Nvidia Forecasts $1 Trillion in Revenue Through 2027

21:46Caroline Hyde:One of the world's best known investors in NVIDIA, ARC CEO Kathy Woods, says she's optimistic about the return on investment from Frontier AI model providers. She spoke with Bloomberg's Anna Edwards in London. Take a listen. We are seeing a revenue generation exploding from the frontier model providers. Anthropics annualized revenue run rate, so ARR, went from 9 billion in December to 19 billion today. So annualizing revenue at 19 billion. That's astonishing growth. Open AI from 20 to 25 billion. The productivity that we are enjoying from these large language models is astonishing, even within our own firm.

22:33Even former skeptics that this was going to amount to very much, you know, very New York skepticism. They're blown away by what they can do. Just to take a detour to geopolitics, because it's become such a dominant market driver. And I wonder how it influences your thinking. We are week three of a war that's taking place in the Middle East. Many tech businesses, of course, probably quite insulated from everything that is happening there. But I wonder, what rethinking does it prompt at ARK? What shift in focus or shift in strategy, if any, does this kind of thing prompt? Yes. Well, of course, it depends how long term this is.

23:14and we are thinking it will be short term. We do have midterm elections this year and other considerations. But of course, energy prices going up, any supply shock to the extent it slows unit growth down, it will slow down the learning curves associated with various technologies. If this is a month or two months, it's not going to have a big impact at all. If This is extended. COVID, we did not understand that the supply shock would reverberate for three years and that inflation would take off and that monetary policy would accommodate the inflation the way it did. We're not in that situation right now.

23:56Monetary policy is not accommodating inflation. We're at 4.3 percent M2 growth on a year over year basis. So nothing like the high 20s, low 30s in COVID. COVID. Our CEO, Cathy Wood there, alongside Bloomberg's Anna Edwards. And look, let's talk more about the war in Iran because it is fueling volatility across global markets. But cryptocurrencies are actually emerging as an unexpected bright spot of late. Bitcoin and its peers have rallied during these times of geopolitical stress. For more, Bloomberg Cross Asset Reporter Isabel Lee joins us. Look, on the day, a little bit of pullback. Over the last few weeks, we've actually finally seen some, what, more buying or less bearishness?

24:34I think it's both. Bitcoin has been resilient. It's now on a six-week high. And unlike its other asset classes, gold, equities, or even other asset classes, it's seen a relative calm. The volatility of Bitcoin has been kind of flat. And really, you can point to it to many things. Maybe it's institutional buying, or maybe it's just a narrative. Although what a lot of my analysts are saying, at least when they talk to me, it's really more institutions, especially corporate treasuries. For every fall, they absorb it, and they buy more of the supply.

25:01Caroline Hyde:There is a technical, or I guess a better phrase for it, transactional part of this story, which you write about that the rally is driven in part by traders unwinding their options bets. Could you explain that quickly, Isabel? This is the thing with Bitcoin. It's interesting because more than the sentiment, it's really all about this mechanic. So we have traders unwinding their options bets, those that bet that Bitcoin will continue to fall. And so when they unwind that, as traders close out their negative positions, Bitcoin rallies. And we have about$1.5 billion of Bitcoin puts clustered around the 60 ,000 level.

25:32and now we're around 75 ,000 level, which is, again, a six-month high, which is really impressive. And there are 1.3 billion of calls at 75 ,000. So that's why you see Bitcoin rallying. But again, it's more about narrative. We're moving beyond that. Now it's about mechanics. I mean, you look at ETF flows,$1.5 billion have flown month to date. So that's really a sign of confidence, Ed.

25:52Caroline Hyde:Bloomberg's Isabella Lee. Thank you. Cara, what are you looking at? Well, I just want to look at what's happening in the world of stablecoins because a bit of an acquisition has happened with MasterCard and BVNK. Look, this is a company that they're buying for$1.8 billion to really ride into the infrastructure play of stablecoins. Remember, Coinbase were looking at that asset and they decided to walk away when it cost them$2 billion, the reports at least.

26:23Caroline Hyde:Welcome back to Bloomberg Tech. One of the other stories out this morning is Qualcomm buying back another$20 billion of shares, also boosting its dividend from 89 cents to 92 cents. The story is pretty simple as Qualcomm tells it. They want to bolster shareholder returns while also continuing to try and diversify this business from smartphone to things like automotive and increasingly and more recently data center. That's what the CEO Cristiano Amon is talking about in the statement, stock up 2%. And then another check on NVIDIA. We're now modestly lower, four tenths of 1%. The peak of Monday's session during Jensen Wang's keynote was a gain of 5%, which very quickly faded as the market interpreted the 2025 to 2027 outlook or forecast of a trillion dollars of demand for its AI compute.

27:10Caroline Hyde:We're now down half a percentage point, Cara. Yeah, and two and a half hours of speeching, it would feel. Jensen Wang didn't actually only just forecast that trillion dollars, the core said. He also talked about what the company will need to get there, including more copper and optics capacity. Look, those comments really rattleshires the companies that make data center optical components. Let's talk about it with Blumbergs Karman Reinecke. Look, we're off by 1.5 % on Corning and some other suppliers at the moment. But what's been interesting is Lumentum and Coherent, they've been running up into this announcement on the anticipation that we're all in on optics.

27:43And it looks as though there's a double-barreled strategy here. Yeah, totally. And it's so interesting because we see those run-ups and then we just have one little comment from Jensen Wong and it just, you know, unraveled right away. So, yeah, I mean, what he said was basically that, you know, copper is still going to be or is going to remain important in these data center buildouts, which just, I guess, made some of the investors a little bit concerned about all of these, you know, optics components. The thing that's interesting, a lot of analysts did say this morning in some notes following GTC that both are definitely going to remain important in these buildouts going forward.

28:20So there's probably not huge cause for concern here. And we did see some of those stocks recovered today. I think Lumentum did kind of go back up and so is in positive territory now.

28:30Caroline Hyde:Carmen, what's the experience of a GTC like for the equities team? Every single time on stage, there was a name check of any given company. you'd notice a little tick higher in some of those stocks. Which were the ones of substance and which were just literally name checks? Yeah, I mean, it ends up being such a flurry of excitement as we're all rushing to send headlines and watch these shares move. I mean, we did see some things move quite materially, outside of Lumentum, coherent. We saw shares of Uber and Lyft jump on partnerships that were announced. IBM shares also jumped. And then there were some other little smaller ones where things quickly faded.

29:11I mean, one that was actually kind of interesting is NVIDIA itself had a very big spike, you know, around that one trillion figure and then actually paired most of those gains sort of as the market digested it. But yeah, overall, we really are seeing again that, you know, Jensen's comments have the ability to move markets, to move these stocks. And it actually is a little bit of a flip from last year, we didn't see a ton of movement around GTC. Investors were really sort of concerned about the macro and, you know, had a lot of AI skepticism. So seeing a little bit of a trend kind of maybe back towards normal this year where, you know, they have the power to move stocks of other companies.

29:47Caroline Hyde:Bloomberg's Carmen Reineke, thank you very much. Let's stick with what's going on in broader markets today, particularly for tech and bringing in Carol Schleif, Chief Market Strategist at BMO Wealth Management. And on a very serious note, like with everything going on, the war in Iran, considerations around trade, a number of headlines relating to trade this morning, even a decline of four-tenths of a percent for NVIDIA, it's the second biggest points drag at the index level for the Nasdaq 100, Carol. How closely were you watching GTC over the last 24 hours for some macro-level impact? I think not necessarily a macro-level impact.

30:25And it's really important to zoom out from what's going on in these day-to-day basis and try to think intermediate and longer term. Clearly, markets are trying to get beyond that. And I think it's one of the reasons why you've seen the aggregate indexes hold in so tightly, because realistically, given all the news we've had since basically the first weekend before January 4th, we've had several different wars, conflicts started in here, lots of stuff that have hit the markets, and yet the aggregate averages are still hugging that close to all-time highs, even though there's been a lot of turbulence underneath.

31:02But I think that's indicative of the fact that people are really leaning into, you've still got growth stories going on. You had TTC reaffirm that growth story. I mean, a trillion dollars, if you will, out over the next couple of years. And so you've got a lot of momentum underneath, and investors don't want to be out of the market when some of that macro clears.

31:24Caroline Hyde:I find that interesting. As Jensen Wong tells it, the global economy is in the early phase of a transition spanning agentic AI through to robotics and the physical AI space. If you've started with classic economics, how does one prepare for that as an investor to understand where in that transition the global economy is? Well, I think one of the things you do is understand we are in the middle of a transition. and they tend to be really muddy when you're in the very short term or the new phases of a technology. I was rolling it back thinking to when we first got Excel and WordPerfect and some of the other early software, and everyone was trying to figure out how do I use it?

32:05Do I have to put everything into a spreadsheet or just some things into a spreadsheet? And when you have that sort of reconfiguration, if you will, It takes some period of time to figure out what the impacts are, but rolling it back and looking at company after company, country after country, reinvesting or investing for the first time in a long time in some of those really important infrastructure and capital investments. And that has a long, long live and long tail to it, if you will. But it's also important to remember from Economics 101 that a lot of the economic stats we have were meant to measure a very different society than we have now or are emerging to.

32:49And so that'll be part of the challenge. So as investors, I think part of it is stay diversified, stay long, lean into it, and don't hyperventilate too much about day-to-day activity. Should you be leaning more into the compute build-out, the AI infrastructure build-out? That's what's worked for the last few years. And I'm looking at Nebius today, for example. It's selling, well, convertible debt to be able to continue to build out its own neocloud offering. We know it's going to deal with meta. Should you be long that space? Well, I think a piece of it is to understand not only the build out, but to look far and wide for those companies that are leaning into using the new technology as well, because there's lots of different applications, different places that it has the chance to supplement, if you will, not necessarily replace everybody, but supplement.

33:47And so where are those leaders that are encouraging their employees, if you will, and prepping their employees to be able to lean in and use those new technologies? I mean, Carol, they've got to lean in because many of them are going to be forced out. Look, there's another headline in your space of banking, Nordea, which is a Nordic bank, saying they're going to be laying off some 5 % of staff because of AI productivity. Now, you can call it AI washing, but when someone like Jack Dorsey is laying off 40 % of staff and he's thinking he can do that because of AI, are we just going to see more and more of that impacting the labor force?

34:23I think that it's interesting because I do think there's a hint, if you will, of AI washing to some of it. But there's also the issue that these leaders are looking for people in their organizations and they're giving them seats at the table, the ones that are rolling up their sleeves, getting messy, trying this stuff out and figuring it out. But also there was a report out recently that talked about the bulk of the spending being done in AI is done on the technology, not on teaching people how to use it. So there's a piece of it where we have to create an environment where it's okay for people to experiment with it.

34:58We're not going to replace overnight some of these macro systems, and especially in highly regulated industries like banking. It's hard to believe that you're necessarily going to totally displace an old software and allow agentic AI to take over all of it. But it is going to supplement what each of us are doing and how we're doing it. And you go back and look just in my business, in analysis, where we started with hand plotted charts and hand calculated moving averages to deploying new technology all the way along makes me a lot more productive day to day. And I think that's what companies are looking for.

35:35But each of us individually is going to have to figure out how to lean into that, too. Well said, Kaurash Life, chief market strategist at BMO Wealth Management. We'll always appreciate your time. Let's talk about that disruption a little bit more now for labor, because China faces a key test as the nation's AI boom really reshapes industries while putting millions of jobs at risk. Now, analysts warn that up to 142 million urban jobs could vanish by 2049 due to rapid AI-driven automation. China correspondent Min Min Lau reports from Beijing.

36:10That almost looks like me, but it's not. It's an AI-generated video based on a single screenshot. Tools from Alibaba, Tencent, Kuaishou are making AI video generation accessible to millions, sometimes for free. Our company, I can't imagine without AI, how can we survive at the beginning? Without AI, I don't think our game can actually be done in one year. It's brought huge productivity gains for this game developer, but also raised alarms in the entertainment industry. Disney and Paramount have accused ByteDance of IP infringement after its video generator produced near-cinematic scenes from just a text prompt.

36:52The fear is that AI could replace not just mundane tasks, but jobs across creative industries. The painting, if we use like labor works, it's like 2 ,000 to 4 ,000 for one piece. But with AI, we only use like probably 2 RMB for one piece. For policymakers, the challenge is balancing growth with disruption.

37:26The China Economic Journal projects that more than 30 % of urban jobs in China could be lost to AI by 2049. That's 142 million jobs. That's a scenario that could threaten social stability. Beijing is aiming to create another 12 million jobs this year, with just as many graduates set to enter an already slack labor market. In finance and IT, if they're warned for this kind of regulatory barriers, about 30 to 40 percent of the job could have been lost right away. If you're thinking about the automation, AI replacement of junior roles, it's already happening massively in China. That leaves Xi Jinping's government with a dilemma.

38:05China can't afford to fall behind in its tech ways with the United States, but the implications of the tech revolution are far from clear. If we let AI replace the jobs without taxing the AI appropriately, then it can really get to the core of the consumer economy. And we got to think about the sort of tax policy that is targeted specifically at what is driving those job losses. It will be in the regulatory framework at some point. I just don't see it as a choice yet because we're at a very early stage of promoting the application of AI. So the gray area must be kept actually by a very wide margin.

38:46Last December, state media published a landmark arbitration case in Beijing that set some early guardrails. Dismissing an employee because of AI is illegal because it's a business decision for profit, not an uncontrollable event. That means companies must prioritise retraining and reassignment before dismissing an employee. But for now, all signs at the two sessions suggest the government is going all in on tech at the risk of leaving some people behind.

39:15Caroline Hyde:That was Bloomberg's Min Min Lau. Coming up, Gecko Robotics makes a deal with the U.S. Navy to monitor and maintain its warships. We speak with CEO Jake Lusararian. That's next. This is Bloomberg Tech.

39:34Hello, hello. I'm Malcolm Gladwell, host of the podcast Smart Talks with IBM. I recently sat down with IBM's chairman and CEO, Arvind Krishna. And I asked him, how can companies use AI to its fullest potential to create smarter business? My one advice to them, pick areas you can scale. Don't pick the shiny little toys on the side. For example? If anybody has more than 10 % of what they had for customer service 10 years ago, they're already five years behind. If anybody is not using AI to make their developers who write software 30 % more productive today with the goal of being 70 % more productive.

40:22Yeah. So we are not asking our clients to be the first experiment on it. We say, you can leverage what we did. We're happy to bring out all our learnings, including what needs to change in the process, because the biggest change is not technology. It's getting people to accept that there's a different way to do things. To listen to the full conversation, visit ibm.com slash smarttalks.

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42:32The U.S. government is stepping up its use of AI to monitor aging infrastructure and modernized military systems. And a new push, Gecko Robotics, has announced a$71 million partnership with the U.S. Navy, deploying its AI-powered robots to assess the condition, the readiness of American warships. Joining us now, Jake Lusasarian. He's Gecko Robotics CEO and co-founder. Jake, can you measure what your robots are able to achieve in terms of real-term military readiness? We're all about measuring the real information and details on the ground. And so we swarm our robots all over these ships, as you see in the videos.

43:08And what they're doing is they're gathering ground truth and information that would typically take three or four months to be done and gather one one-millionth of the amount of information and data set that is not filtered to any source of truth and software that could be gathered and then in perpetuity be evaluated to help with planning to the future. What we're providing to the Navy, and kudos to the Navy for adopting this technology in a way that's giving them an advantage over others that deal with the same problem every single day. They're taking very seriously this demand of getting to 80 % readiness of their fleet, and the robots collect all this information and data that can help perpetuate goodness both now, saving three to four months of cycle time and maintenance cycles, but also into the future to plan smarter so that we have less and less days of downtime for the vessels.

43:53I mean, you're seeing them flying, we're seeing them climbing, we're seeing the hardware, but you're also about the interpretation of the data as well. How are you developing your own models to ensure that the right information is getting to the end user? Yeah, well, it's this example, and what we say at the company a lot is if it's not ready, it doesn't count. And that's very important as it relates to the readiness of our fleets, as it relates to deterring conflict, what's going on right now in the Middle East, and then also on the Pacific side. And, you know, we've been doing this for 13 years and started the company out of a college dorm with this idea of what if you could diagnose the health of the built world, you know, what could that enable as it relates to predicting what the future structures, how they should be built, and then what's going to occur and how to prevent that from occurring.

44:35And so, you know, we've been improving these models and believing that if you can gather information and data using robots, turn atoms into bits, you can have such an incredible advantage as it relates to how to make infrastructure smarter, make it more efficiently and make even new structures. And so these models are all being fed into a central source of truth, a digital thread for critical infrastructure called cantilever.

44:59Caroline Hyde:Jake, you presented basically at the winning the AI race summit in DC last year, which was very much focused on this administration's policy platforms for AI. I'm curious in the time that since passed, you've done a deal with the Navy. You got it done. And I wonder what that's like, you know, to see a project through to fruition with some of the military apparatus of this nation. It is so exciting and so incredible to see the Navy being a leader in the world as it relates to giving our warfighters an advantage, an advantage that no other Navy around the world, including China, has. And that's the ability to have this incredible advantage with robotics and AI to speed up how quickly we're gathering information and then deploying it.

45:41We're not just doing that for the U.S. government. We're doing that for the largest companies in the world, companies like Adnok, Adnok who's giving this AI and robotics native approach in such an incredibly advanced way. We're bringing that same technology and beyond to the Navy and ensuring as well that it's not just about talk, about five years or ten years where you're going to see autonomous systems and robots and AI affecting the Navy and helping our warfighters. No, this is actually happening today. And that is something that the administration cares deeply about. That's something that Secretary Phelan of the Navy cares deeply about.

46:15If you want to have the best Navy in the world, the best assets and programs in the world, most robust, you need impact today. And as you're seeing, today matters, and it matters more than ever.

46:26Caroline Hyde:Right. Jake, what is your core competence at Gecko Robotics? Are you good at hardware or are you good at software? We're good at building robotic systems that go out and gather information and data sets that no one, one, knew how to ever capture before, but then, two, interpreting it to allow for decisions to be made to give you advantages that can speed up times to bring critical infrastructure that's constantly delayed, constantly over budget because of how hard it is to find out where are things broken, how to fix it. are the robots are able to gather all the information, not have to destroy the infrastructure and assets to gather it, and then provide the ability to optimize where to make the repairs, the replacements, and then into the future how to plan for that to potentially never even have a shutdown.

47:09We've been able to prevent shutdowns at oil and gas facilities that were going to occur that would have caused big explosions, and for the Navy to be able to accelerate and give them advantages in terms of how to get our ships out of dry dock and defending our values. And so we're just so incredibly proud to be serving the Navy in this way. And just kudos to the Navy for taking a big, bold step as it relates to giving us this advantage.

47:32Caroline Hyde:Jake Lusararian of Gecko Robotics, great to have you back on the show. Thank you very much. For many men, mental health challenges aren't recognized until they've already taken a toll. Work pressure, financial stress, changing relationships, and traditional expectations around masculinity can quietly wear men down, often without clear warning signs. In Season 3 of The Visibility Gap, Dr. Guy Winch and his guests explore how these pressures show up, how to spot them earlier, and how men can access meaningful support. Listen to the new season of The Visibility Gap, a podcast presented by Cigna Healthcare.

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