Nvidia's AI Push, Paramount's Merger Pause & China's AI Race

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio, News. Bloomberg Tech is live from the heart of Silicon Valley with Ed Ludlow in San Francisco.

**Ed Ludlow** (0:22)
This is Bloomberg Tech, coming up. We check in on Nvidia and its next generation AI chips as the battle for compute gets into high gear. Plus, a judge hits pause on Paramount's merger with Warner Bros. Discovery, throwing the blockbuster media deal into limbo. And the AI race is entering a new phase with Washington promising to scrutinize Chinese models as investors hunt for the next big winners. We're going to discuss with Sameer Dholakia of Bessemer, Venture Partners, Chipmakers, Semiconductor Stocks. The rebound continues and is gathering some pace. The event from closing in a bear market Friday, which was catalyzed by the Kimi K3 release, to now being a little more confident after that pullback. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index, or SOX, is up more than 4%.
A big point being that even in yesterday's session, we saw some pretty wide swings and choppy changes between the level of gains that that index had. We're also checking in on shares of Nvidia. Actually, just in the last 30 seconds, taking a little bit of a tick higher, up 1.4% have been higher. Nvidia says it's full steam ahead on its latest chip designs. Accelerated computing systems based on the new VeraRubin platform have been delivered to major AI companies and are about to start running workloads, Bloomberg's reporting. The VeraRubin rollout has been undiscriminated by both investors and analysts. For more, Bloomberg's Ian King joins us fresh off a trip to Nvidia HQ in Santa Clara. And you've been speaking to one of the key leaders there about the actual state of play.
What is it?

**Ian King** (1:55)
Ian Book, who's basically the head of their data center business, dragged us all into Jensen's office and we all got a walkthrough of where they are, basically. And really what they were keen to do was to kind of slay the dragon, this kind of lingering myth that there is somehow a problem with the rollout. They said, you know, we're going to go faster, everything's working. They even took us to a secret location and showed us a rack of servers that's already actually in use up and running.

**Ed Ludlow** (2:24)
A rack of servers. This is a representation of MV72, 72 Rubin GPUs. Obviously, this is not life-sized.
It wouldn't fit on set with you and I. There was a key takeaway from the real version of this, that it's in full production. I think Jensen's been quizzed about that quite a lot recently, but that is pretty definitive answer to what the market's been questioning.

**Ian King** (2:52)
Right. There was a report out there saying that they had some actual materials issues that it wouldn't be ready.
What they did was say, look, here it is. Guess what? What used to take hours for a human to put together, and a human who would make mistakes now, we've designed it so it can be put together by a robot.

**Ed Ludlow** (3:11)
Great pictures, by the way, that you took on your trip down to Nvidia HQ.

**Ian King** (3:14)
Yeah, with the iPhone.
They said, look, when we drop one of these things off at the dock at a data center in the past, it would take a long time to get it up and running. Now, we're talking tens of minutes to have it from the loading dock to being up and running. Really, what they're pushing the idea is we're going faster, trying to catch us.

**Ed Ludlow** (3:32)
A big part in the moment of the rebound in chip stocks is Intel is having a pretty good day. As an aside to that, we got a statement from the company about them right-sizing, streamlining one of its divisions. What do we need to know?

**Ian King** (3:45)
Yeah, I mean, they've already got rid of multiple tens of thousands of employees and reduce their cost count appreciably. And that looks like it's something which is going to continue. They've said that their data center group is going to be dealing with some more redundancies to get those costs down and get that company into the kind of lean position it feels it needs to be in.

**Ed Ludlow** (4:07)
Bloomberg's Ian King, who leads our coverage of semiconductors. Thank you very much. The cost of building the AI future may be about to get even more expensive. According to a Nikkei report, TSMC has finalized plans to raise chip making prices by as much as 10% starting in 2027 The increases would affect both advanced AI chips, but also more mature semiconductors, potentially impacting customers from Nvidia and Apple to Amazon and Alphabet. For more, Bloomberg's Peter Elstrom, executive editor who leads our coverage of Asia Tech, is with us. This again is a Nikkei report, but what's in it? What do we need to know about TSMC's actions?