Good morning. Andrew here. I’ve been crisscrossing the country in recent days — New Orleans, Austin, Los Angeles and now back in New York — and the same topic seemed to come up in each city among C.E.O.s and the rank and file: a deep fear that artificial intelligence will take everyone’s job. That is a sea change from the prevailing worry I heard just a couple of months ago, that we were in an A.I. bubble that could pop. It is fascinating to observe how quickly things shift. Which perspective is right? Let me know. Amid those fears, we’re taking a look at Nvidia’s proclamation that it expects at least $1 trillion in chip revenue through 2027 — another data point that might explain the optimism/worry paradox. Also: We’ve got news on the Gecko Robotics deal with the Navy, a timely transaction in the midst of the latest in the Strait of Hormuz, which we detail below. (Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up here.)
Stiff oppositionIran continues to flex just enough firepower to disrupt global markets and President Trump’s foreign policy agenda. The price of Brent crude, the global benchmark for oil, rebounded this morning to above $103. That’s after a series of attacks in and around the Strait of Hormuz, the key oil and gas route — including one on a tanker anchored near a port in the United Arab Emirates, according to a British maritime monitoring agency, and another on an Emirati gas field. Iran has vowed to halt oil shipments through the strait that would benefit Washington and its allies. The toll can be felt thousands of miles away. The average U.S. price of diesel surpassed $5 a gallon this morning, a multiyear high. The shock has sent energy prices soaring in Europe. It has also upended economic conditions in some Asian countries reliant on Gulf oil. On the bright side: There are signs that Iran is granting safe passage to some vessels from countries it deems friendly. “This creates a system in which the strait is not formally closed, yet transit increasingly depends on political understandings with Tehran,” JPMorgan Chase analysts wrote in a research note, according to Bloomberg. This ad hoc system has increased market volatility, and put Trump on the back foot. The president’s pleas and veiled threats over the weekend for countries to do their part, including militarily, to help restore ship traffic through the strait have been greeted coolly, or outright rebuffed. Several European leaders were especially opposed to the idea, a response that rankled Trump. At a news conference yesterday, he said that U.S. soldiers “have done a great job” of protecting Europe. He added: “And well, we want to know, do you have any mine sweepers? ‘Well, we’d rather not get involved, sir.’” Trump still holds leverage over Europe, according to Holger Schmieding, an economist at Berenberg. Schmieding fears that a rift with Washington over the Strait of Hormuz could put European security at risk. “We need the U.S. military,” he said. “We need the U.S. intelligence for Ukraine. That remains our huge vulnerability.” On the flip side, Schmieding doesn’t see Trump opening a new front in the trade war with Europe, either by imposing new tariffs or by restricting the Europe’s imports of U.S. liquefied natural gas. “I don’t think he has a lot of economic levers,” Schmieding said. The war is hemming in Trump elsewhere. Yesterday, the president said he would seek to delay by about a month his highly anticipated meeting with Xi Jinping of China, in which the two leaders are expected to discuss their countries’ many trade differences. “Because of the war, I want to be here. I have to be here, I feel,” Trump said, an indication that the president sees the war dragging on further.
The S.E.C. could upend quarterly earnings reports. The agency is reportedly preparing a proposal to give companies the option to publish their results only twice a year, according to The Wall Street Journal, citing unnamed sources. President Trump has long supported reducing the frequency of the reports, and the effort seems to be gaining momentum as some companies cite reporting costs as a reason for staying private. But investors may yet push back. A judge strikes down Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s vaccine policies. A federal judge in Massachusetts blocked the government from putting in effect a series of decisions made by vaccine panelists appointed by Kennedy, the health secretary who has long been skeptical of vaccines, including plans to cut the number of diseases covered by routine immunization and restrict access to Covid shots. The ruling is the latest clash in an escalating battle between the medical establishment and the agency under Kennedy. OpenAI is said to cut side projects to focus on core users. A top executive at the artificial intelligence giant told employees that OpenAI would de-prioritize some projects because it was being “distracted by side quests.” (Last year, the company announced a web browser, a video generator and e-commerce features.) As OpenAI prepares to eventually go public, it has faced increasing competition from Anthropic, which is focused on business customers, A.I. agents and coding applications. Elsewhere, Anthropic is looking to recruit a chemical weapons and explosives expert to try to prevent “catastrophic misuse” of its products.
Nvidia’s $1 trillion forecastIt’s not every day that a C.E.O. announces that his company has lined up $1 trillion in revenue. But that’s exactly what Jensen Huang of Nvidia did yesterday. Addressing a packed arena for the Nvidia GTC developer conference in San Jose, Calif., Huang said that Nvidia expected to take in at least $1 trillion from sales of its flagship Blackwell and Rubin chips from 2025 through 2027. Nvidia had previously forecast that the chips, which have powered the artificial intelligence boom, would bring in $500 billion in sales from 2025 through the end of this year. Such are the expectations for Nvidia, the world’s most valuable publicly traded company, with a market cap of $4.45 trillion, that its stock was largely unchanged in premarket trading this morning.
More news from yesterday:
Huang also introduced a product that uses technology from the chip start-up Groq. (Not to be confused with xAI’s Grok chatbot.) The offering will combine Nvidia chips with Groq’s language processing unit chips, or L.P.U.s. The L.P.U.s speed up the ability of large language models to respond to A.I. prompts, a process known as inference. Nvidia announced in December that it had signed a licensing agreement with Groq that was tantamount to an acquisition, and raced to integrate Groq’s technology. Why it matters: As A.I. systems improve at writing software code, doing research and creating images and videos, hyperscalers are increasingly demanding advanced chips that are cheaper and quicker. In this hotly contested part of the market, Nvidia faces increasing competition from China, as well as from domestic rivals like AMD, Google (via its tensor processing units, or T.P.U.s) and the start-up Cerebras, which has signed up OpenAI and Amazon Web Services as customers. Investors may not be all that impressed, but industry watchers give Huang high marks. “Net-net, we came out of the keynote reassured in Nvidia’s road map,” Atif Malik, an analyst at Citigroup, wrote in a research note last night, adding that it had shown the “ability to innovate faster than the competition.” More than $800 million— The potential payout (including a generous tax benefit) awaiting David Zaslav, the C.E.O. of Warner Bros. Discovery, if Paramount Skydance’s bid to purchase the media conglomerate goes through. A robotics start-up inks a big military dealGecko Robotics began life with a robot that could scan a Pittsburgh-area power plant’s boiler walls for problems. But as interest in robotics and artificial intelligence has grown, so have the start-up’s sources of business — which now include a big contract with the Pentagon. It’s a sign of the continuing boom in robotics, and the latest example of tech businesses working with the military. The Navy signed a five-year contract with Gecko, worth up to $71 million, to assess its fleet’s health, the company announced today. Gecko’s robots, drones and sensors will scour vessels to take stock of maintenance and quickly identify necessary repairs. The contract is the largest that Gecko has signed with the military and, the company says, one of the largest ever signed by a robotics-first company. Up to $54 million of the contract is dedicated to the Pacific Fleet, including destroyers and amphibious warships. Jake Loosararian, Gecko’s co-founder and C.E.O., told DealBook that he expected the contract could expand “in pretty short order.” It’s a bet on the ability of A.I. and robots to cut costs and improve efficiency. The work of maintaining naval vessels has traditionally required humans to sometimes crawl on hands and knees with hand-held sensors, or even hang off the sides of ships on ropes. Loosararian told DealBook that the company’s technology — including robots that climb walls and swim, as well as A.I. to analyze their findings — would help the Navy hit its fleet readiness goal of 80 percent, up from a current level of about 60 percent. And he estimated that Gecko technology could halve how long it took to get a surface vessel shipshape. “What the Navy’s doing is creating a foundation to be able to modernize their fleet in an advantaged way,” he said. Justin Fanelli, the Navy’s chief technology officer, said the contract would save the Navy time, money and risk in maintaining its ships. “Cracking the cost equation is just as important as cracking the physics equation,” he said in a statement. Gecko has continued to grow quickly. It raised $125 million in June at a $1.25 billion valuation, roughly doubling what it was valued at in late 2023. Beyond the Navy, its customer base includes private enterprises like NAES, a big provider of plant operations and maintenance services; the Air Force; and overseas clients like the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company. We hope you’ve enjoyed this newsletter, which is made possible through subscriber support. Subscribe to The New York Times.
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