ARK Invest’s Brett Winton on AI’s Next Phase, Amazon Pharmacy Ambitions, iPhone Delay | Nov 11, 2025

0:13Welcome everyone to the information's TI TV. My name is Akash Pasricha. It is Tuesday, November 11th. We have got a great show lined up for you today. First up, we are discussing our exclusive reporting that Apple is delaying the release of its next iPhone Air after the first model isn't selling as expected. We're then talking to ARK Invest's chief futurist, Brett Winton, about AI valuations and what the next big wave of tech innovation is going to be. Next up, we'll turn to another scoop we published. OpenAI's Stargate effort is getting a$3 billion investment from Blue Owl Capital. and separately, I'm also talking to a top Amazon pharmacy executive about the company's pharmacy strategy at large.

0:55Finally, we're going to end the show with a conversation with the CEO of Epidemic Sound. The company unveiled a new tool to help creators soundtrack their videos. It's a busy show, and so let's get right on into it. Apple's new iPhone Air isn't getting the uptake that it hoped for. That is according to a new story that we published in The Information. My colleagues reported that the company is delaying the release of its next iPhone Air as the first model sales have been below expectations. We also reported that the company could be looking to redesign the model to include a second camera lens after the first model had only one.

1:31Joining me now to discuss that is Gil Luria, Managing Director and Head of Technology Research at DA Davidson. Gil, welcome to CITV. It's great to have you here. Thanks for having me. So let's talk about this news that we reported yesterday. What did you make of it? Well, when we first saw the iPhone there, it looked very cool. It almost looked sexy, right? We all want a thinner, lighter phone. And so there was an appeal there. But once customers put their hands on it, they realized a couple of things. One is it's not actually that thin because the camera bump means that it's at its thickest point.

2:10It's as thick as any other iPhone. And then also that the sacrifice is in the battery life. And that's something that is one of the top, if not the top consideration for consumers to upgrade their phone. So while it did add some halo and cachet to Apple by being sexy, it mostly drove consumers to buy the Pro and Pro Max models. By the way, it's a good thing because those are higher price items for Apple. Right. Now, so how important was it for Apple to unveil this discounted model? And how important is it that it comes out with all these different variations of the iPhone? Because as you said, the iPhone segment, any iPhone sales are good for them.

2:54Yeah, so part of the introduction of iPhone Air was to push the price points of Pro up a little bit. By adding something between the iPhone and the Pro, they were able to then wedge up the Pro model. So that's helping them as well. Because it turns out that this year is a big upgrade cycle. We thought the upgrade cycle would be last year with new AI functionality. Turns out that consumers aren't ready for the AI Apple has to offer. Apple isn't really offering very incremental AI to what you can get in the Chad GPT app. And so all we ended up with is, hey, phones are about four or five years old, so consumers are upgrading them.

3:38And as they're doing that, Apple was able to wedge in the AI model. again give it a little bit of a sexy halo but more importantly push up the prices of pro and pro max so consumers are actually buying a more expensive phone as they upgrade so now we've reported that the company is planning to delay the release of its new model for the iphone air whenever that ends up being what do you think the likelihood is that the company actually just ends up scrapping the model altogether? Well, we won't find out until next year. And what's more likely to happen next year is a foldable iPhone. We've had foldable Samsung phones for a little while.

4:19They're quite popular. And so Apple just wanted to make sure to get it right. They want to make sure that it looks right, it folds right, it looks nice, it doesn't break. And it sounds like they'll be ready for that next year. which is upgrading the iPhone Air won't be a necessity. Maybe they'll do it for the year following that. And again, it'll be either including more cameras or maybe less functionality so it's thin throughout. But we may not find out for another year or two what that looks like because it looks like the emphasis for next year will be the foldable phone. I am curious, the foldable phone, can you tell us about what you make of Apple's decision to move towards a foldable phone.

5:05As you said, other companies already have it. I don't see Apple as really someone who is going after their competition necessarily. They've always prided themselves on innovation. Why do you think the foldable phone is such a focus for them right now? Because they see that Samsung has been successful. So it is fully competition in that case. Yeah, yeah. And Apple is very innovative for sure. and their products are very compelling. We're all very loyal to them. But realistically speaking, they haven't introduced a new product in a long time. They have been mostly seeing what the market is interested in and then doing it at their level, which is a level that delights consumers and then coming up with that.

5:49Much to the frustration of Samsung Android users who feel like they are innovative and get things right first and then Apple just copies them. And Apple doesn't care because if they get it right, they'll sell a lot more phones and generate a lot more profits. If we just zoom out a little bit and look at Apple's efforts to innovate in the device ecosystem at large over the past few years, one thing I wanted to get your take on is whether this is a challenge of innovation and delivering a product that customers actually want. We've seen with stuff like the Vision Pro, I mean, it's hard to build things that customers want.

6:26Or is the other end of the challenge just that Apple is so big, it's really hard to make a dent in a company that is the size of Apple? Which one of those two strikes you as the bigger challenge right now? They're both challenges. But really, for them, it's much more important to get it right. So I would actually say that the Vision Pro, in its own way, was a big success. if you've been to an Apple store and did a trial with the Vision Pro, the experience is incredibly compelling. The world around you is vivid. You have a lot of control over it. It's a great glimpse into the future. So the price point has to come down.

7:09The headset has to get lighter. The battery pack can't be external. These are all things that they will work out because, to your point, they need another big category. And we know what that's going to look like. It's going to be two elements to it. There's going to be the overhead goggles that will replace desktops and TVs and things like that. When we're stationary, we're going to have overhead goggles that immerse us in the world instead of viewing it through a 24-inch screen or a 27-inch screen, or even a 90-inch TV. We'll get immersed in that. and then the other category is going to be the wearables the glasses and there we already know what that looks like because meta is actually leading the way with the head of race bands that are getting better and better at providing us the ability to enhance our our world and as we are in motion so when we're not sitting down at our desk or on our couch those are the two place, new platforms that are important.

8:14Meta's racing to win in both of those categories. We can expect Google to participate in its way. Apple gets it right. Apple delights consumers. And if you try the Vision Pro, it is a very engaging experience that we are going to have when it's ready for primetime. Very quickly, before we let you go, you mentioned Google. we have the reporting that Apple is marching towards a deal with Google to use its AI in Siri. What do you think that tells you about Apple's AI strategy at large? Actually, it's a good thing that they have the consumer, so they can choose what model to feed the consumer, and they don't have to make long-term commitments.

8:56They'll give the consumer what they can give them right now. They'll watch the models develop. They'll figure out who the winner is, and they'll supply that model to their consumers. So instead of spending hundreds of billions of dollars on data centers and trading models, they're letting Google do it and OpenAI do it, and they're letting them race each other to see who gets access to the Apple consumer. And that's where we're at. We don't care whose model it is, as long as Siri can understand what we're talking about and be hopeful. Great. Well, Gil, it's great to have you on the show. Thank you were coming on.

9:29We really do appreciate it. Thank you. Okay. The AI trade is under pressure today. A couple stories in the spotlight. CoreWeb is falling after lowering its full-year revenue forecast. The company reported it is facing delays due to a third-party data center developer who is behind schedule. NVIDIA is also in the red after SoftBank sold its entire stake in the company for more than$5 billion. The AI trade has powered a massive run-up in mega-cap stocks, fueling record valuations. But after months of euphoria, investors are still asking if the hype is ahead of the fundamentals. Here to help answer that question is Brett Winton, Chief Futurist at ARK Invest.

10:09Brett, welcome to TITV. It's great to have you here. Thanks for having me on. So I want to start with the AI trade at large. What do you make of the way that these mega cap companies are trading right now in the broader market movements at large? I think there's clearly this narrative out there that AI is a bubble, that you shouldn't spend so much money on data center capex that we're not going to get utility out of these things. I think it's flat wrong. There's top-down ways and bottoms-up ways to understand it, but at a very high level, we're going to go from a billion AI chatbot users this year to roughly four to five billion by the late 2020s and before 2030.

10:47And we think that AI productivity tools like ChatGPT deliver knowledge workers a 20 % productivity boost today. We think that's going to triple over the course of this year and then triple again. And so you can, over two years, their pricing power should increase by around 9x and the number of users over a little longer should increase by 5x. So you can compound the two to say the pricing power in the entire space is roughly 40 to 50x higher. So if you look at OpenAI's revenue or Anthropik's revenue, I think actually the revenue projections that people are talking about are conservative relative to the pricing power that they have, because these magical artifacts are going to deliver amazing productivity advances more than enough to underwrite the data center spend that they're talking about engaging in.

11:38But let me ask you this. You talked about pricing power. McKinsey put out a report recently that said that 39 % of employees at corporations around the world say that AI has had any impact on operating profit. And at most, they attribute 5 % of their operating profit to the use of AI. And I ask you that because profitability has certainly been the question. Is pricing power the way you see these companies ending up generating a profit? Or how do you see that playing out? Yeah, well, one, as far as we know on a gross profit basis, some of these companies are actually printing very healthy margins.

12:11The way to understand it is you and I are knowledge workers. I'm sure you use ChatGPT. I use it to do complex tasks as kind of like a thought partner and something to do kind kind of code generation, data querying, to really build out forecasting models on behalf of ARK. And everybody in ARK uses it. And so am I able to point to, oh, this query led to this profitability? No, but I'm able to say, hey, I got a lot more done than I otherwise would be able to get done in a world pre-AI. And the way businesses pay for productivity-enhancing software, they don't pay full freight for it. They pay roughly 10%.

12:47Well, we think almost$10 trillion is going to be spent on AI software, by 2030. So you can do the math on kind of the productivity that we assume is going to be delivered to knowledge workers to justify that forecast. But it's more than enough to support the data center build out that we see today. I want to ask you about the number of strategies that ARK has. I mean, you're everywhere. You're in software, robotics, digital assets, healthcare. Which of these categories are you personally spending the most time on right now as you study these spaces? Well, certainly in our venture fund, we have a lot of exposure to AI.

13:25We have in our top holdings, we have OpenAI, XAI, and Anthropic. So we think that the foundation model platforms are going to be remarkably valuable on the order of 15 to 20 trillion dollars by the end of the decade, collectively. And, you know, in ArcW, which is really our AI-focused fund, there's obviously a lot of platform as a service exposure, including Palantir and others, but also infrastructure as a service. And then Tesla is really the largest AI project in the world. And I think you can look at what's about to happen with RoboTaxi and you can say, hey, four to five years after, we'll see the same capability advance in humanoid robots and understand why Elon's maniacal vision is likely to change the world.

14:09I want to come back to Tesla in a minute, but outside of AI, and I ask this question because ARK has such a multifaceted strategy, outside of AI, where do you find yourself spending the most time right now? We believe that five fundamental innovation platforms are basically changing the economic world. So inclusive of AI, which is accelerating everything, we also focus on multiomics, which is really how cures and biological data are going to change the way that we treat health, robotics, energy storage, as well as public blockchain. So we have our Bitcoin ETF, as well as a lot of digital assets exposures and digital wallets exposures.

14:51But it's all being accelerated by artificial intelligence. One of the really striking factors about this cycle is everything is moving forward faster than even we anticipated because AI is moving so quickly. Now, if we zoom in on robotics, we've had people come on the show, a lot of people studying this space, talking about the bonkers valuations in robotics. and robotics is obviously tied to Tesla, which is a company that I know you follow and back very closely. What do you think people get wrong when they think about the robotics trend and how that is going to play out? I mean, honestly, I worry that people are underestimating how difficult and complex a problem humanoid robots are going to turn out to be.

15:34We think that if you commercialize Robotaxi at scale, which we believe Tesla is going to do this year, You generate hundreds of billions of dollars in cash flow over time, and you'll have to spend a lot of that on AI compute and manufacturing to get humanoid robots to the same generalizable degree of scale. We think it's, you know, call it a wide error bar on these estimates, but we think it's net a 200 ,000 times harder problem than commercializing robo-taxi, meaning you have to throw that much additional AI compute power at it. Now you're making great architectural improvements and kind of the quality of the chips is improving, but it really is a multi-hundred billion dollar probably investment cycle to get humanoid robots to the state that people are hoping for and promising.

16:20We've reported on some of the challenges that Tesla is facing getting those humanoid robots to develop at the pace that they would have hoped. What do you make of those challenges? Yeah, I mean, the articulation of the joints, the actuators, the software stack, designing for manufacturing scale, these are all huge thorny engineering challenges. And we think ultimately investing in humanoid robots will be an amazing return on invested capital measured over the course of the decade. We think commercialization is probably in a meaningful scale of 2029 to 2030 event at this point. And for us, the underwrite on Tesla is mostly Robotaxi.

17:04I mean, the fact that you can buy the best-selling car in the world and pay a few thousand extra dollars and it comes with the option to have a robotic chauffeur that you can use at any time is really astounding and amazing. And that transforms the business model of Tesla from selling cars to collecting revenue, platform fees off miles driven. If we pivot to talking a little bit about the chip sector and about NVIDIA, who do you think has the best chance of challenging a company like NVIDIA? I mean, I don't think it's going to be a single company that challenges their primacy. Instead, there are going to be a lot of vertically integrated players kind of nibbling at the edges of their market share.

17:49and AMD has a reasonably comprehensive offering that is clearly gaining traction because of the larger amount of attached memory. The way we underwrite and consider NVIDIA is there's going to be$3 to$4 trillion in AI data center spend by 2030. And we do think NVIDIA's share is going to fall over time. And so, but the number is so large that it's still an interesting position, even at these prices. But the chip space is definitely a cyclical space. Inevitably, we'll get to a point where people have overbought chips and there will be a correction. It could be just on the basis of power availability.

18:33Who gets hurt in that correction? Well, I mean, you know, the chip providers, NVIDIA would get hurt, AMD would get hurt. If you can't install the chips that you buy, then suddenly there's going to be an inventory cycle. Look at the history of semis. Inventory cycles happen, and suddenly gross margins fall as opposed to going up and to the right perpetually. And then there's what people will say is the end of the cycle, but it's really probably an interesting buying opportunity into some of those exposures, given our expectations for capex spend over the medium and long term. But I would caution people, semis is not up and to the right.

19:15That's not the way it works. It's going to be the same this cycle. There are going to be hiccups along the way. Combination of that cyclical nature of the chip business, and then plus the likes of Tesla clearly pushing into vertically integrated chips and others, Tranium with Amazon and Google commercializing TPUs. These are all competitive vectors that it's not like they immediately pulled the rug out from under NVIDIA. Instead, they just put pressure on their growth at some point. Let me ask you a quick question before we go. We had Tony Kim from BlackRock on the show recently. He floated this idea that the big tech companies that are spending heavily on CapEx, one way for them to afford that CapEx in the long run could be loading up on debt, which is something that they've largely been able to avoid.

20:01Do you think that's a good idea? What do you think of that? I mean, I do think these are capital assets that you could layer debt against. Historically, big CapEx cycles in innovation have been debt funded, and the debt markets are simply much larger than the equity markets. The danger is you have long depreciation schedules and the cyclical nature of these CapEx investments, and so certainly people could get off sides. I think ROIC on data centers, the return that you get in investing in data centers is going to be amazing, but that doesn't mean it's going to be amazing for everyone. I think inevitably some players are going to get over their skis and there's going to be a consolidation event.

20:45But we'll look back at the end of this business cycle and say, wow, thank goodness the capital markets funded this build out of these amazing productively delivering compute chips so that we have all of the magical capabilities, cars that can drive themselves, drugs that cost 75 % less to bring to market and are at market 40 % faster, models that literally make your life easier day in and day out, all of those will be byproducts of this data center build that we're seeing right now. Great. And Brett, very quickly before I let you go, one contrarian trade idea that you're obsessed with right now, give it to us.

21:28I don't know if I want to give you an individual name, but I think that Wall Street underestimates how valuable cures are. As in, people think that, hey, it's a bad business to sell a drug that somebody just takes once and they don't have to take it again because people like recurring revenue. But if you do the math on how cures are going to be priced, you get the entire lifetime value of spend of the patient up front plus the utility you deliver to the patient. So cures are two times more valuable than the typical chronic treatment. And so what is the cure that you are laser focused on right now?

22:01Okay. Well, it's a disease that you've never heard of, but hereditary angioedema. 7 ,000 people have it in the US. They have to spend$500 ,000 per year on prophylactic treatments just to prevent themselves from going to the hospital. And they sometimes go to the hospital anyway. So there is a prospective cure for hereditary angioedema. It should price, if it were fairly priced in the high millions of but maybe$3 to$4 million. And so it's a$20 to$30 billion market. And the company that's delivering it, Intelia, is down a lot based on another, a data readout from an entirely different treatment.

22:41I was waiting to see if you would actually say the company. So the company is? Intelia. Intelia. Okay. All right. Well, Brett, I want to thank you for coming on the show. It's great to have you. Always a pleasure chatting with folks from ARC and we'll have you back on the show again soon. Thank you so much. Okay. Open AI's Stargate Data Center project is getting a$3 billion investment from Blue Owl Capital. Blue Owl is best known as one of Wall Street's biggest private lenders, but it is taking a slightly different approach to backing data center projects. Joining me now to discuss that is Myles Krupa, our AI and finance reporter who broke that story today.

23:21Myles, welcome to the show. It's great to have you here. Thanks, Akash. So let's talk about this scoop that you published this morning. What do we need to know about this deal with Blue Owl and Stargate? Yeah, so, you know, Stargate was kind of pitched as this really big company to create computing infrastructure for OpenAI. And it's actually kind of turned into a lot of different individual data center projects that are being financed individually. And so what's happening here is Blue Owl is investing about$3 billion of equity in this data center in New Mexico that's being built, where Oracle, which has a huge contract from OpenAI, Oracle will be the tenant at that data center, and then OpenAI will be renting computing power from Oracle.

24:08So this Blue Owl investment is the equity, and then they're also going out and raising$18 billion in loans from a group of banks. So the system of these deals is kind of interesting to me because people might think, oh, Blue Owl investing in OpenAI, which is not the case at all. This is a very nuanced structure that these data center projects take on. Can you explain to us the difference here between Blue Owl investing in OpenAI versus Blue Owl investing in this particular project? Yeah, that's right. So basically, the project is its own entity, its own kind of company that's separate from OpenAI or Oracle.

24:49And, you know, Blue Owl is going to be the equity investor here. So they get the potential upside if this data center project remains really valuable over the long term. And then they also get paid, you know, from the lease payments that Oracle will be making after the lenders get paid. So it's, you know, it's a bit different from investing in a startup, but there is still, you know, potential for big upside here for Blue Owl. And the reason that these data center projects are structured like this is because what they're largely sort of real estate play? Why is this beneficial? That's right. Yeah, they're sort of in between real estate and big infrastructure projects like oil and gas pipelines and, you know, wind and solar projects.

25:39So they're financed in a very similar manner as those other projects are. The funding that's going in right now is going to cover basically the construction costs. And so that's sort of funding for the next three to five years. And then once it's up and running, it'll probably get refinanced again. So think about this as kind of funding the upfront costs of building a really massive data center. So Blue Owl making an equity investment. Blue Owl, of course, as you said, it's a company that is mostly known on Wall Street for its private credit plays. Is this part of a larger trend, private credit companies making more equity investments in the AI era?

26:24Yeah, I would say overall, some of the biggest firms on Wall Street, Blackstone, KKR, Apollo, they're going deeper and deeper into data centers as this AI boom sort of continues on. and Blue Owl is no exception. And they're maybe even one of the sort of fastest growing players in the data center space. They bought this data center investor called IPI Partners for about a billion dollars. That transaction closed in January and they've been really busy ever since. In addition to this deal, they've done a huge one with Meta for this data center. Meta is building in Louisiana. They invested$2.5 billion in equity for that.

27:08And they've also invested in another Stargate project that's being developed by Crusoe for Oracle and OpenAI. So they're very quickly becoming kind of one of the main players here. And last question before we let you go. Anytime a reporter comes on to tell us about a new development with Stargate, we have to ask the question, how is the project going overall? Is it on track? How far are they? What's your sense on how things are going on the ground? Yeah, well, I would say it's taken a bit of a different shape than maybe what we first thought it would look like. And that was a bit of a pivot. But, you know, it does seem like OpenAI is well on its way to securing what it says could be about 10 gigawatts of computing power.

27:52You know, they're standing up sites here in New Mexico, in Texas, Wisconsin. They're working on other sites with SoftBank, which is a big part of Stargate. So while maybe it isn't exactly how it was first laid out, they are managing to secure pretty significant data center sites for Stargate and, as we just reported, securing the funding for them. Right. Well, as with most things in AI, I think things always do take a different shape than was initially expected. Miles, I want to thank you for coming on. It's great to chat with you, and we'll have you back on the show again soon. Thanks, Akash.