30/05/2025

BIZ & FINANCE FRIDAY | MAY 30, 2025

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Nvidia earnings beat expectations

SAN FRANCISCO: Nvidia on Wednesday reported earnings that topped market expectations, with a US$4.5 billion (RM19 billion) hit from US export controls being less than the Silicon Valley chip juggernaut had feared. However, Nvidia chief financial officer Colette Kress warned in an earnings call that export constraints are expected to cost the AI chip titan about US$8 billion in the current quarter. Nvidia in April notified regulators that it expected a US$5.5 billion hit in the recently-ended quarter due to a new US licencing requirement on the primary chip it can legally sell in China. US officials had told Nvidia it must obtain licences to export its H20 chips to China because of concerns they may be used in supercomputers there, the company said in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing. The new licencing rule applies to Nvidia graphics processing units, or GPUs, with bandwidth similar to that of the H20. “China is one of the world’s largest AI markets and a springboard to global success,” Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang said in an earnings call. “The platform that wins China is positioned to lead globally; however, the US$50 billion China market is effectively closed to us.” Nvidia cannot dial back the capabilities of its H20 chips any further to comply with US export constraints, winding up forced to o Sales hit from China export curbs not as bad as feared Google begins direct online sales of Pixel phones in India MUMBAI: Google yesterday began direct online sales of its popular hardware devices in India, including Pixel phones, watches and earbuds, ahead of an anticipated launch of its first physical stores in the South Asian nation. The Alphabet-owned firm said it has for the first time enabled direct online purchases for Indian users on the official Google Store website. The company currently sells it products in India through authorised retailers and via Walmart-backed e-commerce platform Flipkart. Apple, its bigger rival in the premium smartphone category, already sells its phones directly to Indian users, and operates its own retail stores in Mumbai and in New Delhi, with more planned. Google is close to deciding on locations in India where it will open its first physical retail stores outside the United States, Reuters reported in February. In launching the physical stores, Google has sought to mirror a retail approach that helped Apple Inc rake in billions of dollars in the last two decades by showcasing its own products. Apple has 500 plus stores worldwide. – Reuters

write off billions of dollars on inventory that cannot be sold or repurposed, according to Huang. “The US has based its policy on the assumption that China cannot make AI chips,” Huang said. “That assumption was always questionable, and now it’s clearly wrong.” China’s AI is moving on without Nvidia technology, while that country’s chip-makers innovate products and ramp up operations, according to Huang. “The question is not whether China will have AI; it already does,” he said. “The question is whether one of the world’s largest markets will run on American platforms.” The new requirements resulted in Nvidia incurring a charge of US$4.5 billion in the quarter, associated with H20 excess inventory and purchase obligations “as demand for H20 diminished”, the chip-maker said in an earnings report. US export constraints stopped Nvidia from bringing in an additional US$2.5 billion worth of H20 revenue in the quarter, according to the company. Nvidia said it made a profit of US$18.8 billion on revenue of US$44.1 billion, causing shares to rise more than 4% in after-market trades. Huang said demand for the company’s AI-powering technology remains strong, and a new Blackwell NVL72 AI supercomputer referred to as a “thinking machine” is in full-scale production. “Countries around the world are recognising AI as essential infrastructure – just like electricity and the internet – and Nvidia stands at the centre of this profound transformation.” Nvidia high-end GPUs are in hot

Huang delivering the keynote address at the Nvidia GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California. – REUTERSPIC

from geopolitical headwinds but Nvidia also faces mounting competitive pressure as rivals like AMD gain ground.” Revenue in Nvidia’s gaming chip business hit a record high of US$3.8 billion, leaping 48% and eclipsing forecasts. – AFP

from the unit, however. “Nvidia beat expectations again but in a market where maintaining this dominance is becoming more challenging,” said Emarketer analyst Jacob Bourne. “The China export restrictions underscore the immediate pressure

demand from tech giants building data centres to power artificial intelligence. The company said its data centre division revenue in the quarter was US$39.1 billion, up 10% from the same period last year. The market had expected more

DeepSeek releases update to its R1 reasoning model SHANGHAI: Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek released models claiming to surpass DeepSeek’s.

upended beliefs that US export controls were holding back China’s AI advancements after the startup released AI models that were on a par or better than industry-leading models in the United States at a fraction of the cost. The launch of R1 in January sent technology shares outside China plummetting in January and challenged the view that scaling AI requires vast computing power and investment. Since R1’s release, Chinese tech giants like Alibaba and Tencent have “We want real humans to make it as artists and creators, but what is creativity in the future with AI? I don’t know. What is music?” Ek said. He recalled that electronic dance music and the DJ culture, and before that, hip hop where people sampled music, were initially not considered “real music”. Noting that Mozart had to compose entire symphonies in his head, Ek said “now, any one of us can probably create a beat in five or 10 minutes”. “The tools that we now have in

and Cornell, ranked DeepSeek’s updated R1 reasoning model just slightly behind OpenAI’s o4 mini and o3 reasoning models on code generation and ahead of xAI’s Grok 3 mini and Alibaba’s Qwen 3. Bloomberg earlier reported the update on Wedneday. It said that a DeepSeek representative had told a WeChat group that it had completed what it described as a “minor trial upgrade” and that users could start testing it. DeepSeek earlier this year future of creativity that we’re entering,” Daniel Ek told reporters at an open house at the company’s Stockholm headquarters this week. Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter and a recent book, Mood Machine , have accused Spotify of tasking a handful of producers to make thousands of songs under fake AI profiles, which the company allegedly pushed onto playlists – saving Spotify money by elbowing out real artists and their higher royalties. Spotify has denied the claims.

Google’s Gemini has introduced discounted tiers of access while OpenAI cut prices and released an o3 Mini model that relies on less computing power. The firm is still widely expected to release R2, a successor to R1. Reuters reported in March, citing sources, that R2’s release was initially planned for this month. DeepSeek also released an upgrade to its V3 large language model in March. – Reuters our availability are just staggering. “Of course there are very scary potential applications for AI, but the more interesting thing for me is that the amount of creativity that creative people will have available at their fingertips is going to be insane. “The barriers for creation are becoming lower and lower. More and more people will create.“ Spotify had 678 million active users at the end of March, including 268 million paying subscribers. – AFP

released an update to its R1 reasoning model in the early hours of yesterday, stepping up competition with US rivals such as OpenAI. DeepSeek launched R1-0528 on developer platform Hugging Face, but has yet to make an official public announcement. It did not publish a description of the model or comparisons. But the LiveCodeBench leaderboard, a benchmark developed by researchers from UC Berkeley, MIT,

AI to spur more music creativity, not a threat: Spotify CEO STOCKHOLM: Artificial intelligence will encourage more people to create music in the future and is not a threat to the industry, the founder and CEO of streaming giant Spotify said.

Artists using machine-learning tools to produce music have given rise to concerns about whether AI-generated music – even entirely fake artists – could one day replace human artists. “I’m mostly optimistic and mostly very excited because we’re just in the beginning of understanding this