is season two of Better Vantage by Vanguard, an eight-part video podcast series hosted by custom content from WSJ and Vanguard.

Joe Davis (0:23)

All investing is subject to risk, including possible loss of principle. This content was created by custom content from WSJ, a unit of the Wall Street Journal Advertising Department.

Luke Vargas (0:34)

The gloves come off after Canada-U.S. trade talks break down. Plus, Sheehan prices its long-awaited IPO well below the fast fashion giant's one-time valuation, and Nvidia takes aim at frontier AI developers.

Robbie Whelan (0:49)

The models that Nvidia is going to be building are going to compete directly with open AI models, robotics models, Google's models. And that might be seen as a problem, right? Because if you're a customer of Nvidia, you might be looking at them saying, oh, what the heck, now you guys are going to be designing models as well?

Luke Vargas (1:07)

It's Monday, August 24th. I'm Luke Vargas for The Wall Street Journal, and here is the AM Edition of What's News, the top headlines and business stories moving your world today. Instead of sealing a trade agreement, which appeared to be within reach on Friday, the US and Canada are instead spiraling toward a trade war.

Gavin Bade (1:27)

Late Friday night going into Saturday, we saw trade talks between the US and Canada collapse, and this led to the imposition of new 50 percent tariffs on about $20 billion worth of Canadian goods. Now, that's only about 5 percent of Canadian exports to the US each year, but the risk here is for escalation.

Luke Vargas (1:47)

That is Journal trade reporter Gavin Bade.

Gavin Bade (1:49)

The Canadians have already said that they're going to reply dollar for dollar with a similar set of tariffs. That will go into effect on September 8th. And then we'll have to see what the Trump administration does. They have said if Canada retaliates, we will likely retaliate as well. So there's some risk here that we could see the spiral into an all out trade war.

Luke Vargas (2:10)

The reignition of tensions comes after divisions between the two sides had looked to be narrowing.

Last week, we reported that Washington was open to lowering top line tariffs on Canadian steel, aluminum, and automobiles. But Gavin says the devil was in the details.

Gavin Bade (2:25)

This is rather technical, but right now the US allows companies to get a tariff rebate for the value of all of the US made parts in their automobile. Canada wanted to expand this to be Canadian and North American content as well. Well, the US didn't want to do that is what our sources have told us. And then there are a number of other issues as well. The Canadians have said that the US wanted to put limitations on their ability to do trade deals with other nations. And they saw this as a violation of their sovereignty basically. You can't tell us who we can go and make a deal with. And so that was something that clearly ruffles and feathers north of the border here. The Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney was really bristling about that in his press conference after the talks fell apart.

Mark Carney (3:10)

We've consistently proposed long term partnerships. Well, America has often pursued short term transactions.

The gap between partnership and competitor unfortunately has remained too wide in recent days. So last evening, I instructed our negotiators to return to Ottawa. We cannot accept what they've offered and we will not give what they've asked.

Luke Vargas (3:40)

Among the Canadian goods hit by the latest US tariffs are paper and textile products, hockey sticks, honey, and cement. Canada has yet to reveal the target of its retaliatory tariffs, which are set to go into effect after Labor Day.

Paramount is today meeting with officials in California in a bid to resolve the antitrust lawsuit that's standing in the way of its $81 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, led by California Attorney General Rob Bonta, a dozen Democratic-led states have sued to block the deal, arguing that it would create too much concentration in the market for theatrical films and cable television channels. We exclusively report that Bonta is expected to ask Paramount to divest some cable channels and maintain a separate movie studio before approving the deal. There's been increasing pressure on the Attorney General to engage in settlement talks with Paramount, and speaking on Friday, California Governor Gavin Newsom said he hoped the two sides would find common ground.