Nvidia Flags Next Wave of AI

Nvidia reported revenue for the quarter ended January 26 of 39.3 billion US dollars, up 78% from a year ago, driven in part by demand for its new Blackwell chips for AI. For fiscal 2025, revenue was 130.5 billion dollars, up 114% from a year ago. 

“Demand for Blackwell is amazing as reasoning AI adds another scaling law — increasing compute for training makes models smarter and increasing compute for long thinking makes the answer smarter,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia. “We’ve successfully ramped up the massive-scale production of Blackwell AI supercomputers, achieving billions of dollars in sales in its first quarter.”

He added: "Models like OpenAI, Grok 3, DeepSeek-R1 are reasoning models that apply inference time scaling. Reasoning models can consume 100x more compute.... DeepSeek-R1 has ignited global enthusiasm. It's an excellent innovation. But even more importantly, it has open-sourced a world-class reasoning AI model. Nearly every AI developer is applying R1 or chain of thought and reinforcement learning techniques like R1 to scale their model's performance."

Huang described each Grace Blackwell NVLink 72 rack as "an engineering marvel. 1.5 million components produced across 350 manufacturing sites by nearly 100,000 factory operators.....the ecosystem that sits on top of our architecture is 10 times more complex today than it was two years ago. And that's fairly obvious because the amount of software that the world is building on top of architecture is growing exponentially and AI is advancing very quickly." He went on to note that "data centres will increasingly become AI factories, and every company will have either rented or self-operated."

Nvidia flagged three major growth engines for AI. "The next wave is coming, agentic AI for enterprise, physical AI for robotics [interpreting physical sensations, such as touch and resistance], and sovereign AI as different regions build out their AI for their own ecosystems. And so, each one of these are barely off the ground," Huang contended. "All software and all services will be based on -- ultimately, based on machine learning, the data flywheel is going to be part of improving software and services and that the future computers will be accelerated, the future computers will be based on AI. And we're really two years into that journey. And in modernising computers that have taken decades to build out." Source: Nvidia

Deutsche Telekom to Step Up Investment in the US

Deutsche Telekom estimated it will spend 17.1 billion euros on cash capex in 2025, up from 16 billion euros in 2024. The telco indicated that rise will be driven by higher spending in the US, where it invested 8.9 billion US dollars last year.

Deutsche Telekom forecast that its revenue will increase in 2025, following organic growth of 3.3% in group revenues in 2024 to 116 billion euros. Source: Deutsche Telekom

Baidu Predicts Fast Growth in Autonomous Rides

Apollo Go, Baidu’s autonomous ride-hailing service, provided over 1.1 million rides in the fourth quarter of 2024, up 36% year over year. In January 2025, accumulated rides provided to the public by Apollo Go surpassed nine million, Baidu added.  In November 2024, Apollo Go was granted permits to conduct autonomous driving testing on public roads in Hong Kong.  Baidu says it is now running 100% fully driverless operations in all the cities in China where Apollo Go is available. 

Robin Li, CEO of Baidu, added: "We operate in one of the most challenging environments globally. China's traffic conditions are among the world's most complex due to its massive population, diverse road conditions, dynamic traffic scenarios, and complicated urban layouts. The price for ride hailing in China it's about like one-seventh of that in the U.S. So, our successful operation here demonstrates our exceptional technological and operational capabilities."

Li said Baidu has successfully validated its business model for autonomous ride-hailing "and laid a strong foundation for further scaling and global expansion. ...Hong Kong is our first right-hand drive... market. It shows our ability to adapt our autonomous driving technology to different traffic systems, opening doors for expansion into other markets with similar driving setups. This year will be a paramount year for our expansion, we expect to grow our fleet size and ride volumes faster than ever." Source: Baidu

EssilorLuxottica Cranks Up Production of Smart Glasses

Since its launch in September 2023, EssilorLuxottica has sold more than two million units of the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses. "The rate of activation and the time of utilisation have been constantly increasing since the first launch, showing that this product is becoming part of our daily life," the Group's CEO Francesco Milleri told investors. "The category of wearable is at an early stage, but we have great confidence in its potential and we are planning for the long term with Meta. We are thinking about new releases with new features and new brands, all supported by AI, key applications in smart glasses and wearable. We expect important progress soon as the most advanced multi-modal AI, which is currently available in the U.S., Canada and Australia, will expand across other markets worldwide."

EssilorLuxottica said it views the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses as a shared platform, "ready to embark on third-party brands and new functions also in the form of subscription services. In the light of such evolution and in line with our ambitious plan, we are currently expanding our production capacity for Ray-Ban Meta, set to reach 10 million annual units by the end of next year." Source: EssilorLuxottica

Amazon Ups the AI Ante Even Further

Amazon indicated it will spend more than 100 billion US dollars on capex in 2025, up from approximately 80 billion dollars in 2024. "The vast majority of that capex spend is on AI for AWS," Andrew Jassy, CEO of Amazon said. "We think virtually every application that we know of today is going to be reinvented with AI inside of it and with inference being a core building block, just like compute and storage and database. If you believe that, plus altogether new experiences that we've only dreamed about are going to actually be available to us with AI, AI represents, for sure, the biggest opportunity since cloud and probably the biggest technology shift and opportunity in business since the Internet." 

However, Jassy also referenced a number of constraints, including the supply of chips from third parties, the roll out of its own chips and energy. "The world is still constrained on power from where I think we all believe we could serve customers if we were unconstrained." he noted.  

With respect to the apparent AI breakthroughs achieved by DeepSeek, Jassy said Amazon was "in part impressed with some of the training techniques, primarily in flipping the sequencing of reinforcement training -- reinforcement learning being earlier and without the human-in-the-loop. We thought that was interesting ahead of the supervised fine-tuning. We also thought some of the inference optimizations they did were also quite interesting." Source: Amazon 

Uber Gears Up for Autonomous Vehicles

Uber described 2024 as "a turning point for the industry, as autonomous vehicle (AV) technology began to mature and more people experienced the magic of their first autonomous ride."  

Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi added: "We estimate that the U.S. market alone is a 1 trillion dollar opportunity as you commercialise AV at scale and bring the unit economics down.....[but] we think that the commercialisation of the technology is gonna take way, way longer. And by the time that the technology commercialises all over the world and in the U.S., you're gonna see many, many more players get over the finish line as it relates to technology."  

"In the next five years, the addressable market is going to be probably in the order of 10% to 15% of the overall marketplace and then gradually is going to expand over a period of time over the next 15 years or so," he added.

Khosrowshahi identified five factors that are required for "scale commercialisation of this business," which he quantified as 10%, 20%, 30% of Uber's volumes. The five factors he cited are enabling regulation, "a consistently superhuman safety record",  cost-effective vehicles, excellent on-the-ground operations; and a "high-utilisation network" that can manage variable demand with flexible supply. 

Uber claimed that AVs currently cost more than 200,000 US dollars each to make, while also noting that  an "average-utilised AV" can run as much as 100,000 miles a year, compared to a typical consumer vehicle at 10,000-15,000 miles a year. "This means that AVs need to be charged multiple times a day and serviced monthly," Uber says.

As it partners with AV developers, Uber said it is spending "an enormous, yet appropriate, amount of organisational energy to execute on our AV strategy. We will have much more to share through the year, starting with our public launch with Waymo in Austin next month and Atlanta this summer. "

Outside of the US, Uber anticipates "several more international expansions in 2025" following its launch in Abu Dhabi. Source: Uber

Alphabet Plans Major Increase in Capex

For the full year 2024, Alphabet's revenue grew by 14% to 350 billion US dollars. Alphabet said it expects to invest approximately 75 billion dollars in capex in 2025, up from 52.5 billion dollars in 2024, primarily to expand its artificial intelligence capabilities.

Alphabet also reported that its Waymo self-driving vehicles served more than four million passenger trips in 2024. However, progress may have slowed - Alphabet also said Waymo is averaging over 150,000 trips each week - the same figure it cited in October 2024. Source: Alphabet

Meta Steps Up Investments in Wearables

Meta hopes to sell between 5 and 10 million units of the next iteration of its AI glasses, after declaring the second generation (the Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses) "a real hit." Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, said that 2025 will be "a defining year that determines if we're on a path towards many hundreds of millions and eventually billions of AI glasses -- and glasses being the next computing platform like we've been talking about for some time -- or if this is just going to be a longer grind."

Meta also suggested that 2025 is going to be a pivotal year for the metaverse. "This is the year when a number of the long-term investments that we've been working on that will make the metaverse more visually stunning and inspiring will really start to land," Zuckerberg said.

In 2025, Meta expects about half of its investments in Reality Labs, which is making a loss of about 17.7 billion US dollars a year, to be related to wearables (such as the AI glasses) and about half in metaverse, which includes its VR, mixed reality, and social platform initiatives.  "We do anticipate that operating losses in Reality Labs will increase in 2025, as they did in 2024," Meta added. "In terms of the increase, we expect our wearables devices to be the primary driver of Reality Labs operating losses growing in 2025 across both cost revenue and operating expenses. And that really comes from our efforts to further accelerate the adoption of our AI glasses products." Source: Meta