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Hard Numbers: Automate this, Everything’s expensive, Chips delayed, Intel cuts costs, Groq on the rise
106 billion: Capital expenditures from big tech firms are soaring this year, up to $106 billion, according to the self-reported estimates from Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta’s latest quarterly earnings reports. One of the biggest culprits? AI. These companies are acquiring expensive chips, and building out data centers to support their AI and cloud investments. And it may only be the start of a larger trend: Analysts say these figures could keep soaring for the next five years.
3: Nvidia’s latest chips will be delayed up to three months due to a critical design flaw. The chips, part of the company’s Blackwell series, are in high demand by AI companies such as Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI, which have reportedly ordered tens of billions of dollars worth of the chips.
15,000: Intel announced late last week that it’s laying off 15,000 employees and halting non-essential work. The 15%-staff reduction is part of a $10 billion cost savings plan, the company said. It’s also cutting R&D and marketing budgets for the next two years. While Intel has benefitted from the Biden administration’s CHIPS Act stimulus, it’s not yet a major player in AI-grade chips, trailing Nvidia and AMD, so its business isn’t reaping the benefits of the AI boom — at least not yet.
$2.8 billion: Groq, the AI chip startup, raised $640 million in a new funding round as it seeks to challenge Nvidia’s dominance in AI-grade chips. The new investment, led by BlackRock, valued Groq at around $2.8 billion at the time of the investment. Meta’s Yann LeCun is also joining the company as a technical adviser.
Rise of electric mobility an inevitable trend for auto companies: China Daily contributor
In the article, the writer says that the implementation of the Corporate Average Fuel Consumption and New Energy Vehicle (NEV) credit program will expedite NEV penetration and guide the market onto a positive track.
Coronavirus and the robot revolution
As COVID-19 continues its global attack, many people are thinking that robots look like a pretty good investment right now.
If you're a company decision-maker spooked by the pandemic's massive disruption of economies and supply chains, greater automation of your production lines has a distinct appeal. Robots don't get paid, demand benefits, commute, take vacation, or go on strike. They also don't take sick leave, ask for PPE, or sneeze on other robots. Also, crucially, you can put robots wherever you like – making it easier to take production back to your home country.
If you're an investor trying not to check the balance on your 401K right now, you might be thinking about how automation can make companies more efficient and more profitable, pushing stock prices higher so that you can retire before you turn 80.
If you're a consumer, you might see new value in transactions that don't include the kind of personal contact that spreads deadly viruses.
For all these reasons, COVID-19 will accelerate a process of automation that was already well underway in many sectors. Research shows that the global financial crisis of 2008-2009 already led to the replacement of many workers with machines.
A few thoughts on the implications….
It won't happen all at once. This kind of change takes lots of investment that businesses won't make at a time when demand for their products is low.
Some jobs are easier to automate than others. Coronavirus doesn't change that, even if it creates economic incentives to think more deeply about what's possible. In the US and Europe, employers will be looking in particular to automate many of the millions of retail, services, and manufacturing jobs that have been vacated in recent weeks.
Overseas jobs will also be a target if pressure to bring production "home" now grows.
New kinds of jobs are coming. History shows that technological change can create more jobs than it kills. But the new jobs are likely to fall into one of two broad categories: digital-age jobs for a digital economy and service jobs that don't pay like they used to. That leaves a lot of people out.
Automation will worsen inequality in wealthy countries. This transition to new forms of work won't come easy. People with skillsets better suited to the digitized workplace will have a much easier time than people expected to develop those skills from scratch. The result could intensify the inequality that has already stoked populism and upended political establishments in so many countries in recent years.
Robots pose a special challenge in emerging markets. Hundreds of millions of jobs are at stake in lower-wage countries that have operated for decades as factories for the world's textiles and light manufacturing industries. The International Labor Organization has warned, for example, that 140 million jobs in Southeast Asia alone are at risk of automation in the next 15 years. That's more than half the region's salaried labor force. And that was before the pandemic created new reasons for companies to turn to robots in order to safeguard their production and supply chains against future disruptions.
In both rich and poor countries, governments better be ready. Lost jobs and greater inequality mean that political leaders better be thinking about ways to rewrite the social contract to help those people who can learn new skills and new jobs, and to support those who can't. Displaced people make trouble in democracies and dictatorship alike.
One last thought….
Robots gets viruses too! Cyber-viruses can be just as virulent as biological ones. (Hey, maybe robots do take sick leave.) If companies move to automate their labor forces, they'll also have to invest massively in cybersecurity to immunize them against hackers.