>>> Why Badger Meter Stock Is Off the Charts Today


by Rich Smith

Motley Fool

Apr 18, 2024


https://finance.yahoo.com/news/why-badger-meter-stock-off-154259846.html


Shares of water measurer Badger Meter (NYSE: BMI) jumped 12% through 11:15 a.m. ET Thursday after exceeding expectations with its Q1 2024 earnings report this morning.

Analysts had forecast Badger Meter would earn $0.82 per share on sales of $182.3 million -- but Badger beat those numbers with a stick. Badger's earnings for the quarter came within a whisker of $1 a share -- $0.99 -- and sales were $196.3 million.

Badger Meter Q1 sales and earnings

Badger Meter scored wins across the board this morning, growing sales 23% year over year, expanding its operating profit margin by 290 basis points to 18.6%, and growing its net income a whopping 50%. CEO Kenneth Bockhorst credited both "robust customer demand" and "operating execution" for the "exceptional" results.

Sales growth among water utility customers was particularly strong, up 29% -- continuing a yearlong trend of 30%-ish sales growth in this sector. This suggests that America's long-delayed project to improve water infrastructure is now well underway.

Is Badger Meter stock a buy in 2024?

There are pluses and minuses in this for Badger Meter investors. On the one hand, Bockhorst notes that Badger Meter will face "more difficult prior-year comparisons as the year progresses" in 2024. On the other hand, though, he agrees that the water industry is currently enjoying a "resilient macro trend" that should "drive sales and earnings growth."

My big worry as an investor: Continuation of this trend could already be baked into the stock's price. While 50% Q1 earnings growth was certainly impressive, Badger stock also trades at a very impressive price-to-earnings ratio of 48. That's a fair price to pay if growth keeps going at its present pace, and Badger's share price surge today is certainly justified by the news.

But if growth slows at all, Badger investors could find themselves caught in a trap. Caveat investor.

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>>> Palantir looks to have many years of growth ahead

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/forget-nvidia-likely-next-once-113000380.html

Jake Lerch (Palantir Technologies): What makes for a once-in-a-generation stock buying opportunity? For me, the most important factor is a secular growth story. And today, nothing fits that bill better than the rise of artificial intelligence. So it should come as no surprise that my pick is an AI stock: Palantir Technologies.

Palantir specializes in AI-driven data analysis and pattern recognition. Through its software platforms, Palantir can help various organizations achieve very different ends. On the one hand, it could help law enforcement track and apprehend cybercriminals. On the other, it might assist healthcare organizations deliver better outcomes to patients.

In short, almost every organization today could benefit from its products in some capacity. Moreover, AI is only getting better. As it improves, the results it can deliver will also scale -- making Palantir's products even more appealing to organizations looking to increase revenue, cut costs, or improve customer satisfaction.

Best of all for potential investors, Palantir remains in the early stages of its life cycle. The company got its start partnering with governmental organizations -- law enforcement, national security agencies, and military branches. Recently, however, Palantir's commercial customer base has expanded.

In its most recent quarter (the three months ending on Dec. 31, 2023), Palantir reported commercial revenue of $284 million -- up 32% from a year earlier and representing 47% of its overall sales. American-based commercial revenue grew even faster -- 70% year over year.

To sum up, American companies are flocking to Palantir. Yet, the company still has ample room to grow -- a fantastic combination for investors.

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>>> Why a near-miss cyberattack put US officials and the tech industry on edge


Reuters

by Raphael Satter

April 5, 2024


https://finance.yahoo.com/news/why-near-miss-cyberattack-put-110219091.html


WASHINGTON (Reuters) -German software developer Andres Freund was running some detailed performance tests last month when he noticed odd behavior in a little known program. What he found when he investigated has sent shudders across the software world and drawn attention from tech executives and government officials.

Freund, who works for Microsoft out of San Francisco, discovered that the latest version of the open source software program XZ Utils had been deliberately sabotaged by one of its developers, a move that could have carved out a secret door to millions of servers across the internet.

Security experts say it’s only because Freund spotted the change before the latest version of XZ had been widely deployed that the world was spared a digital security crisis.

“We really dodged a bullet,” said Satnam Narang, a security researcher with Tenable who has been tracking the fallout from the find. “It is one of those moments where we have to wipe our brow and say, ‘We were really lucky with this one.’”

The near-miss has refocused attention on the safety of open source software – free, often volunteer-maintained programs whose transparency and flexibility mean they serve as the foundation for the internet economy.

Many such projects depend on a tiny circle of unpaid volunteers fighting to get out from under a pile of demands for fixes and upgrades.

XZ, a suite of file compression tools packaged into distributions of the Linux operating system, was long maintained by a single author, Lasse Collin.

In recent years, he appeared to be under strain.

In a message posted to a public mailing list in June 2022, Collin said he was dealing with "longterm mental health issues" and hinted that he working privately with a new developer named Jia Tan and that “perhaps he will have a bigger role in the future.”

Update logs available through the open source software site Github show that Tan’s role quickly expanded. By 2023 the logs show Tan was merging his code into XZ, a sign that he had won a trusted role in the project.

But cybersecurity experts who’ve scoured the logs say that Tan was masquerading as a helpful volunteer. Over the next few months, they say, Tan introduced a nearly invisible backdoor into XZ.

Collin didn’t return messages seeking comment and said on his website that he would not respond to reporters until he understood the situation well enough to do so.

Tan did not return messages sent to his Gmail account. Reuters has been unable to ascertain who Tan is, where he is, or who he was working for, but many of those who've examined his updates believe Tan is a pseudonym for an expert hacker or group of hackers -- likely one working on behalf of a powerful intelligence service.

“This is not kindergarten stuff,” said Omkhar Arasaratnam, the general manager of the Open Source Security Foundation, which works to defend projects like XZ. “This is incredibly sophisticated.”

‘WE LUCKED OUT’

Tan could easily have gotten away with it had it not been for Freund, the Microsoft developer, whose curiosity was piqued when he noticed the latest version of XZ intermittently using an unexpected amount of processing power on the system he was testing.

Microsoft declined to make Freund available for an interview, but in a publicly-available email and posts to social media, Freund said a series of easy-to-miss clues prompted him to discover the backdoor.

The find “really required a lot of coincidences,” Freund said on the social network Mastodon.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella congratulated Freund over the weekend, saying in a post to the social network X that he loved seeing how the developer, “with his curiosity and craftsmanship, was able to help us all.”

In the open source community, the discovery has been sobering. The volunteers who maintain the software that underpins the internet aren't strangers to the idea of little pay or recognition, but the realization that they were now being hunted by well-resourced spies pretending to be Good Samaritans was “incredibly intimidating,” said Arasaratnam, of the Open Source Security Foundation.

Government officials are also weighing the implications of the near-miss, which has underlined concerns about how to protect open source software. Assistant National Cyber Director Anjana Rajan told Politico that “there’s a lot of conversations that we need to have about what we do next” to protect open source code."

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) says it has been leaning on U.S. companies that use open source software to plow resources back into the communities that build and maintain it. CISA adviser Jack Cable told Reuters the burden was on tech companies not just to vet open software but to “contribute back and help build the sustainable open source ecosystem that we get so much value from.”

It’s not clear that software companies are properly incentivized to do so. Online open source mailing lists are teeming with complaints about tech giants demanding that volunteers troubleshoot issues with open source software those companies use to make billions of dollars.

Whatever the solution, almost everyone agrees the XZ episode shows something has to change.

“We got unreasonably lucky here,” said Freund in another Mastodon post. “We can't just bank on that going forward.”

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Vertiv Holdings - >>> Here's Why Shares in This Nvidia Partner Soared in March


by Lee Samaha

Motley Fool

Apr 5, 2024


https://finance.yahoo.com/news/heres-why-shares-nvidia-partner-121917710.html


Shares in data center equipment company Vertiv Holdings (NYSE: VRT) rose by a whopping 20.8% in March as the company rode the artificial intelligence (AI) investment boom. The stock price took a leg up in mid-March following the announcement that Vertiv would become a Solution Advisor: Consultant partner in the Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) Partner Network.

Data centers are cool

You can't have a burgeoning investment in AI applications without data centers, and you can't have data centers without cooling. As such, Vertiv has a critical role in the growth of AI, a fact acknowledged by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang at Nvidia's GPU Technology Conference (GTC) a day after the announcement. Huang noted that Nvidia and Vertiv were working on cooling systems, with Vertiv acknowledged as "very important" in ensuring the cooling of data centers.

While that's a red rag to an Nvidia bull, there's reason and hard numbers behind the optimism.

Spending on data centers continues to surge

As previously discussed, there's been an incredible boom in U.S. manufacturing construction investment over the last couple of years, led by investment in semiconductors and electronics, including data centers. In fact, U.S. manufacturing spending came in at $214 billion in 2023 compared to less than $100 billion in 2022 and even lower in the pre-pandemic era.

Moreover, the boom in interest in AI has made spending on data centers higher. For example, here's a look at capital expenditures at leading data center company Equinix. Although it dipped through 2022 in line with a correction after the boom inspired by the pandemic, it's now taken off again. Equinix management expects $2.9 billion to $3 billion in capital spending in 2024.

Vertiv will benefit from booming data center spending

The ongoing spending in data centers is also seen in Vertiv's order growth -- up 23% on a year-over-year basis in the fourth quarter of 2023 and 18% in the third quarter of 2023. Moreover, CEO Giordano Albertazzi expects spending "to continue to be strong up in the high teens on a year-on-year basis in the first quarter across the portfolio" in the first quarter.

As such, Vertiv is set for another year of strong growth, and management forecasts call for a double-digit increase in organic revenue for the full year.

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>>> Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) -- Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 302

https://www.insidermonkey.com/blog/5-best-stocks-to-buy-right-now-according-to-financial-media-1270874/4/

Number of Times Stock Appeared in Top Picks of Financial Media: 7

Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) is a Washington-based technology company. On March 6, investment advisory Jefferies maintained a Buy rating on Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) stock with a price target of $500.

Among the hedge funds being tracked by Insider Monkey, Texas-based investment firm Fisher Asset Management is a leading shareholder in Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) with 25 million shares worth more than $9.5 billion.

In its Q4 2023 investor letter, Fred Alger Management, an investment management firm, highlighted a few stocks and Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) was one of them. Here is what the fund said:

“Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) is a beneficiary of corporate America’s transformative digitization. Microsoft’s CEO expects technology spending as a percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to jump from about 5% now to 10% in 10 years and that Microsoft will continue to capture market share within the technology sector. The company operates through three segments:

Productivity and Business Processes (Office. LinkedIn, and Dynamics),

Intelligent Cloud (Server Products and Cloud Services, Azure, and Enterprise Services), and

More Personal Computing (Windows, Devices. Gaming, and Search).

During the quarter, the company reported strong fiscal first quarter results, where revenues and earnings beat analyst estimates, driven in large part to growing Al demand. Regarding Intelligent Cloud segment, management noted Azure optimizations were similar to the previous quarter, but new Al and traditional workloads are helping drive greater consumption growth, which resulted in their first reacceleration since March 2022. We believe the strong Azure performance suggests diminishing cost optimization headwinds and growing strength in Al service consumption.”

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>>> Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL)

https://www.insidermonkey.com/blog/5-best-stocks-to-buy-right-now-according-to-financial-media-1270874/4/

Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 131

Number of Times Stock Appeared in Top Picks of Financial Media: 6

Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) is a consumer electronics firm. On March 5, investment advisory Wedbush maintained an Outperform rating on Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) stock with a price target of $250.

At the end of the fourth quarter of 2023, 131 hedge funds in the database of Insider Monkey held stakes worth $205 billion in Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL), compared to 134 in the previous quarter worth $179 billion.

In its Q4 2023 investor letter, Horizon Kinetics LLC highlighted a few stocks and Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) was one of them. Here is what the fund said:

“The full point is that if BYD has turned its attention from its domestic market to direct global competition, then other Chinese companies can do the same. The next most visible example of Chinese commercially applied technological prowess relates to the 2nd highest-weight company in the S&P 500, Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL).

In September 2023, Huawei Technologies introduced its Mate 60 Pro smartphone. It uses its own, internally developed 5G enabled chip that is apparently competitive with the Apple A17 chip. For practical purposes it has the functionality of the iPhone 15 Pro. This came as a great surprise – perhaps even shock – to the U.S. technology community, because four years ago the U.S. placed strict sanctions on China’s access to state-of-the-art semiconductor manufacturing technology…”

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>>> NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) -- Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 173

https://www.insidermonkey.com/blog/5-best-stocks-to-buy-right-now-according-to-financial-media-1270874/3/

Number of Times Stock Appeared in Top Picks of Financial Media: 5

NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) provides graphics, computing and networking solutions. On March 7, investment advisory Mizuho maintained a Buy rating on NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) stock and raised the price target to $1,000 from $850.

Among the hedge funds being tracked by Insider Monkey, Florida-based investment firm Citadel Investment Group is a leading shareholder in NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) with 15.4 million shares worth more than $7.6 billion.

In its Q4 2023 investor letter, Fred Alger Management, an asset management firm, highlighted a few stocks and NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) was one of them. Here is what the fund said:

“NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) is a leading supplier of graphics processing units (GPUs) for a variety of end markets, such as gaming, PCs, data centers, virtual reality and high-performance computing. The company is leading in most secular growth categories in computing, and especially artificial intelligence and super- computing parallel processing techniques for solving complex computational problems. Simply put, Nvidia’s computational power is a critical enabler of Al and therefore critical to Al adoption, in our view. During the period, shares contributed to performance as Nvidia reported solid fiscal third quarter results well above analyst expectations, driven by strong demand from data centers. Growing Al data center workloads are driving demand for the increased interconnections and fully accelerated software stacks, thereby enabling leading application performance and fast result times.”

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>>> Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) -- 14-day RSI: 32.14

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/11-oversold-blue-chip-stocks-195219274.html

Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 131

Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) is a leading technology company focused on the designing, manufacturing, and marketing of smartphones, personal computers, tablets, wearables, and accessories, and sells a variety of related services. It released worldwide the latest version of its flagship smartphone titled iPhone 15, on September 22 last year.

The quarterly revenue of Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) increased by 2% on a y-o-y basis in the quarter ended December 30. The company posted a revenue of $119.6 billion and a net income of $33.9 billion, which translated to an adjusted EPS of $2.18.

As of Q4 2023, Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) shares were held by 133 of the 933 hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey, the highest on our list of 11 oversold blue chip stocks to buy right now. Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway was its biggest shareholder with ownership of 905.6 million shares valued at $174 billion.

In its Q4 2023 investor letter, Wedgewood Partners, an investment management firm, made the following comments about Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL):

“The Company's services segment revenue growth accelerated to +16% over last year, one of the fastest growth rates since Covid-19 lockdowns, helping drive +11% growth in earnings per share. The strength in the Company's services segment was aided by over 1 billion paid subscribers across Apple's media platforms. We estimate that there are more than 2 billion iOS devices in Apple's global installed base, which still represents a very large addressable share of their current subscriber count. Apple also continues to innovate across its hardware portfolio, with custom silicon for nearly all its device form factors. More recently, the Company launched its new line of Mac computers, which included their M3 family of chips, including the M3 Max, which contains up to an astonishing 92 billion transistors. Apple's long-term strategy of creating products with customized hardware and software should continue to differentiate their products and help drive solid revenue growth and expense leverage across the Company's ecosystem.”

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Palantir - >>> Analyst who correctly forecast Palantir's stock rally updates outlook


The Street

by Todd Campbell

Mar 29, 2024


https://finance.yahoo.com/news/analyst-correctly-forecast-palantirs-stock-173300455.html


The artificial intelligence boom has helped many tech stocks, including Palantir Technologies, produce market-beating returns.

While the S&P 500's 10% first-quarter return is nothing to sneeze at, Palantir shares surged 34%. Its shares also substantially outperformed the benchmark index over the past year, returning 172% since March 2023. Meanwhile, the S&P 500 is up about 29%.

Those extraordinary gains likely surprised many investors who were concerned that the Peter Thiel-founded company would struggle because the possible recession and congressional wrangling over the debt ceiling would dent demand.

However, where others saw risk, TheStreet Pro's Stephen Guilfoyle saw an opportunity. He bought shares when they were trading below $10 in April 2023, allowing him to profit handsomely from surging optimism over AI spending.

Given Palantir's shares rocket-ship ride higher and a current price near $23, Guilfoyle has updated his analysis and stock price target.

Palantir's demand driven by AI wave

Guilfoyle's purchase of Palantir stock last year was based on its strong, debt-free balance sheet, improving free cash flow, and a clearer pathway to profit growth.

The highly successful launch of OpenAI's ChatGPT in December 2022 has proven to be a boon for the company, making Guilfoyle's prediction prescient.

Interest in using AI to digest, interpret, and create new insights from siloed data has swelled across most industries, resulting in the most rapid research and development since the Internet Age in the 1990s.

Banks are using AI programs to hedge risks, evaluate loans, and price products. Drugmakers are exploring its use in predicting drug targets and clinical trial outcomes. Manufacturers are evaluating if it can boost production and quality. AI may also help retailers forecast demand, manage inventories, and curb theft.

AI's widespread applications seem boundless, which has led many companies and governments to turn to Palantir's deep expertise in managing and protecting data for help in training and running new AI apps.

Palantir's (PLTR) roots stretch back to helping the U.S. government design systems for counter-terrorism. Its Gotham platform continues to assist governments in those efforts today. It also offers solutions that manage, interpret, and report data across enterprise and cloud networks to large companies too.

Its deep data experience positioned it perfectly to help customers design large language models and other AI solutions using its AI platform (AIP).

"The demand for [Artificial Intelligence Platform] AIP is unlike anything we have seen in the past twenty years," said CEO Alan Karp last summer. "We are currently in discussions with more than three hundred additional enterprises to deploy AIP within their organizations, all of which are searching for an effective and secure means of adapting the latest large language models for use on their internal systems and proprietary data."

Karp's optimism appears to have been well-placed. Palantir's year-over-year sales growth has exceeded 20% in each of the past three quarters, and its earnings per share growth in each of those quarters has been in the double-digit percentages.

Revenue totaled $736 million and earnings per share were 9 cents in the fourth quarter, up 21% and 16% from the previous year.

Wall Street analysts think Palantir's profit growth will continue. The consensus analyst estimate for earnings in 2024 and 2024 is 33 cents and 39 cents, respectively, an increase of 34% and 17%.

Palantir pause may set up another opportunity

Initially, Guilfoyle's Palantir stock price target was $12. However, he bumped that target to $18 last June, $20 last July, and $22 last August.

Shares eclipsed $22 in February, reaching a high of $27.5 in early March. Since then, they've retreated about 16% to $23.

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Again - this is one of several substrates that LWLG's Perkinamine can work with and maximize potential.

It is a POSSIBLE symbiotic tech, not competitive.

It's an industry focused news site - with no relationship to LWLG.

>>> Apple’s first quarter has felt more like an entire (bad) year


Yahoo Finance

Daniel Howley

Mar 27, 2024


https://finance.yahoo.com/news/apples-first-quarter-has-felt-more-like-an-entire-bad-year-201715880.html?.tsrc=fin-notif


Apple (AAPL) is in the midst of what you could generously call a “difficult” period. The company is contending with a high-profile antitrust battle with the Department of Justice, falling iPhone sales in China, and a regulatory investigation in the European Union. And those are just the headlines from the past week.

The company is also still facing a shortfall when it comes to generative AI capabilities. And while it’s widely expected to debut some kind of generative AI offering during its WWDC developer event on June 10, it’ll need to have quite an impressive showing if it’s going to catch up to its Big Tech rivals including Microsoft (MSFT) and Google (GOOG, GOOGL).

All of that is hurting Apple’s stock price. Shares of the iPhone maker have fallen more than 7% since the start of the year and are up just 6.25% over the last 12 months. Shares of Microsoft, meanwhile, are up 14% year to date and 49% over the last 12 months. Google? Shares of the search giant are up 9% year to date and 43% in the last 12 months.

Suffice it to say, Apple’s 2024 is not going well.

Apple’s China problem

Apple’s latest headache came Tuesday, when Bloomberg, citing Chinese government data, reported that iPhone shipments fell 33% year over year in the country in February.

China is Apple’s third-largest market behind North America and Europe. In 2023, the region accounted for $72.6 billion of Apple’s $383.3 billion in total revenue. That’s roughly 19% of the company’s sales.

And this isn’t exactly out of the blue. Earlier this month, Counterpoint Research reported that iPhone sales fell 24% year over year through the first six weeks of 2024 in the country. Overall smartphone unit sales in China declined 7% during the same period.

Apple has been aggressively expanding in China for years, but a resurgent Huawei and difficult economic conditions in the country are squeezing device sales. The company isn’t just sitting idly by, though. Last week, CEO Tim Cook flew to China for the opening of the company’s latest flagship store in Shanghai. He also attended the China Development Forum in Beijing and was expected to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

According to the South China Morning Post, Apple-authorized retailers are also trying to goose sales, cutting the price of the company’s latest iPhones in the hopes that it will get consumers to start buying again. However, it might take more than lower prices to make that happen.

A battle with the DOJ

Outside of Apple’s China sales drama, the company is also facing its long-anticipated antitrust fight with the Department of Justice. The lawsuit, which the DOJ filed last Thursday, accuses Apple of illegally maintaining dominance over the premium smartphone market by pushing aside competing apps and devices.

The Justice Department claims that Apple imposes restrictions on app developers, makes it difficult for users to switch to competing platforms, and hinders cloud gaming and so-called super apps that allow users to access multiple smaller apps from one larger platform.

Apple, however, is fighting back, saying in a statement that the suit "threatens who we are and the principles that set Apple products apart in fiercely competitive markets. If successful, it would hinder our ability to create the kind of technology people expect from Apple."

The DOJ is seeking to force Apple to change its business practices, which could mean giving third-party apps greater access to the company’s platforms and requiring Apple to expand compatibility with third-party device makers.

The lawsuit could also prove to be a dangerous distraction for Apple similar to how Microsoft’s antitrust battle in the 90’s stole executives’ attention away from emerging technologies like smartphones. If Microsoft hadn’t been so invested in its antitrust fight at the time, there’s a good chance it would have seen the smartphone age coming as did Apple and Google, and launched its own line of handsets.

European Commission calling

In addition to slowing iPhone sales in China and the DOJ’s antitrust suit, the European Union’s competition watchdog, the European Commission on Monday, announced that it is looking into whether Apple is in compliance with the bloc’s Digital Markets Act.

In a statement released Monday, the Commission said it is investigating Apple’s new app fee structure in the EU as well as whether it meets user choice obligations related to default apps and the ability to delete preinstalled apps.

The Digital Markets Act requires Apple to open up the iPhone to third-party app stores, enabling developers to get around the 30% and 15% fees the company charges for sales through its own App Store. While Apple said it will allow those third-party stores, the company said it will also charge developers a 50 euro cent Core Technology Fee per install per year on apps that have been installed more than 1 million times in the last 12 months.

In a statement, the EC said it is looking into whether Apple’s new fees defeat the purpose of the obligations of the Digital Markets Act.

While Apple is certainly facing a slew of challenges, it’s far from down and out. It’s still the second-richest company in the world by market capitalization — behind Microsoft — and it’s sure to continue to sell millions of devices and services subscriptions throughout the year ahead.

Still, for the foreseeable future, Apple could be in for a bumpy ride.

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>>> Startup HyperLight debuts thin-film Lithium Niobate platform at ECOC 2021


Sept. 13, 2021


https://www.lightwaveonline.com/optical-tech/components/article/14210212/startup-hyperlight-debuts-thin-film-lithium-niobate-platform-at-ecoc-2021


The company, led by CEO and Co-Founder Dr. Mian Zhang, has developed an electro-optic photonic integrated circuit (PIC) platform based on the thin-film Lithium Niobate (LiNbO3) technology.

HyperLight, a startup founded out of Harvard in 2018, will make its debut this week at ECOC 2021 in Bordeaux, France. The company, led by CEO and Co-Founder Dr. Mian Zhang, has developed an electro-optic photonic integrated circuit (PIC) platform based on the thin-film Lithium Niobate (LiNbO3) technology.

Zhang says that HyperLight has been able to apply silicon photonics processes to LiNbO3, thus enabling a significant reduction in size versus traditional modulators based on the technology. As a result, products such as optical transceivers and transponders, among others, can enjoy the power and performance benefits of LiNbO3 without sacrificing the small package sizes silicon photonics and other photonic integration approaches make possible.

Zhang expects HyperLight’s technology will enable thin-film LiNbO3 modulators that require sub-volt driving voltages while supporting greater than 100-GHz bandwidth. Working with Nokia Bell Labs, an “early version” of the platform demonstrated a 700.5-Gbps line rate and 538.8 Gbps net rate with intensity-modulated and direct detect (IM-DD) signals over 10.2 km of single-mode fiber. However, Zhang says the company and Nokia Bell Labs have since demonstrated the ability to accommodate coherent transmissions up to 1.58 Tbps at 200 GBaud. Both results required only a single thin-film LiNbO3 modulator.

The company is working with partners towards productization and has begun shipping prototype chips in this context. However, a generally available product using the thin-film LiNbO3 technology is still “a couple of years away,” in Zhang’s estimation.

Zhang will discuss the company’s work via a presentation as part of ECOC’s Market Focus on September 15, at 12:40 pm, CET.

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>>> Optical Fiber Conference 2022 - Who are these people?


March 30, 2022


https://www.lightwaveonline.com/business/companies/article/14233154/who-are-these-people


Some of these companies may be relatively young; others may have recently rebranded. All would like a bit of your time and attention. So, as a public service, here is some background on a few companies that may not be familiar to you, but it might benefit

A look through the conference program for OFC 2022 will reveal speakers from the usual list of well-established optical communications technology suppliers as well as a wide assortment of research centers (and centres), universities, colleges, institutes, écoles, and whatnot. However, it would not be surprising to see a company or two you may not know well, if at all. The same may also be true upon perusal of the exhibitor list.

Some of these companies may be relatively young; others may have recently rebranded. All would like a bit of your time and attention. So, as a public service, here is some background on a few companies that may not be familiar to you but it might benefit you to know.

In the conference sessions

Several presenting companies in 2022 made their debuts around the OFC 2021 timeframe but may have escaped your notice. For example, Mountain View, CA, based Avicena Tech Corp. focuses on chip-to-chip communications for high-performance computing, cloud computing, and data center networking using a combination of micro-LEDs from the display world and multicore fiber similar to what’s found in imagery applications.

Central to Avicena’s LightBundle architecture are Cavity-Reinforced Optical Micro-Emitters (CROMEs) based on GaN micro-LEDs. These visible blue light emitters typically can transmit less than 1 Gbps of information but Avicena has developed a way to increase that by 10X. The CROMEs are bonded to CMOS in a highly parallel array alongside arrays of silicon photodetectors (PDs) grown directly in CMOS. The technology can enable 10 Tbps per square millimeter at a power efficiency of less than 0.5 pJ/bit, company sources have told Lightwave. The CROME emitters operate at ASIC temperatures, meaning they can serve reliably as internal laser sources for co-packaged optics without cooling.

The multicore fibers will connect to the CROME/PD combinations via passive alignment. Avicena expects the fiber, in a diameter of about 1 mm, to support hundreds of channels initially and thousands of channels eventually. However, development work on the multicore fiber now being used in applications such as endoscopy will be required to support such channel counts, Avicena acknowledges.

The company introduced the LightBundle concept to OFC 2021 attendees via a post-deadline paper. Here, the company described a demonstration of an array of more than 200 devices at a 30-mm pitch coupled simultaneously through a 0.5-mm imaging fiber. As 10G drivers were not available then in an array format, the CROME arrays were driven at 2 Gbps. However, the engineers conducting the demonstration also were able to package the CROME with an external driver to achieve 10 Gbps. At OFC 2022, Avicena CEO Bardia Pezeshki (most recently CEO of Kaiam) will deliver “W1E.1: Microled Array-Based Optical Links Using Imaging Fiber for Chip-to-Chip Communications” as a paper Wednesday, March 9, in which he will undoubtedly report on the company’s progress since last June.

Ayar Labs is another young company focused on chip-to-chip communications and co-packaged optics that will present a paper during the show. The company’s optical I/O approach features 5x9-mm TeraPHY silicon chiplets paired with SuperNova external lasers. The chiplets, which feature micro-ring resonator-based modulation, are designed to be integrated within the packaging of the semiconductor via a multi-chip module approach using normal processes, whether in-house or third-party.

The laser/chiplet combination is designed to support transmission distances of 2 km. Via a post-deadline paper at OFC last year, Ayar reported on a demonstration of a TeraPHY chiplet with eight optical ports providing error-free transmission of 1.024 Tbps at less than 5 pJ/bit. The error-free status was obtained without recourse to forward error correction (FEC). The SuperNova external laser source showed the ability to generate 64 addressable wavelengths based on laser array technology from MACOM.

The company believes its approach can benefit datacom and telecom networking, aerospace and government, and high-performance computing and artificial intelligence applications. An Ayar Labs source told Lightwave at the end of 2020 that he expected the company will begin small volume production perhaps as early as the beginning of this year. Dr. Mark Wade, co-founder and CTO of Ayar Labs, likely will provide updates via the talk he's scheduled to provide on Tuesday (which, as of this writing, remains without an announced title) as part of Tu2A Symposia: Emerging Photonic Interconnects and Architectures for Femtojoule per Bit Intra Data Center Links Session I.

Thursday will see the presentation of “Th1J.1: BTO-Enhanced Silicon Photonics – a Scalable PIC Platform with Ultra-Efficient Electro-Optical Modulation,” from Lukas Czornomaz, co-CEO and founder of Lumiphase AG. “BTO” stands for “Barium Titanate,” which Lumiphase asserts enables low-power, low-optical-loss silicon photonics modulators to enable Mach-Zhender interferometers and other optical processing devices, according to a report in eeNews Europe. In the paper description, Czornomaz touts BTO’s strong Pockels effect, which relates to changes in refractive index – which are very fast in BTO – with the application of an electric field. Lumiphase states on its website that BTO enables “nprecedented piezo- and ferro-electric properties on silicon.”

The company spun out of IBM Europe, which did early work on such devices, at the beginning of 2020. At the time the article appeared last July, Lumiphase was contemplating a Series A funding round for either late in 2021 or at some point this year to help it produce products for the communications, optical computing, and sensing markets. The company has its headquarters in Zurich, Switzerland.

Europe – specifically, France – also is home to SCINTIL Photonics; CEO Sylvie Menezo will discuss the company’s work in silicon photonics Tuesday in “Tu2A.2: (Integrated or Not?) Laser Source for a Few pJ/bit DWDM Links” in the same session in which Ayar Labs’ Wade will speak. The fabless company was founded in Grenoble in November 2018 by Menezo, previously with CEA-Leti, and Chairman Pascal Langlois, former CEO of Tronics Microsystems. SCINTIL Photonics has developed a silicon photonics platform in which it can integrate multi-wavelength lasers. In a 2020 interview with Lightwave, Pascal said that the company can combine silicon, indium phosphide, germanium, and silicon nitride in a CMOS compatible process it calls BackSide-on-BOX. The process sees unprocessed InP/III-V dies bonded on the backside of processed silicon-on-insulator (SOI) wafers, only where it is needed – hence the name. BackSide-on-BOX enables integration of laser arrays and other active and passive components and functions to support applications such as multi-channel 800 Gigabit Ethernet without the need for hermetic packaging.

SCINTIL has secured an agreement with a commercial foundry for PIC production; at the time of the interview, Pascal expressed hope that the company could deliver commercial photonic integrated circuits (PICs) at some point this year.

Finally, Sivers Photonics isn’t a new company – but it has a relatively new name. The company has its roots in CST Global (also known as Compound Semiconductor Technologies), an independent manufacturer of III-V photonic devices that Sivers IMA Holding purchased in 2017. The company provides custom, foundry services in wafer, coated bar, chip device and die on tape formats. Sivers IMA Holding changed its name to Sivers Semiconductors in 2020 – and concurrently changed the name of the subsidiary formed by the former CST Global to Sivers Photonics AB.

Andy McKee, Sivers Photonics, will discuss “Recent Advances in InP Laser Sources for SiPh Hybrid Integration” Wednesday as part of a panel on Progress and Roadmap in Silicon Photonics Foundries and Supply Chains (W1B).

Exhibit floor programming

Two young companies that are delivering commercial products will be among the participants in some of the exhibit hall programming. For example, Lumenisity will attempt to top the splash it made during last OFC with its hollowcore fiber. The company’s nested anti-resonant nodeless fiber (NANF) approach, developed at the University of Southampton in the UK, caught the eye of BT Labs, which conducted several tests and demonstrations of the technology that were discussed around the time of the 2021 show. Lumenisity also announced results of a demonstration of coherent transmission over the NANF hollowcore fiber with Ciena.

Lumenisity, BT, and several other speakers will be back to discuss hollowcore fiber advances on Thursday, March 10, at noon in a panel discussion titled, “Hollow Core Fiber - Ready for Prime Time?” The event takes place in the show floor’s Theater II. Tony Pearson, vice president, sales and marketing, will represent Lumenisity as he discusses “Hollow Core Cable – Delivering Prime Time and…Connecting More Light Faster!”

The next day, at 12:20 pm, POET Technologies Inc. will participate in a Technology Showcase with the presentation, “Hybrid Integration Platform for Co-Packaged Photonics Using POET’s CMOS Based Optical Interposer.” POET develops and sells a variety of optical engines for transceivers, as well as the O-Band LightBar applicable to co-packaged optics (CPO) applications. The products are based on the company’s POET Optical Interposer, which leverages integrated spot-size converters designed to minimize coupling losses and increase laser power efficiency. The approach enables straightforward integration of photonic elements such as waveguides, filters, and gratings, as well as passive alignment of lasers for flip-chip bonding, according to the company.

POET demonstrated these technologies at last year’s OFC. Since then, the company has announced a pair of customers for its optical engines, one of whom is Shenzhen Fibertop Technology Co., Ltd.

Swing by the booth

On the show floor, HyperLight Corp. will be making its OFC debut. The company, co-founded out of Harvard by CEO Dr. Mian Zhang and Head of Product Dr. Christian Reimer, focuses on the use of thin-film Lithium Niobate (LiNbO3) technology as part of an electro-optic photonic integrated circuit (PIC) platform. Zhang told Lightwave last fall that he expects HyperLight’s technology will enable thin-film LiNbO3 modulators that require less than 1-V driving voltages while supporting greater than 100-GHz bandwidth. Working with Nokia Bell Labs, an early version of the platform demonstrated a 700.5-Gbps line rate and 538.8-Gbps net rate with intensity-modulated and direct detect (IM-DD) signals over 10.2 km of single-mode fiber. However, Zhang says the company and Nokia Bell Labs have since demonstrated coherent transmissions up to 1.58 Tbps at 200 GBaud. Both results required only a single thin-film LiNbO3 modulator, he said. A generally available product using the thin-film LiNbO3 technology is still “a couple of years away,” Zhang’s stated during the interview.

Finally, a company whose name may make your brow furrow initially as you pass by its booth is Quantifi Photonics – until you realize that the company used to be called Coherent Solutions (and, before that, Southern Photonics). The test and measurement technology developer, which made its mark in coherent transmission testing, changed its name in the fall of 2020 to signal a wider scope of activities. The New Zealand-based company completed an oversubscribed Series B funding round of $10 million last July designed to fund expansion of its activities in North America.

Of course, there are many factors that combine to determine how familiar a company may be. Whether mentioned here or discovered via a look through the OFC conference schedule or exhibition list, exploring a company whose story is unfamiliar to you could reveal valuable discoveries.

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>>> Lightwave Logic reaches electro-optic polymer materials commercialization with supply license agreement

June 1, 2023


https://www.lightwaveonline.com/optical-tech/components/article/14294661/lightwave-logic-reaches-electro-optic-polymer-materials-commercialization-with-supply-license-agreement


Lightwave Logic, Inc. (NASDAQ: LWLG) has announced its first commercial material supply license agreement for its Perkinamine chromophore electro-optic polymers. The company has been working on electro-optic polymer development for photonic applications since at least 2008.

The company did not identify the customer or how the materials will be used, although Lightwave Logic is known to have worked with Polariton (see, for example, “Lightwave Logic touts stability of its polymer material in Polariton's plasmonics platform”) and startup SilOriX on the use of its organic polymers for optical modulators for fiber-optic communications applications. Lightwave Logic CEO Michael Lebby acknowledged that while its electro-optic polymer technology could be used for a variety of applications, the company has focused its efforts on 1550- and 1310-nm telecom and datacom applications.

Lebby said the deal runs for at least four years. In addition to a license initiation fee, the agreement covers per-unit royalties, minimum royalty levels that increase annually, and minimum sales volume in units.

The deal marks commercial acceptance of Lightwave Logic’s technology and approach, Lebby asserted. He added he is pursuing other license opportunities that may be the subject of similar announcements in the not too distant future. Pursuit of such license agreements is part of what Lebby describes as a three-pronged approach towards commercialization, alongside development of the company’s own chips and technology transfer. He says that examples of Lightwave Logic’s own chips are returning from multiple fabs, setting the stage for additional prototyping efforts. He revealed that significant developments in this area are on tap for later this year.

Meanwhile, he says that the market is beginning to warm to new approaches towards component development as the industry grapples with how to support future optical transmission rates and chip I/O requirements. He pointed to the attention being given to barium titanate (BTO) and thin-film lithium niobate approaches alongside electro-optic polymers as evidence of this trend.

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Nvidia - >>> Exclusive: Behind the plot to break Nvidia’s grip on AI by targeting software


Reuters

by Max A. Cherney

3-25-24


https://finance.yahoo.com/news/exclusive-behind-plot-break-nvidia-110359868.html


SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Nvidia earned its $2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial-intelligence chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from startups to Microsoft, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet.

Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years' worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia's CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps.

Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm, Google and Intel plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going after the chip giant’s secret weapon: the software that keeps developers tied to Nvidia chips. They are part of an expanding group of financiers and companies hacking away at Nvidia's dominance in AI.

"We're actually showing developers how you migrate out from an Nvidia platform," Vinesh Sukumar, Qualcomm's head of AI and machine learning, said in an interview with Reuters.

Starting with a piece of technology developed by Intel called OneAPI, the UXL Foundation, a consortium of tech companies, plans to build a suite of software and tools that will be able to power multiple types of AI accelerator chips, executives involved with the group told Reuters. The open-source project aims to make computer code run on any machine, regardless of what chip and hardware powers it.

"It's about specifically - in the context of machine learning frameworks - how do we create an open ecosystem, and promote productivity and choice in hardware," Google's director and chief technologist of high-performance computing, Bill Hugo, told Reuters in an interview. Google is one of the founding members of UXL and helps determine the technical direction of the project, Hugo said.

UXL's technical steering committee is preparing to nail down technical specifications in the first half of this year. Engineers plan to refine the technical details to a "mature" state by the end of the year, executives said. These executives stressed the need to build a solid foundation to include contributions from multiple companies that can also be deployed on any chip or hardware.

Beyond the initial companies involved, UXL will court cloud-computing companies such as Amazon.com and Microsoft's Azure, as well as additional chipmakers.

Since its launch in September, UXL has already begun to receive technical contributions from third parties that include foundation members and outsiders keen on using the open-source technology, the executives involved said. Intel's OneAPI is already useable, and the second step is to create a standard programming model of computing designed for AI.

UXL plans to put its resources toward addressing the most pressing computing problems dominated by a few chipmakers, such as the latest AI apps and high-performance computing applications. Those early plans feed in to the organization's longer-term goal of winning over a critical mass of developers to its platform.

UXL eventually aims to support Nvidia hardware and code, in the long run.

When asked about the open source and venture-funded software efforts to break Nvidia’s AI dominance, Nvidia executive Ian Buck said in a statement: "The world is getting accelerated. New ideas in accelerated computing are coming from all across the ecosystem, and that will help advance AI and the scope of what accelerated computing can achieve."

NEARLY 100 STARTUPS

The UXL Foundation's plans are one of many efforts to chip away at Nvidia's hold on the software that powers AI. Venture financiers and corporate dollars have poured more than $4 billion into 93 separate efforts, according to custom data compiled by PitchBook at Reuters’ request.

The interest in unseating Nvidia through a potential weakness in software has ramped up in the last year, and startups aiming to poke holes in the company's leadership gobbled up just over $2 billion in 2023 compared with $580 million from a year ago, according to the data from PitchBook.

Success in the shadow of Nvidia's group on AI data crunching is an achievement that few of the startups will be able to achieve. Nvidia's CUDA is a compelling piece of software on paper, as it is full-featured and is consistently growing both from Nvidia's contributions and the developer community.

"But that's not what really matters," said Jay Goldberg, chief executive of D2D Advisory, a finance and strategy consulting firm. "What matters is the fact that people have been using CUDA for 15 years, they built code around it."

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Lightwave Logic -- Re-post - >>> Lebby is the Axe of the entire Industry!! He chairs at the major Industry conferences, he orchestrates the Industry Roadmaps, and if you would have ever come to one of the Executive Forum events you'd know that it is the top dogs of the Tier 1's who find their way over to Lebby for discussions!!

https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=174089938

At OFC this coming week Lebby will be giving a Keynote address on Hybrid Integration, this is what LWLG's technology won the top award at ECOC 2023 for, and there will be a Panel discussion on the topic the following day as well

1) Lebby's Timeline to Mass Commercialization has remained UNCHANGED in presentations for the last few years, Lebby has told investors that LWLG would come to market at 800Gbs in 2024!!
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=172658420

2) Lebby has been making partnering DEALS at least as far back as ECOC 2019 when LWLG presented its META-STABILITY DATA that showed the material systems actually GAINED stability over time!!

3) Lebby's Timeline of 2024 is a PERFECT MATCH to what the industry is now showing to be the FASTEST ADOPTION EVER of a Next-Gen Node Implementation at 800Gbs set for, you guessed it, 2024!!! Check out this chart showing 800Gb adoption to be HUGE at $2 Billion starting in 2024!!! (note 800Gbs is the BLUE SHADED area)
https://investorshub.advfn.com/uimage/uploads/2023/8/19/wwenqIMG_7963.png

4) Lebby in the latest Wall Street Transcript just flat out told investors who the Customers are going to be when this thing ROLLS, which will undoubtably be in 2024 because that is what the INDUSTRY is saying will be the HUGE rollout of 800Gbs, and make NO MISTAKE when you read below who LWLG's Customers are going to be (all under NDA now!!)

TWST: Do you see your ideal customers like Cisco or whoever makes these particular modulation devices? Are they the ones who are going to buy?

Dr. Lebby: Yes, they will — a lot of these larger companies. The Ciscos of this world as well as the Intels and the Cienas, these types of players, Googles and others. A lot of these folks are actually vertically integrated. So they actually do a lot of the things themselves. And some of the parts they send out to foundries or to contract manufacturers.

As I see the business model, you need to be flexible, because some of these guys will want to buy from you direct. And other ones who will say, go work with our contract manufacturer or go work with our foundry, get qualified there, and then we’ll give you the business.

And so, we have to be flexible with these large guys, because they have different working models.

https://www.reddit.com/r/LWLG/comments/15twmqr/interview_with_dr_lebby_august_17_2023/

Ok folks, so Investors now now that the Intel's and Cisco's and Google's ARE THE CUSTOMERS that the Foundries PDK's HAVE BEEN DEVELOPED to serve!!!! Lebby has already told investors that there are PRODUCTION TRIALS in progress for at least the last 6 months but more likely a year or more!!!

PRODUCTION TRIALS!!! Nothing makes short sellers more nervous than finding out that Lightwave Logic’s foundry partners are currently running PRODUCTION TRIALS Why would they do that? “We” were convinced their technology would never scale and the fact that Lightwave Logic has never produced a product in 20 years was proof positive that they would never ever produce any revenue. We even talked to an ex employee who told us there were issues five years ago.

The worst news possible is learning about production runs because reaching that step means both parties want to produce and market this technology. In order to reach agreement on the terms of a license, both parties must be comfortable with the production economics. What level of upfront cash payment is appropriate? What percentage of gross modulator sales makes sense?

One thing is clear to me, the foundries want this technology and are already devoting machine time to be able to price the agreements. If I were short this stock, I would be fargin nervous as hell.

https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=171355567

. This expansion of our IP moat, paired with our acquisition of the mission-critical IP assets of Chromosol Ltd (UK) to strengthen foundry PDK design capabilities with extremely low temperature ALD Processes, is a part of our ability to advance initial production trials with our foundry partners and secure our first licensing agreements in the near-term.

Corporate Update March 2, 2023

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Apple - >>> Justice Department files antitrust suit against Apple


Yahoo Finance

by Daniel Howley and Alexis Keenan

March 21, 2024


https://finance.yahoo.com/news/justice-department-files-antitrust-suit-against-apple-145514025.html


The US Justice Department filed an antitrust lawsuit against Apple (AAPL), alleging that the maker of the iPhone illegally maintains its dominance over the smartphone market by boxing out competing apps and devices.

Apple "has maintained its power not because of its superiority, but because of its unlawful exclusionary behavior," Attorney General Merrick Garland said at a press conference Thursday.

Apple said it would fight the lawsuit, which it said "threatens who we are and the principles that set Apple products apart in fiercely competitive markets. If successful, it would hinder our ability to create the kind of technology people expect from Apple."

A victory for the US in this case "would also set a dangerous precedent, empowering government to take a heavy hand in designing people’s technology," Apple added in its statement.

Apple's stock fell more than 4% following news of the lawsuit, which the Justice Department filed with 16 state attorneys general.

The filing sets up yet another confrontation between the US government and a Silicon Valley icon as the Biden administration tries to rein in Big Tech's power.

The Department of Justice is suing Google (GOOG, GOOGL) over antitrust allegations, while the Federal Trade Commission is suing Amazon (AMZN) and Facebook (META) alleging they also violate antitrust laws.

The new DOJ lawsuit filed Thursday poses a major new threat to Apple's various revenue streams.

Apple generates the bulk of its cash through the sale of its wildly popular iPhone, which accounted for $200.6 billion of the company's $383.3 billion in total revenue in 2023. But Apple's services and hardware that tie into the iPhone are also incredibly lucrative.

The company's wearables, home, and accessories business, which includes its Apple Watch and AirPods sales, generated $39.8 billion last year, while its growing services business, which includes subscriptions for things like Apple Music+ and App Store sales, brought in $85.2 billion.

The DOJ's suit comes just weeks after the European Commission (EC) fined Apple $2 billion for allegedly breaking competition laws in the bloc. The EC alleged the company illegally wielded its dominance to the detriment of its rivals in the market for the distribution of music streaming apps.

The Justice Department suit is just the latest headache for Apple, which is off to a rough start in 2024.

Shares of Apple are down 7% year to date as the company struggles with slowing iPhone sales in China, its third-largest market. Apple also lost its title as the world's most valuable company to rival Microsoft (MSFT).

How Apple allegedly wields power

At the center of the DOJ’s lawsuit is the iPhone, Apple’s most recognizable product.

The company harms consumers by making it more difficult for iPhone users to switch to a competing product and to access competing services, according to the government. The complaint also says Apple harms app developers by imposing restrictions on app creation and distribution.

That includes everything from text messaging to digital wallets to apps that reduce user dependence on the iPhone.

Garland, for example, characterized Apple’s iMessage as anti-competitive, saying that when it is used to text with a Google Android device, the iPhone user’s response is in green rather than blue. (whoopee)

That, he said, "limits functionality." The videos sent via text, Garland added, can also be pixelated and grainy.

He then quoted Apple’s CEO responding to a complaint from a user who said he couldn’t send his mom certain videos: "'Buy your mom an iPhone.'"

Apple, the suit alleges, also makes it more difficult for smartphone users to access competing digital wallets by blocking developers from using tap-to-pay functionality in their apps. And it prevents the Apple iWatch from working with Android smartphones while making it more difficult for someone with an iPhone to use a rival’s smartwatch. (too bad)

"Apple repeatedly responded to competitive threats," said Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter, "by making it harder to leave, then making it more attractive to stay. The antitrust laws have something to say about that."

Apple, according to the suit, also suppresses cloud streaming gaming apps and denies consumers access to so-called super apps, which allow users access to a broad range of functionalities from a single interface.

The wide-ranging suit is "about the core unfair practices of Apple," Case Western Reserve University antitrust expert and law professor Anat Alon-Beck said.

"Apple systematically excludes rivals from the Apple ecosystem. By doing that, Apple is hurting so many startup businesses, stakeholders, customers, and, in my opinion, its shareholders."

As a result, she predicts that Apple's stock will "see more downward movement."

Apple's Epic battle

This is just the latest antitrust battle Apple has had to contend with in the US.

The last was in 2020, when "Fortnite" maker Epic Games sued the company and accused it of violating antitrust law by prohibiting third-party app developers from offering their own payment methods within their apps —as opposed to using Apple's payment service.

Justice Department lawyers were permitted to present arguments in that high-stakes dispute. It focused attention on Apple’s App Store — the only place consumers can download apps for iPhones and iPads, which generally charges app developers a 30% commission on paid app purchases made through the platform.

Apple scored a victory in that case when the appeals court upheld a California trial court's ruling that said Apple did not hold a monopoly in the market for mobile app stores.

However, in a minor win for Epic, the appeals court also upheld the trial court's ruling that said Apple must allow app developers to offer more ways for users to pay for purchases.

Both companies tried to take their fight to the Supreme Court, though the high court declined to take up either appeal.

Following that decision, Apple said it will allow developers to offer third-party payment options through their apps. However, the company said developers would still have to pay fees of either 12% or 27%, a move Epic CEO Tim Sweeney called "anticompetitive."

Apple is in the midst of reconfiguring its App Store payment system in the European Union. Under the EU's new Digital Markets Act (DMA), the company must allow EU customers the option to download third-party app stores and get access to third-party payment options.

Apple said it would address the measure and allow third-party downloads and payments, but will still charge developers a fee of 50 euro cents for each download if they cross the 1 million download threshold in a year.

Both Epic and Spotify objected to the measure, with Spotify CEO Daniel Ek calling the new rule "hostile."

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>>> Nextracker Inc (NASDAQ:NXT)

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/12-best-wind-power-solar-162031158.html

Number of Hedge Fund Investors: 33

Nextracker Inc (NASDAQ:NXT) provides integrated solar tracker and software solutions used in utility-scale and ground-mounted solar projects.

Insider Monkey's database of 933 hedge funds updated for the fourth quarter of 2023 shows that 33 hedge funds had stakes in Nextracker Inc (NASDAQ:NXT).

Last month Nextracker Inc (NASDAQ:NXT) posted solid Q4 results and upped its guidance. Adjusted EPS in the period came in at $0.96, beating estimates by $0.47. Revenue in the quarter jumped 38.4% year over year to $710.43 million, beating estimates by $92.94 million.

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>>> Nextracker Inc. (NXT), an energy solutions company, provides solar tracker and software solutions for utility-scale and ground-mounted distributed generation solar projects worldwide. The company offers tracking solutions, which includes NX Horizon, a solar tracking solution; NX Gemini, a two-in-portrait format tracker, which holds two rows of solar panels along the central support beam; and NX Horizon-XTR, a terrain-following tracker designed to expand the addressable market for trackers on sites with sloped, uneven, and challenging terrain. It also provides monitoring and control software solutions including TrueCapture, a solar boosting power plant, which boost plant performance by correcting for shading and diffuse light conditions; and NX Navigator, a mitigating extreme weather risk navigator which helps to maintain optimum tracker equipment health and availability. The company was founded in 2013 and is headquartered in Fremont, California. <<<



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>>> Oracle Posts Biggest Gain Since 2021 on Cloud Revenue Growth


Bloomberg

Brody Ford

Mar 12, 2024


https://finance.yahoo.com/news/oracle-set-biggest-gain-since-091209365.html


(Bloomberg) -- Oracle Corp. shares posted their biggest gain in more than two years after reporting a spike in bookings in its cloud computing business, showing progress in its bid to capture more of the competitive market.

Remaining performance obligation — a measure of Oracle’s sales backlog — was $80 billion at the end of the quarter ended in February. That was significantly ahead of the $59 billion expected by analysts. Chief Executive Officer Safra Catz pointed to this figure, which she said was driven by “large new cloud infrastructure contracts signed in the third quarter,” as evidence of momentum.

The stock rose 12% to close at $127.54 in New York, a record high. Shares had been down about 10% over the past six months through Monday’s close, lagging the iShares software ETF, which gained 16%.

The Austin-based company, known for its database software, is focused on expanding its cloud infrastructure business to compete with Amazon.com Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google. That effort has faced headwinds in recent quarters as growth rates slowed. But there were signs of stabilizing in the third quarter, with sales gaining at nearly the same pace as the three months preceding it.

“We expect to continue receiving large contracts reserving cloud infrastructure capacity,” Catz said on a conference call, adding that Oracle is “very rapidly” opening new data centers to meet demand.

Cloud revenue jumped 25% to $5.1 billion in the period that ended in February, the company said, just ahead of Wall Street’s $5.06 billion estimate. Of that, $1.8 billion came from renting out computing power and storage over the internet and $3.3 billion from applications.

The results were “certainly better than feared,” said Jefferies analyst Brent Thill in an interview on Bloomberg TV, noting that other cloud vendors like Amazon and Microsoft have similarly reported strong results recently.

Total sales in the fiscal third quarter increased 7.1% to $13.3 billion, roughly in line with analysts’ estimates, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Excluding some items, profit was $1.41 a share, compared with the average estimate of $1.38.

Sales of Fusion software for managing corporate finance increased 18% in the quarter from a year earlier. Revenue from NetSuite, enterprise planning tools aimed at small and midsize companies, was up 21%. Revenue from both businesses gained 21% in the previous period.

After acquiring Cerner, the electronic health records company, Oracle has been focused on modernizing the legacy software business. It finished moving “the majority of Cerner customers” to Oracle cloud infrastructure in the quarter, Chairman Larry Ellison said. Further updates over the coming year, such as a new suite of applications, will transform Cerner and Oracle’s health operations into “a high-growth business for years to come,” he added.

In the current quarter, which ends in May, revenue will be up about 5%, Catz said. Cloud revenue without Cerner will be about 23%, she said. Cerner will return to revenue growth in the fiscal year ending in May 2025, Catz said, adding that it has been a “significant headwind” to revenue growth this year.

Capital expenditures will be as much as $7.5 billion in the current fiscal year, Catz said. As the company builds more data centers to meet demand for cloud computing, that spending will increase to $10 billion in fiscal 2025, she added. That’s above the average analyst estimate of about $8.9 billion.

Investors are watching capital expenditures as a proxy for future cloud demand, as it means Oracle is constructing data centers, wrote Guggenheim analyst John DiFucci. “We believe Oracle continues to face a situation in which Oracle demand is outpacing the ability to meet it.”

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>>> Intuit (NASDAQ:INTU) has many business software products under its umbrella. However, the company’s most famous software is TurboTax. People use the product to file their taxes every year, and it results in steady revenue for the company. Quickbooks is another popular tool that Intuit owns.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/market-mavericks-7-growth-stocks-154037454.html

The company’s Q2 FY24 results indicate more growth is ahead. Revenue increased by 11% year-over-year while net income more than doubled year-over-year. Intuit reiterated guidance for the fiscal year which projects 11%-12% year-over-year revenue growth. Expanding profit margins will make the company’s valuation more appealing for long-term investors. All in all, it’s one of those growth stocks to consider.

Intuit has been a winning stock for patient investors. Shares are up by 61% over the past year and have gained 165% over the past five years. The company’s vast array of business software gives it many opportunities to gain market share for the benefit of long-term investors. The stock offers a low 0.55% dividend yield, but growth rates have been solid. The company hiked its dividend by 15.4% year-over-year in 2023.

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Super Micro - >>> Move over, Nvidia. Investors are obsessed with this AI stock you may never have heard of


by Krystal Hur

CNN

Mar 7, 2024


https://finance.yahoo.com/news/move-over-nvidia-investors-obsessed-123045939.html


Nvidia isn’t the only stock capturing the attention of AI enthusiasts these days.

Nvidia is undoubtedly the poster child for artificial intelligence. Shares of the American chipmaker have soared roughly 277% over the last 12 months, helping drive a powerful bull market that’s led stocks to record highs. Nvidia closed above a $2 trillion market cap on March 1, joining an elite cohort including Apple and Microsoft.

But there’s another AI-related stock that has quietly logged eye-popping gains.

Shares of Super Micro Computer (SMCI) have surged about 296% so far in 2024, following a 246% jump in 2023. Supermicro’s stock gained even more momentum in January, after the company reported second-quarter results that blew past expectations and raised its full-year revenue forecast.

Supermicro’s stock was one of the most popular names bought by Charles Schwab clients in February, according to the firm’s latest trading activity index.

The server producer counts Nvidia (NVDA) and Advanced Micro Devices among its customers. Its stock had risen at a breakneck pace even before last year’s bull market. The shares jumped roughly 87% in 2022, while other tech names and the broader market got pummeled as the Federal Reserve raised interest rates aggressively to bring down wayward inflation.

Supermicro’s runaway gains are indicative of the burgeoning demand for high-quality infrastructure to support AI chips, after the creation of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in November 2022 kickstarted a race among tech behemoths to develop generative AI platforms and tools.

Nvidia has been the biggest beneficiary of the AI boom. The chipmaker, which produces processors that power AI systems, reported last month that its full-year profits grew more than 580% from the prior year.

“Everyone’s looking for something that looks and smells and tastes like Nvidia. … [Supermicro] is exactly that,” said Victoria Bills, chief investment strategist at Banrion Capital Management.

Supermicro has a market cap of roughly $63 billion, up from $5 billion just a year ago. The stock is set to join the benchmark S&P 500 index at its next quarterly rebalance.

Wall Street thinks it has more room to run. Bank of America analysts initiated coverage on Supermicro last month with a “buy” rating and price objective of $1,040, which the stock has already surpassed, closing at $1,124.70 a share on Wednesday. Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs analysts also recently initiated coverage.

“The company’s willingness to experiment with different combination of components, its close proximity to leading semiconductor companies in San Jose and the fact that a majority of its manufacturing is in the United States is a competitive advantage,” wrote BofA analysts in a February 15 report.

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>>> Why Broadcom Stock Was Sliding Today


by Jeremy Bowman

Motley Fool

March 8, 2024


https://finance.yahoo.com/news/why-broadcom-stock-sliding-today-170211445.html


Shares of Broadcom (NASDAQ: AVGO) were moving lower Friday after the diversified semiconductor company posted solid results in its fiscal 2024 first-quarter earnings report after the market closed Thursday, but failed to raise its guidance.

High expectations were also baked into the stock. The company is viewed as a beneficiary of the AI boom, and as its shares have risen in recent months in consequence.

As of 11:59 a.m. ET, the stock was down by about 6%.

A good -- but not good enough -- quarter

Broadcom, which also just completed its purchase of VMware, said that revenue jumped by 34% in the quarter (which ended Feb. 4) to $12 billion, edging past the consensus estimate of $11.72 billion. Organic revenue, which excludes the impact of the VMware acquisition, was up 11%, accelerating from just 4% growth in the previous quarter, and the company said it was seeing strong demand for AI-related products.

In its semiconductor solutions segment, it reported 4% growth to $7.4 billion, while VMware drove a 153% jump in infrastructure software revenues to $4.6 billion.

Further down the income statement, adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) increased by 26% to $7.16 billion, and adjusted earnings per share rose 6.4% to $10.99, which beat the consensus estimate of $10.29.

CEO Hock Tan noted the strengthening tailwind in AI, saying, "Strong demand for our networking products in AI data centers, as well as custom AI accelerators from hyperscalers, are driving growth in our semiconductor segment."

Guidance falls a bit short

Friday's share price pullback seems to be driven by the company's decision to maintain its full-year guidance at $50 billion in revenue and $30 billion in adjusted EBITDA. It kept that steady forecast even as it has had one quarter to integrate VMware and as it's seeing increased demand for AI products.

Even with Friday's slide, Broadcom shares are still up 18% year to date and have more than doubled in the last year, showing the stock is benefiting from AI tailwinds. While this session's dip may be disappointing for investors, it shouldn't change anyone's long-term thesis on the stock.

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>>> PTC for the new manufacturing world

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/3-great-value-stocks-set-172200800.html

This industrial software company's solutions lie at the heart of the digitization of the manufacturing sector. Its computer-aided design (CAD) software helps customers digitally create and modify designs. The products that are designed can be digitally analyzed and tested via simulation before they are built. This interface between the physical and digital worlds continues with PTC's product lifecycle management (PLM) software. Meanwhile, its Internet of Things (IoT) software digitally integrates products and assets.

Digital technology is revolutionizing manufacturing and helping reduce product development times while creating so-called "closed loop" manufacturing, whereby data is being constantly analyzed to improve production iteratively, and can even lead to adjustments to the product design.

These are hot concepts in modern manufacturing plants, and PTC is a leader in the field. The company continues to grow its annual run rate revenue, a figure that represents its recurring revenue, at a mid-teens growth rate, and it's likely to drop down into significantly more free-cash-flow generation in the coming years. Wall Street analysts have PTC growing its free cash flow to around $1 billion in 2026, putting the stock at a ratio of 20 times estimated 2026 free cash flow at the current price. That's a good value for a company growing at a mid-teens rate.

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>>> Why C3.ai Stock Rocketed Higher Thursday Morning


by Danny Vena

Motley Fool

Feb 29, 2024


https://finance.yahoo.com/news/why-c3-ai-stock-rocketed-162410723.html


Shares of C3.ai (NYSE: AI) moved sharply higher Thursday morning, soaring by as much as 26.4%. As of 10:40 a.m. ET, the stock was still up by 24.3%.

The catalyst for that surge was the quarterly report it delivered after the close Wednesday, which revealed that the artificial intelligence (AI) specialist may finally be tapping into the widening adoption of AI.

The beginnings of a turnaround?

For its fiscal 2024 third quarter, which ended Jan 31, C3.ai generated revenue of $78.4 million, up 18% year over year. Subscription revenue grew even faster, up 23% to $70.4 million, accounting for 90% of the total. The results were further aided by the company's expanding gross profit margin of 58%, which edged higher from 56% in fiscal Q2.

Profits continued to be elusive. C3.ai booked a net loss of $72.6 million, resulting in an adjusted loss of $0.13 per share -- more than double its loss of $0.06 per share in the prior-year quarter.

To put those results into context, analysts' consensus estimates were calling for revenue of $76.1 million and a loss of $0.28 per share, so the company beat on both top and bottom lines.

Better days to come

C3.ai's results might not seem like much to celebrate, particularly given its worsening bottom-line losses. However, there are indications that better days could be coming as management increased its full-year guidance and investors let out a collective cheer.

The company cited the increasing number of new agreements it has signed with customers -- it inked 50 during the quarter, up 85% year over year. Of those, 29 were new pilots. Management expects these deals will translate into commercial revenue in the months and years to come.

For its fiscal 2024 fourth quarter, management forecasts revenue of between $82 million and $86 million, which would amount to growth of roughly 10% at the midpoint. For the full year, C3 is forecasting revenue of $306 million to $310 million, a year-over-year increase of about 15% at the midpoint. Most of that range tops analysts' consensus expectation for revenue of $306.2 million. However, as a result of its increasing investments, the company said its losses will continue, and it no longer expects to be profitable by the fiscal fourth quarter.

C3.ai still needs to show it can capitalize on the AI boom and turn a profit.

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>>> Super Micro surges as AI server maker set to join S&P 500


Reuters

March 1, 2024


https://www.yahoo.com/tech/super-micro-surges-ai-server-000955723.html


(Reuters) - Shares of Super Micro Computer rallied 13.5% in extended trade on Friday after it was announced the seller of AI-optimized servers will join the S&P 500.

Super Micro and Deckers Outdoor Corp will be added to the S&P 500 prior to the start of trading on Monday, March 18, coinciding with a quarterly rebalance of Wall Street's most widely followed stock benchmark, S&P Dow Jones Indices said in a news release.

Those two companies will replace Whirlpool Corp and Zion Bancorporation, S&P Dow Jones Indices said.

Index funds that track the S&P 500 are among the most popular investment tools on Wall Street, and those funds will have to purchase shares of Super Micro and Deckers in order to stay aligned with the benchmark's composition.

Such S&P 500 index funds have assets of about $7.8 trillion, according to Howard Silverblatt, Senior Index Analyst at S&P Dow Jones Indices.

Super Micro sells high-end servers made with Nvidia's top-of-the-line AI processors, and its stock has more than tripled this year.

With Super Micro's stock market value reaching over $50 billion, investors had speculated the company would be added to the S&P 500.

On Friday, investors exchanged almost $10 billion worth of Super Micro's shares, eclipsing trading in Wall Street heavyweights including Microsoft and Amazon.

Its jump in after-hours trading adds to a 4.5% surge during Friday's trading session.

Shares of Deckers rose 2.7% in extended trade, while Whirlpool dipped 1.7% and Zion Bancorporation fell 2%.

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>>> PTC Inc. (PTC) operates as software company in the Americas, Europe, and the Asia Pacific. The company provides

Windchill, a suite that manages all aspects of the product development lifecycle(PLM) that provides real-time information sharing, dynamic data visualization, collaborate across geographically distributed teams, and enabling manufacturers to elevate product development, manufacturing, and field service processes;

ThingWorx, a platform for Industrial Internet of Things;

ServiceMax, a field service management solutions enable companies to asset uptime with optimized in-person and remote service and technician productivity with mobile tools. and deliver metrics; and Arena, a SaaS PLM solution enables product teams to collaborate virtually to share product and quality information with internal teams and supply chain partners and deliver products to customers. It offers -

Codebeamer, an application lifecycle management for products and software development;

Servigistics, a service parts management solution; and FlexPLM, a solution provides retailers with a single platform for merchandising and line planning, materials management, sampling, and others. In addition, it offers -

Kepware, a portfolio of industrial connectivity solutions helps companies connect diverse automation devices and software applications;

Creo, a 3D CAD technology enables the digital design, testing, and modification of product models; and -

Onshape, a cloud product development platform that delivers computer-aided design with data management tools. Further, it offers -

Vuforia, an augmented reality (AR) technology enables the visualization of digital information in a physical context and the creation of AR enabling companies to drive results in manufacturing, service, engineering, and operations; and -

Arbortext, a dynamic publishing solution streamlines how organizations create, manage, and publish technical documentation. PTC Inc. was incorporated in 1985 and is headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts.

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https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/PTC/profile


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>>> Why Palantir Technologies, Arm Holdings, and Other Artificial Intelligence (AI) Stocks Have Skyrocketed 50% or More in February


by Danny Vena

Motley Fool

February 19, 2024


https://finance.yahoo.com/news/why-palantir-technologies-arm-holdings-171500648.html


The rapid adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) has been gathering steam over the past year, but there's been a notable uptick in AI-related developments over the past several weeks. Since the start of February alone, shares of Palantir Technologies (NYSE: PLTR) have jumped 55%, Super Micro Computer (NASDAQ: SMCI) surged 72%, Arm Holdings (NASDAQ: ARM) soared 90%, and SoundHound AI (NASDAQ: SOUN) skyrocketed 121% as of the market close on Thursday.

The common thread that runs through these companies is the accelerating adoption of AI. There wasn't a single development that drove these stocks higher, but rather the growing tidal wave of AI that's beginning to overtake the tech industry.

Let's look at what drove each of these stocks higher and what it all means for the future.

Show me the money

It wasn't just the growing secular tailwinds of generative AI that drove these stocks higher. Three of the four recently reported quarterly financial results that easily surpassed investor expectations.

Supermicro was first out of the gate, reporting the results of its fiscal 2024 second quarter (ended Dec. 31, 2023). The company generated revenue of $3.7 billion, up 103% year over year and 73% sequentially. Management cited record and accelerating demand for AI servers. Profit was equally spectacular, with adjusted earnings per share (EPS) of $5.59 rising 62%. If that weren't enough, the company is forecasting full-year revenue of $14.5 billion at the midpoint of its guidance, which would represent 100% growth.

Next up was Palantir Technologies. For the fourth quarter, revenue of $608 million marked a 20% jump year over year and 9% sequentially, fueled by a 70% jump in U.S. commercial revenue. This performance helped the company generate its fifth consecutive quarter of profit according to generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP), with adjusted EPS of $0.08. The headline was the forecast for at least 40% growth from its U.S. commercial business over the coming year, thanks to robust demand for its Artificial Intelligence Platform, Palantir's generative AI solution.

Most recently, Arm Holdings delivered eye-opening results. For its fiscal 2024 third quarter, Arm generated record revenue of $824 million, up 14% year over year, driven by license revenue that grew 18% and record royalty revenue that climbed 11%. This performance resulted in adjusted EPS of $0.29, rising 32%. It was the company's forecast that really caught Wall Street off guard. Management is guiding for fourth-quarter revenue in a range of $850 million to $900 million, or growth of between 34% and 42%, lunging past the third quarter's 14% growth.

What these companies have in common, aside from the obvious ties to AI, is that each company delivered a "beat and raise" quarter, defying expectations and providing guidance that outpaced Wall Street's already bullish expectations.

The godfather of AI takes stock

There's a strong argument to be made that Nvidia saw the writing on the wall and positioned itself for the AI boom to come. Investors need only review the company's recent results to understand the magnitude of the secular tailwind involved.

For Nvidia's fiscal 2024 third quarter (ended Oct. 29, 2023), the company delivered record revenue that jumped 206% to $18.1 billion, resulting in diluted EPS that surged 1,274% to $3.71.

So when Nvidia makes a notable move in the field of AI, investors take notice.

In a regulatory filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday, Nvidia revealed that it had taken stakes in several AI-related companies, causing a spike in their respective shares.

Nvidia purchased 1.73 million shares of SoundHound AI, which provides voice-controlled AI solutions for businesses, in a stake valued at $6.5 million as of Thursday's market close. The company's technology has been deployed by a number of high-profile restaurants, including White Castle and Jersey Mike's, to power voice-enabled phone and drive-through ordering. It's also one of the leading providers of voice-AI solutions to carmakers, counting more than 20 automotive brands on its customer list.

SoundHound wasn't the only one. Nvidia finally confirmed the size of the stake it took in Arm Holdings: It owns 1.96 million shares worth roughly $262 million. Arm provides the designs behind some of the world's most widely used central processing units. After two years in the making, regulators quashed an attempted merger between Nvidia and Arm in early 2022.

Some viewed these purchases as a significant vote of confidence from Nvidia. As a result, many investors followed suit, piling into the stocks.

The cost isn't as high as you might think

The most common bear argument for investing in these and many AI stocks is the valuation. That view is understandable but tends to ignore the stunning growth rates of the companies in question. It reveals the limitations involved in using the price-to-earnings ratio or the price-to-sales ratio, especially when using them in a vacuum.

When dealing with high-growth stocks, the more appropriate measure is the price/earnings-to-growth (PEG) ratio, as it takes the growth rate of the company's profit into account. Since SoundHound AI isn't yet profitable, the point is moot. However, for Arm Holdings, Super Micro Computer, and Palantir Technologies, they clock in with forward PEG ratios of 0.8, 0.5, and 0.3, all well below the level of 1, which is the standard for an undervalued stock.

From that perspective, Arm Holdings, Super Micro Computer, and Palantir Technologies are not only growing quickly but are also cheaper than you might think.

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SMCI - >>> 1 Wall Street Analyst Thinks Super Micro Computer Stock Is Going to $1,040. Is It a Buy?


by Howard Smith

Motley Fool

February 18, 2024


https://finance.yahoo.com/news/1-wall-street-analyst-thinks-173000319.html


Data center systems provider Super Micro Computer (NASDAQ: SMCI) has been a darling of Wall Street lately. Its shares have soared 950% over the past year and have been on a parabolic move recently.

The stock has tripled in just the last month, but one Wall Street analyst thinks Supermicro, as it is known, still has more room to run. Bank of America Securities analyst Ruplu Bhattacharya began coverage on the supplier of accelerated computing server systems with a buy rating and a $1,040 price target. That would represent a jump of 18% over Wednesday's closing price, even after Supermicro's torrid run.

AI has legs

Companies in virtually every sector are leveraging the power of artificial intelligence (AI). The biggest beneficiary in the stock market thus far has been semiconductor chipmaker Nvidia. In that company's third quarter, overall revenue more than tripled from a year ago and soared 34% sequentially from the prior quarter. That jump came mainly from growth in Nvidia's data center business thanks to customers craving its chips that power AI applications.

But businesses don't just need the chips, they need the server infrastructure that keeps the full AI machine running. And while Nvidia's revenue tripled year over year, its earnings per share rocketed by more than 12-fold. That's the earnings power that Bhattacharya sees helping boost Supermicro too.

In a client note, he wrote: "We think this provider of server and storage solutions will be a beneficiary of AI-driven demand growth ... We believe the market for AI servers is much larger than is factored in [Wall] Street models."

Is it too late to buy Supermicro?

Bhattacharya's price target could even be conservative. If the market for AI servers grows at a 50% annual rate over the next several years as Bhattacharya thinks, Supermicro has plenty more sales and earnings growth ahead.

Yet the stock is still not overly expensive. It has a price-to-sales ratio of about 6 compared to 40 for Nvidia. And earnings could soar as they have for Nvidia. The analyst's call looks very achievable.

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>>> Palantir Stock Is Going to the Moon Following Its Jaw-Dropping Earnings Report


by Adam Spatacco

Motley Fool

February 13, 2024


https://finance.yahoo.com/news/palantir-stock-going-moon-following-095400737.html


Earnings season is in full swing, and investors still have their eyes on one big item: artificial intelligence (AI). Much of the buzz surrounding AI is saved for the "Magnificent Seven" -- a catchy moniker that includes megacap tech behemoths Microsoft, Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, Nvidia, Meta, and Tesla. But that doesn't mean no other companies are riding the wave.

With a market cap of just $51 billion, Palantir Technologies (NYSE: PLTR) may not be seen in the same light as big tech, but Palantir is making inroads in the space as well, and investors realized it last week.

Following the release of a jaw-dropping fourth-quarter earnings report on Feb. 5 after the market closed, Palantir stock rocketed by roughly 50% over the next five trading days.

From revenue to operating margins to cash flow to customer acquisition strategies, Palantir is giving investors no shortage of key performance indicators to drool over. Let's analyze the report, and what the company's current performance could spell for its future. Despite operating in the shadows of megacap tech, now could be a lucrative time to invest in Palantir as it pushes forward in the AI arms race.

Customer acquisition at its finest

2023 was full of exciting developments in the world of artificial intelligence. Microsoft invested billions into OpenAI, the start-up behind ChatGPT. Alphabet and Amazon swiftly followed, with each investing in a competing platform called Anthropic.

In an effort to stand out, Palantir created a unique lead generation strategy to help fuel interest in its newest product, its Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP). Specifically, the company began hosting immersive seminars that it calls "boot camps." During these sessions, attendees can try out Palantir's software and get a better understanding of how the company can play a critical role in generative AI-driven use cases.

During Palantir's fourth-quarter earnings call with analysts, investors learned that the company completed over 500 boot camps last year. It conducted only 92 during 2022. While it's clear that the boot camps are in high demand, a thorough analysis of the company's customer growth is worth a look.

Palantir had 497 customers in the fourth quarter, a 35% increase over the year-ago period. Palantir is witnessing surging demand in the private sector in particular, with customer count increasing 44% annually.

This is important, because for many years Palantir was knocked by Wall Street bears over the company's heavy reliance on government deals. It's clear that the advent of AIP is building demand and business outside of its legacy public sector operation is thriving.

Margins are expanding, and cash flow is compounding

The chart below illustrates Palantir's annual revenue for the last five years.


https://media.zenfs.com/en/motleyfool.com/f14da0e2f277f368492b7e658c255d8d">https://media.zenfs.com/en/motleyfool.com/f14da0e2f277f368492b7e658c255d8d" />


Palantir was founded in 2003 and the chart shows that it took almost two decades for the company to reach the milestone of $1 billion in annual revenue. And yet in just three short years, the company has doubled its revenue. This growth is astounding considering how tough the macroeconomic outlook has been in recent years, coupled with the a fierce competitive landscape.

Perhaps more importantly, Palantir is also generating healthy margin expansion, which is flowing right to the bottom line. After adjusting for non-cash expenses like stock-based compensation, Palantir's operating margin expanded from 22% in 2022 to 28% in 2023. Furthermore, free cash flow grew 260% year over year to $730 million.

Some things to consider

The combination of top-line growth and margin expansion has helped bolster Palantir's liquidity. As of Dec. 31, the company had $3.7 billion of cash and marketable securities, and no debt on its balance sheet.

While this is encouraging to see, investors should take note of the disparity between the company's customer growth and its revenue acceleration. Even though customer count increased by 35% last year, Palantir's total revenue only grew by about 17%.

To me, this signals that Palantir is playing the long game when it comes to AI. In other words, the boot camps are merely a low-cost mechanism to get customers into the pipeline and convert them into paying users of the company's software. However, through a combination of use-case discovery rooted in AI along with enhanced customer-nurturing efforts, Palantir has the ability to upsell and cross-sell customers over time. As such, the company should enjoy significant revenue acceleration as time goes on.

I'd caution investors from buying into any hype narratives surrounding Palantir. Focusing on the long-term picture and assessing the company's position among enterprise software providers specializing in AI will be important.

For me, the fourth-quarter report was a preview of what investors could expect on an ongoing basis. As artificial intelligence software becomes more prominent in IT budgets, Palantir should be well positioned to benefit from secular tailwinds. Now looks like a great opportunity to scoop up shares for both new and existing investors, and prepare to hold on for the long term. The ride appears to just be getting started.

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Apple - >>> Warren Buffett Says Steve Jobs Once Called Him Asking For Advice On How To Invest Apple's Cash — Then He Completely Ignored The Advice


Benzinga

by Jeannine Mancini

February 12, 2024


https://finance.yahoo.com/news/warren-buffett-says-steve-jobs-192312997.html


Warren Buffett shared a look into a conversation with Steve Jobs about Apple Inc.'s financial strategy during a 2012 appearance on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”

In the "Ask Warren" segment, Buffett said, “It was an interesting conversation because I hadn’t talked to him in a long time. He said, ‘We’ve got all this cash. What should we do with it?’ So we went over the alternatives. It was kind of interesting.”

This dialogue between two titans of industry sheds light on the decision-making process at one of the world’s most valuable companies.

Jobs, known for his transformative role in making Apple a global technology leader, reached out to Buffett to seek advice on the company’s cash-management strategies. Buffett, a legendary investor and chairman of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., outlined the four primary options available for deploying cash: stock buybacks, dividends, acquisitions or holding onto it.

Despite Jobs’s acknowledgment that Apple’s stock was undervalued, indicating that buybacks could be a wise choice, he ultimately decided against taking any action, preferring to maintain the company’s cash reserves.

“I went through the logic of each thing. He told me they would not have the chance to make big acquisitions that would require lots of money," Buffett said. "And then I asked him the question, I said, ‘I would use it for buybacks if I thought my stock was undervalued.’ And I said, ‘How do you feel about that?’ The stock was 200-and-something. He said, ‘I think my stock is very undervalued.’ I said, ‘Well, what better to do with your money?’"

Jobs liked having the cash and that was what he ultimately decided was his best option. Buffett added that Jobs interpreted their conversation as Buffett endorsing his decision to hold onto the cash. "I later learned that he said I agreed with him to do nothing with the cash," Buffett said.

The conversation between Jobs and Buffett highlights a cautious approach to financial management, contrasting sharply with the actions taken by Jobs’s successor Tim Cook. Under Cook’s leadership, Apple has aggressively pursued stock buybacks, spending over $500 billion on them in the last decade. According to Business Insider, this expenditure surpasses the market capitalization of major corporations like Visa Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co., and ExxonMobil Corp., underscoring the scale of Apple’s commitment to repurchasing its shares.

Apple’s buyback strategy has enhanced shareholder value and increased the stake of Berkshire Hathaway in the tech giant without additional investment. Berkshire Hathaway, owning nearly 6% of Apple, has seen its ownership stake grow as a result of these buybacks.

Buffett has publicly supported Apple’s repurchase efforts, noting in his 2021 letter to shareholders the positive impact of the buybacks on both Berkshire’s holdings and Apple’s broader ecosystem.

“Much of what the company retained was used to repurchase Apple shares, an act we applaud,” Buffett wrote. “Tim Cook, Apple’s brilliant CEO, quite properly regards users of Apple products as his first love, but all of his other constituencies benefit from Tim’s managerial touch as well.”

While Jobs exhibited a preference for liquidity and financial flexibility, Cook has leveraged Apple’s financial strength to actively manage its capital structure, reinforcing the company’s position as a leader in the technology sector and delivering value to its shareholders and stakeholders alike.

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>>> Why Monolithic Power Systems Stock Popped After Earnings


by Rich Smith

Motley Fool

February 8, 2024


https://finance.yahoo.com/news/why-monolithic-power-systems-stock-172638300.html


Shares of Monolithic Power Systems (NASDAQ: MPWR), a specialist in manufacturing integrated circuits for controlling power systems, surged 17.2% through 10:55 a.m. ET Thursday morning, after the company beat expectations for fourth-quarter earnings last night.

Heading into its Q4 report, analysts had forecast the semiconductor company would earn $2.85 per share on sales of $452 million. In fact, Monolithic earned $2.88 per share on sales of $454 million -- a small beat to be sure, but still a beat.

Monolithic Power sales and earnings

Not all the news was good however. While better than expected, Q4 sales actually declined 4.4% year over year, and gross profit margins on those sales contracted by 290 basis points, to 55.3%.

Even worse, operating costs rose nearly twice as fast as sales fell, up 8.2%, driving operating profits down 20% year over year, and subtracting 19% from net income. While Monolithic reported non-GAAP (adjusted) profits of $2.88 per share, thus exceeding Wall Street's expectations, its actual earnings as calculated according to generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) were only $1.98 per share.

Results for the full year fiscal 2023 were only a bit better. Gross margin still fell, operating costs still rose, and on the bottom line, earnings were only $8.76 per share. But that was only a 3% decline versus 2022, thanks in part to 2023 revenue rising 1.5% in comparison to 2022.

Is Monolithic Power Systems stock a sell?

And yet, the news could also get better going forward. Turning to guidance, CEO Michael Hsing said he's "cautious about near-term business conditions." Nevertheless, he's predicting that in the first quarter, sales will range from $437 million to $457 million -- the entire range of which is ahead of Wall Street's own forecast for $431 million in sales. Gross margin is also stabilizing, and may even improve, with Monolithic saying its gross margin this coming quarter will range from 55.1% to 55.7%.

All things considered, Monolithic still probably won't earn as much in Q1 2024 as it earned in Q1 2023. But analysts are forecasting a 16% decline. If sales turn out to be better than expected, though, and gross margin stops shrinking, then Monolithic could be on course to beat earnings again in Q1 2024.

As for investors' reaction to this news, they're obviously happy about it today. Still, with Monolithic Power stock selling for a pricey 74 times trailing earnings, and earnings still shrinking (by any amount), the stock still looks expensive to me. I don't mean to rain on investors' parade or anything, but I'm afraid this semiconductor stock is still a sell.

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>>> 4 Phenomenal Companies That Will Be Massive Winners, Regardless of Who Wins the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Arms Race


by Keithen Drury

Motley Fool

Feb 10, 2024


https://finance.yahoo.com/news/4-phenomenal-companies-massive-winners-121500269.html


Investing in artificial intelligence (AI) can be overwhelming, as many companies benefit from this trend. Whether it's a company deploying AI to improve its business or one that makes AI software, there are a lot of opportunities.

However, there are also hardware components of AI, and many of these companies will be winners regardless of what happens to individual companies. I've pinpointed four that will be massive winners over the coming years.


1. ASML

A microchip is at the core of every computer used to create an AI model. These components require highly specialized machinery to make them, and one of the key suppliers in this realm is ASML (NASDAQ: ASML). The company makes lithography machines, which make the conductive traces on chips.

Semiconductors have reached the point where the distance between these traces is as small as 3 nanometers (nm). For reference, the human hair is about 80,000 to 100,000 nanometers wide. With smaller distances between traces, these chips become more powerful and efficient -- a key need for any device.

ASML currently holds a technological monopoly in this space, as no other companies make EUV (extreme ultraviolet) lithography machines. If you're making cutting-edge chips, you must work with ASML. As a result, ASML will be a huge winner in this space.


2. Taiwan Semiconductor

Taiwan Semiconductor (NYSE: TSM) is a huge user of these machines. The company is the world's largest contract chip manufacturer, which means it makes chips for other clients.

TSMC is a leader in this field, as it has 3-nm chips but is also developing 2-nm chips slated to launch in 2025. Taiwan Semiconductor's innovative culture is always working on the next thing, which will provide continual revenue boosts as these new products launch.

Among Taiwan Semiconductor's customers are Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) and AMD, which provide another critical component in the AI value chain.


3. Nvidia

Nvidia has probably received the most attention in this group, as its best-in-class GPUs (graphics processing units) are crucial in AI. GPUs are used to process vast amounts of data and train AI models, making them must-have hardware.

When a business outfits a computer to train these models, they don't just buy one or two GPUs; they buy thousands. This caused Nvidia's revenue to explode higher in 2023, as the demand for its GPUs was unprecedented.

Nvidia's strength will continue as long as AI is a massive trend, as it requires a significant computing infrastructure buildout.


4. Super Micro Computer

You can't just go out and buy a few thousand Nvidia GPUs filled with Taiwan Semiconductor chips made with ASML's lithography machines, hook them up, and expect a positive result. Instead, a specialized server is needed to maximize efficiency so a business can get the most performance out of its supercomputer.

That's where Super Micro Computer (NASDAQ: SMCI) comes in. Supermicro specializes in server design, whether it's being used for engineering simulations, drug discovery, or AI model training. Its products are highly configurable, whether a company wants a couple of hundred GPUs or a couple of thousand.

As the demand for AI computers reaches the general market, Supermicro will continue to excel, which is part of the reason the stock is up around 140% to start in 2024.

A basket of AI winners

You don't have to pick a single winner to be a successful AI investor. Instead, you could select a variety of stocks that are critical suppliers in the AI field and likely do quite well.

This group will be successful regardless of which company produces the best AI product, as they provide the building blocks necessary for all AI models.

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>>> Biden administration announces $5 billion commitment for research and development of computer chips


The Washington Post

By Josh Boak?|?AP

February 9, 2024


https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/02/09/computer-chips-research-development-biden/c704b56c-c73c-11ee-bbc9-9b5ca9b20779_story.html


WASHINGTON — The Biden administration on Friday announced the investment of $5 billion in a newly established public-private consortium aimed at supporting research and development in advanced computer chips.

The National Semiconductor Technology Center is being funded through the CHIPS and Science Act. That 2022 law aims to reinvigorate the computer chip sector within the United States through tens of billions of dollars in targeted government support.

Stakeholders in the chips industry gathered on the White House campus to discuss how the center should prioritize research and worker training for an industry poised to expand because of government backing. The coronavirus pandemic exposed the risk to the economy and national security of an overdependence on Taiwan for advanced chips, while the emergence of artificial intelligence is likely to push demand for newer and more innovative chips upward.

“This is an inflection point in the industry,” Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo told the group. “Not just because we’re dangerously dependent on one country for so many of our chips, but because AI is going to lead to an explosion of demand for chips, for sophisticated chips, more energy-efficient chips, cost-effective chips.”

The center would help to fund the design and prototyping of new chips, in addition to training workers for the sector.

Companies say they need a skilled workforce in order to capitalize on the separate $39 billion being provided by the government to fund new and expanded computer chip plants. Raimondo said there will be “a drumbeat” of funding announcements for companies in the next six to 12 weeks.

The sector would likely increase rapidly in terms of its need for highly specialized workers. Labor Department data say that about 375,000 people are employed in the production of computer chips with an average income of $82,830.

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>>> 20 Best-Performing AI ETFs for February 2024

Exchange-traded funds are one way to invest in artificial intelligence. THNQ and SPRX are some of the best-performing AI ETFs.


Nerd Wallet

By Sam Taube

Feb 2, 2024


https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/investing/best-performing-ai-etfs


Spear Alpha ETF (SPRX)

59.11%

iShares U.S. Technology ETF (IYW)

51.09%

iShares Expanded Tech Sector ETF (IGM)

47.88%

iShares U.S. Tech Independence Focused ETF (IETC)

47.57%

Clockwise Core Equity & Innovation ETF (TIME)

45.68%

Fidelity MSCI Information Technology Index ETF (FTEC)

41.06%

iShares Global Tech ETF (IXN)

40.36%

Franklin Exponential Data ETF (XDAT)

37.19%

Invesco NASDAQ Internet ETF (PNQI)

36.08%

Global X Artificial Intelligence & Technology ETF (AIQ)

34.33%

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>>> Arm Holdings plc (ARM) architects, develops, and licenses central processing unit products and related technologies for semiconductor companies and original equipment manufacturers rely on to develop products. It offers microprocessors, systems intellectual property (IPs), graphics processing units, physical IP and associated systems IPs, software, tools, and other related services. Its products are used in various markets, such as automotive, computing infrastructure, consumer technologies, and Internet of things. The company operates in the United States, the People's Republic of China, Taiwan, South Korea, and internationally. The company was founded in 1990 and is headquartered in Cambridge, the United Kingdom. Arm Holdings plc operates as a subsidiary of Kronos II LLC.

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>>> Is It Too Late to Buy Palantir Stock?


by Will Healy

Motley Fool

Feb 7, 2024


https://finance.yahoo.com/news/too-buy-palantir-stock-143129749.html


Palantir Technologies' (NYSE: PLTR) stock price has jumped nearly 31% since Monday afternoon right after the release of its earnings report for the fourth quarter of 2023. With its artificial intelligence platform (AIP) and U.S. commercial segment showing massive growth, investor interest in the software stock has surged.

With the stock already up approximately 163% over the last year and its valuation rising, have investors missed their opportunity to buy?

Palantir and AIP

Admittedly, the potential of the company could motivate some investors to ignore its current elevated valuation. Palantir has stood out above other SaaS stocks by analyzing data and delivering insights. It has long relied on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to make its determinations. After first focusing on national defense applications, it turned to the commercial sector to apply its knowledge to the business world.

With Palantir releasing AIP last year, more commercial customers have become interested in the software after attending Palantir boot camps. On the Q4 2023 earnings call, Chief Revenue Officer and Chief Legal Officer Ryan Taylor spoke of one attendee who said they could find at least "100 use cases" for AIP. Another attendee remarked about finding "endless solutions" through the product.

Such successes were likely the biggest reason Palantir's revenue in the U.S. commercial sector rose by 70% in Q4. U.S. commercial customer counts also moved higher by 55% over the same period.

Palantir's financials and valuation

Those aforementioned successes appeared to move the stock higher despite more muted financial results. The $2.2 billion in revenue reported for 2023 increased by 17% yearly, with Q4 revenue climbing by 20%.

Also, since operating expenses rose modestly, Palantir earned considerably higher profits. Its net income of $217 million in 2023 increased from a $371 million loss in 2022. The company also earned $97 million of that profit in Q4 alone, having increased quarterly net income by 152% compared with year-ago levels.

Nonetheless, considering that Q4 2022 was its first quarterly profit, investors should remember that profits usually rise by a considerable amount when a company first reaches profitability, rendering its P/E ratio of just above 360 meaningless. Looking to the future, a forward P/E of 73 is high but not unprecedented for an AI company in today's environment.

Also, its price-to-sales (P/S) ratio of 23 is up from single digits one year ago, and investors could turn on the stock should sentiment turn negative. Still, the P/S ratio is down from the 2021 bull market when it was routinely above 25 despite Palantir not being profitable at the time. That could indicate that investors are willing to tolerate a higher sales valuation for this company.

Moreover, AIP's success could help to increase revenue and earnings growth in future quarters. That, in turn, could help the P/S and P/E ratios fall quickly, which could propel the stock higher at a faster pace.

Is it too late to buy Palantir?

Given Palantir's current state, investors should feel safe adding shares at current levels. Indeed, valuations are high, which could give pause to some prospective buyers.

However, Palantir's customers appear to see game-changing potential in its software, which gives the company tremendous pricing power. Also, the rapid increase in customer counts and U.S. commercial revenue confirms the high demand for this software, and sales and earnings multiples will likely fall as customer counts increase.

Thus, it is likely not the end of the bull run for Palantir, and customers who buy the stock now can still earn considerable returns over the long term.

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Super-micro - >>> 3 Artificial Intelligence (AI) Stocks That Could Help Make You a Millionaire


by Will Healy

Motley Fool

Feb 7, 2024


https://finance.yahoo.com/news/3-artificial-intelligence-ai-stocks-114500306.html


Much like the technology trends of the past, artificial intelligence (AI) could potentially help turn investors into millionaires. The performance of stocks like Nvidia and the recoveries of numerous other stocks from their 2022 bear market lows reflects the tremendous growth that these new technologies are driving for the companies involved, and the willingness of investors to pay for it.

Recently, investors have begun to gravitate toward smaller companies with the potential for massive growth. As AI makes more headway among investors, businesses, and consumers, these AI stocks could deliver outsized gains to investors.


Palantir

Investors should not ignore the AI-driven opportunity in Palantir (NYSE: PLTR). The company has long used machine learning and other AI tools to deliver analytical insights to clients in the national defense and commercial realms. The success of its platforms has helped it grow its revenue and profits.

However, the Palantir Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP) may take its AI prowess to a much higher level. AIP employs generative AI technology, and the company has heavily promoted the product recently through what it calls "boot camps," where it helps prospective customers find real-world ways to use the technology to their benefit. Clients that attend these boot camps have reported eye-popping productivity gains from them, such as producing outputs 10 times faster with one-third of the resources.

Admittedly, the impacts of AIP have not yet shown up in the company's headline numbers. In the first three quarters of 2023, its revenue rose 16% to $1.6 billion. Also, Palantir limited operating expense growth, resulting in a net income of $120 million during that timeframe. Due to investors' optimism about the company's future, its stock has risen by about 110% over the last year.

With that gain behind it, the stock now trades at a price-to-sales ratio of 17, a valuation that may give some investors pause. Still, when factoring in the growth potential, others might see it as a relative bargain based on its forward P/E ratio of 55. If AIP's successes start translating into revenue gains, a surge in the stock could bring investors closer to millionaire status.


Supermicro

Super Micro Computer (NASDAQ: SMCI) -- better known simply as Supermicro -- has existed for over 30 years, but it may finally be getting its moment in the sunshine amid the AI revolution. It describes itself as a "rack-scale total IT solutions provider," building servers for big data, cloud computing, enterprise, 5G, and other applications.

However, it has drawn particular attention with its servers for data centers powered by Nvidia's AI chips. With more than 6 million square feet of manufacturing space and operations in over 100 countries, it has positioned itself to take this technology wherever customers demand it.

Indeed, interest in its products has begun to skyrocket. In the first six months of its fiscal 2024 (a period that ended Dec. 31), its revenue rose 58% year over year to $5.8 billion. But because operating expenses also rose rapidly, its net income increased by just 25% to $453 million.

Since those higher operating expenses appear to have been primarily related to improvements, investors seem to be less concerned about them, and more focused on the company's burgeoning AI opportunity. The stock has risen by an eye-popping 695% over the past year, and doubled since the beginning of 2024.

Despite that gain, its price-to-earnings ratio is around 43, a relatively moderate level considering its revenue growth. Considering that the stock trades at just 26 times forward earnings, it is probably not too late for investors to see further substantial gains in Supermicro.


Upstart

Upstart Holdings (NASDAQ: UPST) seeks to upend the loan evaluation business using AI. According to internal studies, it has found loan opportunities overlooked by Fair Isaac's FICO scoring tool, allowing Upstart's lending clients to approve more loans without increasing their risks.

The FICO score is particularly vulnerable to disruption since its processes have changed little since Fair Isaac launched the scoring tool in 1989. Also, because Upstart seeks to earn revenue on evaluations only, it should carry little credit risk, in theory.

Unfortunately for the company, its period of fast growth and profitability ended abruptly as interest rates rose. Its fairly small client base and high dependence on two large clients have also hampered Upstart, as did its decision to widen its business model and become the lender on some of the loans its platform approved.

Consequently, its revenue in the first nine months of 2023 fell 46% year over year to $408 million. Nonetheless, in Q3, its revenue rose 3% from the previous quarter to $147 million, suggesting that the worst may be over. Also, the stock's price-to-sales ratio stands at just 5, a small fraction of where it stood in the previous bull market.

Upstart carries significant risk, but its platform's ability to approve more loans without increasing lenders' credit risk could offer tremendous value, especially if more banks use it to replace the FICO score model. If more banks adopt its tool and interest rates head lower, Upstart could deliver massive shareholder returns.

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>>> Why Super Micro Computer Stock Rocketed to New Highs This Week


by John Ballard

The Motley Fool

Feb 1, 2023


https://finance.yahoo.com/news/why-super-micro-computer-stock-000323378.html


Week to date, shares of Super Micro Computer (NASDAQ: SMCI) were up 23% through Thursday's market close, according to data provided by S&P Global Market Intelligence. The demand for artificial intelligence (AI)-driven computing is driving accelerating revenue growth and profits for this leading supplier of rack-scale solutions for data centers.

Despite the stock's massive run over the last year, the company is seeing market share gains for its products and raised full-year revenue guidance.

Why Super Micro Computer revenue was up more than 100% in the fiscal second quarter

In the company's fiscal 2023 annual report, CEO Charles Liang said the ongoing growth in AI computing could be potentially more impactful to the world than the industrial revolution over 200 years ago. His company is certainly growing like it. Earlier this week, Super Micro reported a record $3.66 billion in revenue for the fiscal second quarter ending Dec. 31, a year-over-year increase of 103%.

The company continues to benefit from the demand for Nvidia's graphics processing units (GPUs), so as those chips are coming into better supply, it is driving more sales of Super Micro's rack systems for AI.

Management expects fiscal 2024 revenue to double to between $14.3 billion to $14.7 billion "With AI applications booming, I expect the $20 billion annual revenue target to be just a few years away," Liang said in his annual letter to shareholders last year.

Why the stock has room to run

Despite rocketing 700% over the last 12 months, the stock is still reasonably priced. It reported adjusted earnings per share of $5.59, up from $3.26 in the same quarter last year. That's an annual run rate of $22.36, which gives a forward price-to-earnings ratio of 25.9.

Given that fair valuation, Super Micro's run is likely not over.

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>>> Supermicro Introduces a Rack Scale Total Solution for AI Storage to Accelerate Data Pipelines for High-Performance AI Training and Inference


PR Newswire

January 25, 2024


https://finance.yahoo.com/news/supermicro-introduces-rack-scale-total-210500568.html


Turn-Key Data Storage Solution for Large Scale AI Training and Inference – Hundreds of Petabytes in a Multi-tier Solution Supports the Massive Data Capacity Required and High-Performance Data Bandwidth Necessary for Scalable AI Workloads


SAN JOSE, Calif., Jan. 26, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Supermicro, Inc. (NASDAQ: SMCI), a Total IT Solution Manufacturer for AI, Cloud, Storage, and 5G/Edge, is launching full stack optimized storage solution for AI and ML data pipelines from data collection to high performance data delivery. This new solution maximizes AI time-to-value by keeping GPU data pipelines fully saturated. For AI training, massive amounts of raw data at petascale capacities can be collected, transformed, and loaded into an organization's AI workflow pipeline. This multi-tiered Supermicro solution has been proven to deliver multi-petabyte data for AIOps and MLOps in production environments. The entire multi-rack scale solution from Supermicro is designed to reduce implementation risks, enable organizations to train models faster, and quickly use the resulting data for AI inference.

"With 20 PB per rack of high-performance flash storage driving four application-optimized NVIDIA HGX H100 8-GPU based air-cooled servers or eight NVIDIA HGX H100 8-GPU based liquid-cooled servers, customers can accelerate their AI and ML applications running at rack scale," said Charles Liang, president and CEO of Supermicro. "This solution can deliver 270 GB/s of read throughput and 3.9 million IOPS per storage cluster as a minimum deployment and can easily scale up to hundreds of petabytes. Using the latest Supermicro systems with PCIe 5.0 and E3.S storage devices and WEKA Data Platform software, users will see significant increases in the performance of AI applications with this field-tested rack scale solution. Our new storage solution for AI training enables customers to maximize the usage of our most advanced rack scale solutions of GPU servers, reducing their TCO and increasing AI performance."

For more information about the Supermicro Storage Solutions for AI, please visit https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/storage

Petabytes of unstructured data used in large-scale AI training processing must be available to the GPU servers with low latencies and high bandwidth to keep the GPUs productive. Supermicro's extensive portfolio of Intel and AMD based storage servers is a crucial element of the AI pipeline. These include the Supermicro Petascale All-Flash storage servers, which have a capacity of 983.04* TB per server of NVMe Gen 5 flash capacity and deliver up to 230 GB/s of read bandwidth and 30 million IOPS. This solution also includes the Supermicro SuperServer 90 drive bay storage servers for the capacity object tier. This complete and tested solution is available worldwide for customers in ML, GenAI, and other computationally complex workloads.

The new storage solution consists of:

All-Flash tier - Supermicro Petascale Storage Servers

Application tier – Supermicro 8U GPU Servers: AS -8125GS-TNHR and SYS-821GE-TNHR

Object tier - Supermicro 90 drive bay 4U SuperStorage Server running Quantum ActiveScale object storage

Software: WEKA Data Platform and Quantum ActiveScale object storage

Switches: Supermicro InfiniBand and Ethernet Switches

"The high performance and large flash capacity of Supermicro's All-Flash Petascale Storage Servers perfectly complement WEKA's AI-native data platform software. Together, they provide the unparalleled speed, scale, and simplicity demanded by today's enterprise AI customers," said Jonathan Martin, president at WEKA.

Supermicro will present the optimized storage architecture in more detail in a webinar. To attend the webinar live on Feb. 1, 2024, or view the Supermicro and WEKA webinar on-demand, visit: https://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/17278/604378

Learn More about All Supermicro Storage Systems

*Raw value is based on vendor raw base capacity of 30.72TB. TB is base-10 decimal. Availability of 30.72TB E3.S SSD is subject to vendor availability.

About Super Micro Computer, Inc.

Supermicro (NASDAQ: SMCI) is a global leader in Application-Optimized Total IT Solutions. Founded and operating in San Jose, California, Supermicro is committed to delivering first to market innovation for Enterprise, Cloud, AI, and 5G Telco/Edge IT Infrastructure. We are a Total IT Solutions manufacturer with server, AI, storage, IoT, switch systems, software, and support services. Supermicro's motherboard, power, and chassis design expertise further enables our development and production, enabling next generation innovation from cloud to edge for our global customers. Our products are designed and manufactured in-house (in the US, Taiwan, and the Netherlands), leveraging global operations for scale and efficiency and optimized to improve TCO and reduce environmental impact (Green Computing). The award-winning portfolio of Server Building Block Solutions® allows customers to optimize for their exact workload and application by selecting from a broad family of systems built from our flexible and reusable building blocks that support a comprehensive set of form factors, processors, memory, GPUs, storage, networking, power, and cooling solutions (air-conditioned, free air cooling or liquid cooling).

Supermicro, Server Building Block Solutions, and We Keep IT Green are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Super Micro Computer, Inc.

All other brands, names, and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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>>> Super Micro Computer (SMCI) - >>> This Incredibly Cheap Artificial Intelligence (AI) Stock Is Crushing Nvidia in 2024 With 50% Gains. It Could Soar Another 85%.


by Harsh Chauhan

The Motley Fool

January 25, 2024


https://finance.yahoo.com/news/incredibly-cheap-artificial-intelligence-ai-131500553.html


If you're looking to buy a top artificial intelligence (AI) stock right now, Nvidia is likely to be one of the first names that comes to mind. That's not surprising. Its dominance in the AI chip market has been driving outstanding top- and bottom-line growth for the company.

The good part is that Wall Street and investors are positive about Nvidia's prospects in 2024 and beyond as the AI chip market gains steam. This explains why Nvidia stock has already risen 20% in 2024. However, Nvidia's solid start to the year on the stock market has been eclipsed by Super Micro Computer (NASDAQ: SMCI), which has already clocked eye-popping gains of nearly 50% this month.

Let's look at the reasons why shares of Supermicro -- as it's more commonly known -- have been soaring and why investors should consider buying it hand over fist straight away.

Supermicro's updated guidance is stellar

In a business update provided by Supermicro on Jan. 18, the company announced significantly upgraded guidance for the second quarter of its fiscal 2024 (which ended on Dec. 31, 2023). The company -- known for providing modular server solutions, which are in solid demand as they are used for deploying AI chips -- is now anticipating fiscal Q2 revenue to land at $3.62 billion at the midpoint of its guidance range.

It was earlier forecasting $2.8 billion for the previous quarter, which means that it has increased its revenue estimate by almost 30%. Additionally, Supermicro is expecting its adjusted earnings to land between $5.40 and $5.55 per share, up significantly from the earlier range of $4.40 to $4.88 per share. The updated guidance suggests that Supermicro's revenue is set to double on a year-over-year basis, while its non-GAAP (adjusted) earnings would increase 68% from the same period last year.

The big increase in Supermicro's guidance and the impressive year-over-year growth that it is set to deliver was rewarded with a sharp jump in the company's stock price. But it is worth noting that Supermicro stock continues to trade at an attractive valuation despite its latest surge.

The company sports a price-to-sales ratio of just over 3. That's incredibly cheap when compared to Nvidia's sales multiple of 33. What's more, Supermicro's trailing earnings multiple of 39 is also much lower than Nvidia's multiple of 65. Additionally, Supermicro is trading at just 7 times forward earnings, which points toward the impressive bottom-line growth that the company is expected to deliver.

According to consensus estimates, Supermicro's earnings could increase 51% in fiscal 2024 to $17.88 per share, compared to $11.81 per share in fiscal 2023. Even better, the company is forecast to deliver impressive growth over the next couple of years as well.

Assuming Supermicro does hit $27.50 per share in earnings in fiscal 2026 and trades at the Nasdaq-100 index's forward earnings multiple of 29 then (using the index as a proxy for tech stocks), its stock price could jump to $800 in just over a couple of years. That points toward 85% gains from current levels.

A closer look at the market Supermicro serves will show you just why it could indeed deliver such outstanding growth, and why investors would do well to buy this AI stock while it is still trading at attractive levels.

AI is going to be a long-term growth driver

Supermicro's server solutions have been in terrific demand thanks to the growing adoption of AI. That's not surprising as the company claims that its server solutions "maximize [the] parallel computing power of GPUs to handle billions if not trillions of AI model parameters to be trained with massive datasets that are exponentially growing."

Supermicro offers server solutions that can be used to deploy multiple types of AI accelerators, ranging from Nvidia's popular H100 chip to Intel and Advanced Micro Devices' offerings as well. As a result, data center operators have been lining up to buy its server solutions, which can reportedly help them reduce cooling and electricity costs.

The demand for Supermicro's server racks is so strong that the company recently upgraded its manufacturing capacity to 5,000 racks a month from the earlier capacity of 4,000. So, the company's updated guidance doesn't seem surprising considering the 25% jump in its manufacturing capacity, which will help it serve a "strong market and end customer demand for our rack-scale, AI and Total IT Solutions."

With the AI server market expected to grow fivefold between 2023 and 2027, generating an annual revenue of $150 billion at the end of the forecast period, Supermicro is at the beginning of a lucrative growth opportunity. The good part is that Supermicro is setting itself up to capitalize on this massive market by investing in more capacity. According to George Wang of Barclays, the company's new facility in Malaysia, which is expected to go online in the second half of fiscal 2024, could help it generate $30 billion in revenue.

Given the solid demand for AI servers, Supermicro should ideally be able to sell almost all the capacity that it brings online. That could lead to a massive jump in the company's revenue considering that it reported a top line of $7.1 billion in fiscal 2023. As a result, investors would do well to buy this growth stock hand over fist since it could sustain its red-hot rally and soar impressively in the long run.

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>>> Synopsys, Inc. (SNPS) provides electronic design automation software products used to design and test integrated circuits. It operates in three segments: Design Automation, Design IP, and Software Integrity. The company offers Digital and Custom IC Design solution that provides digital design implementation solutions; Verification solution that offers virtual prototyping, static and formal verification, simulation, emulation, field programmable gate array (FPGA)-based prototyping, and debug solutions; and FPGA design products that are programmed to perform specific functions. It also provides intellectual property (IP) solutions for USB, PCI Express, DDR, Ethernet, MIPI, HDMI, and Bluetooth low energy applications; logic libraries and embedded memories; processor cores, software, and application-specific instruction-set processor tools for embedded applications; security IP solutions; IP solutions for automotive market; and system-on-chip (SoC) infrastructure IP, datapath and building block IP, and verification IP products, as well as mathematical and floating-point components, and Arm AMBA interconnect fabric and peripherals. In addition, the company offers HAPS FPGA-based prototyping systems; virtual prototyping solutions; and Platform Architect solutions for SoC architecture analysis and optimization, as well as optical products, and mechatronic simulations. Further, it provides security and quality testing products, managed services, programs and professional services, and training that enable its customers to detect and remediate security vulnerabilities, and defects in the software development lifecycle, as well as manufacturing solutions. Additionally, the company provides intelligent orchestration solution, software risk manager, and black duck software composition analysis tools. It serves electronics, financial services, automotive, medicine, energy, and industrial areas. The company was incorporated in 1986 and is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California.

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https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/SNPS/profile?p=SNPS



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>>> CGI Inc. (GIB), together with its subsidiaries, provides information technology (IT) and business process services. Its services include the business and strategic IT consulting, systems integration, and software solutions. The company also provides application development, modernization and maintenance, holistic enterprise digitization, automation, hybrid and cloud management, and business process services; intellectual property-based solutions; business consulting; managed IT services; and IT infrastructure services. It serves clients operating in government, banking and capital market, health, utility, communication and media, oil and gas, space, manufacturing, insurance, life sciences, retail and consumer service, and transportation and logistics sectors. The company operates in Canada, France, Spain, Portugal, the United States, Germany, Sweden, Norway, the United Kingdom, Australia, Finland, Poland, Baltics, the Netherlands, Denmark, Czech Republic, India, the Philippines, Asia Pacific, and internationally. Western and Southern Europe; Australia; Scandinavia; Finland, Poland, and Baltics; the United States; the United Kingdom; and the Asia Pacific. The company was formerly known as CGI Group Inc. and changed its name to CGI Inc. in January 2019. CGI Inc. was founded in 1976 and is headquartered in Montreal, Canada.

<<<


https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/GIB/profile?p=GIB




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Apple - >>> Why Wall Street is cooling on Apple stock


Yahoo Finance

by Hamza Shaban

January 4, 2024


https://finance.yahoo.com/news/why-wall-street-is-cooling-on-apple-stock-194143216.html


The brightest light on Wall Street is dimmer at the start of 2024.

Apple (AAPL), the most valuable company on the market, has endured a bruising run in the first days of the new year. The iPhone maker, which commands about 7% of the weight of the S&P 500 (^GSPC) index, steering the fate of investor portfolios, drew two stock downgrades this week, pulling shares down more than 5% and raising concerns about weakening iPhone demand.

Barclays struck the first blow. Analysts there cut Apple's rating to Underweight and dropped their price target to $160, representing what was a roughly 17% stock price drop for the tech giant from last year.

"We rate Apple Under Weight as questions persist about the deterioration of iPhone upgrade demand with rising competition in the premium smartphone segment," the analysts wrote.

The follow-up punch landed Thursday, when analysts at Piper Sandler downgraded their rating on Apple's stock to Neutral from Overweight and sliced their price target by $15 to $205. Apple shares were trading hands at around $182 as of Thursday afternoon.

"We are concerned about handset inventories entering into 1H24 and also feel that growth rates have peaked for unit sales," said lead analyst Harsh Kumar in a note to clients. "Deteriorating macro environment in China could also weigh on handset business."

The percentage of analysts with a bullish rating on the stock is at a three-year low, according to Bloomberg data.

Apple's iPhone revenue sank about $5 billion in 2023 from the year prior. The flagship iPhone accounts for roughly half the company’s total revenue. Sales of Macs, iPads, and wearables also declined, as rising inflation and interest rates pressured consumers.

But bullish analysts focus on Apple's growing services businesses, which swelled from $78 billion in 2022 to $85 billion in 2023. In the most recent quarter revenue from services ballooned by almost 20% compared to the same period the year before. Apple's enormous user base and the strength of its services are a crucial component of more optimistic readings on the company's future. Wedbush analysts led by Dan Ives pin the value of Apple's services business as high as $1.6 trillion and predict that Cupertino will become the first $4 trillion company by the end of 2024.

Skeptical observers, however, see heightened risks even in Apple's most promising segment. Barclays noted that services might attract more regulatory scrutiny. Investigations into the app store could intensify, especially as other tech giants brace for a wave of significant antitrust rulings this year. How Big Tech figures into the US presidential election and how aggressively the next administration will pursue competition enforcement is another major factor for tech stocks.

Apple's lucrative agreement to use Google as the default search engine in its Safari browser, which is estimated to bring in billions of dollars to its services business, could also be under threat. Closing arguments for the Department of Justice's antitrust case against the search giant are scheduled for the spring.

Apple's dimming prospects among some analysts coincide with a stock performance that lags behind other members of the Magnificent Seven.

All the names in the elite, tech-centric group handily beat out the benchmark S&P 500 index. But Apple claimed the lowest position, rising roughly 50% in 2023. That’s nothing to sneeze at, but is notable compared to the staggering gains of Nvidia (NVDA) and Meta (META), up 239% and 194%, respectively, or even Microsoft's (MSFT) more modest 57% rise. The Nasdaq 100's (^NDX) increase of 54% managed to edge out Apple too.

Where much of the tech world and even players outside it have scrambled to get in on the AI hype — releasing products, announcing new ventures or simply reciting the words "AI" — Apple CEO Tim Cook has taken a more subtle approach. That too may have played a factor in the market's cooling reception.

In recent earnings calls, Cook has explained that AI is already integrated into the Apple consumer experience. It's just that the company doesn't call out the technologies explicitly, as if it were a marketing gimmick, but relies instead on weaving AI into its products and focusing on the customer benefit. In another rhetorical move that appeared to be gently critical of other tech leaders, Cook said the company tends to unveil new technologies when they are ready for users. And not before.

If there is a consumer tech company defined by how its products make users feel — for the vibes rather than the intricacies of its software, it's Apple. So not showboating about what's coming in the AI development cycle has its benefits.

But a more pessimistic interpretation is that as rivals like Microsoft and Meta lean into their large language models, framing generative AI as tech's next great frontier, Apple is getting left behind. And most of us already have phones.

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>>> Insight Enterprises, Inc. (NSIT), together with its subsidiaries, provides information technology (IT) hardware, software services and solutions in the United States and internationally. The company's solution portfolio includes cloud enablement, data and AI, digital strategy, intelligent applications and edge, and IoT solutions, as well as digital transformation services. It also offers cloud and data center platforms; modern workplace; and supply chain optimization solutions. In addition, the company provides software maintenance solutions that offers clients to obtain software upgrades, bug fixes, help desk, and other support services; vendor direct support services; and offers Software-as-a-Service subscription products. Further, it designs, procures, deploys, implements, and manages solutions that combine hardware, software, and services to help businesses. Additionally, the company sources, procures, stages, configures, integrates, tests, refurbishes, and redeploys IT products spanning endpoints to infrastructure; and offers software life cycle and hardware warranty services. It serves construction technology, enterprise business, financial services, health care and life sciences, manufacturing technology, retail, restaurant, service providers, small to medium business, and travel and tourism industries. Insight Enterprises, Inc., was founded in 1988 and is headquartered in Chandler, Arizona.

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UiPath - >>> This Artificial Intelligence Stock Is Now Cathie Wood's Second-Largest Position -- and It's Not Palantir or Nvidia


Motley Fool

By Adam Spatacco

Oct 10, 2023


https://www.fool.com/investing/2023/10/10/this-artificial-intelligence-ai-stock-is-now-cathi/?source=eptyholnk0000202&utm_source=yahoo-host&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=article


KEY POINTS

UiPath has nearly 11,000 customers, and its offerings integrate with applications such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and OpenAI.

Given its broad reach, UiPath has access to tons of data which make it an interesting player when it comes to artificial intelligence.


Ark Invest has quietly been building a position in UiPath, a leader in workforce automation software. Technology investor Cathie Wood is back in the headlines. But for once, she isn't talking about her bullish stance on Tesla. Wood is known for setting lofty price targets as well as for acquiring large positions in high-flying growth stocks.

Given the increasing interest in and use of artificial intelligence (AI) technology by businesses of all sizes, it should not surprise investors to learn that Wood is pouncing on an array of stocks in that niche. What may come as a surprise, however, is that she is not scooping up shares of well-known AI names such as Nvidia or Palantir at the frequency you might expect. Rather, she appears to be looking for less obvious AI opportunities.

One such company in particular has really started to stick out: UiPath (PATH). Why? Well, because Wood has bought so much of its stock that it now represents her second-largest position across all of her exchange-traded funds (ETFs).

The company develops robotic process automation (RPA) software that helps its clients streamline tedious and time-consuming tasks.

While it may seem like UiPath merely makes software widgets designed to save workers a little time at the office, its capabilities are much more robust, and Wood, for her part, is pounding the table.

Why might Wood love the stock?

On UiPath's most recent earnings call, management noted that the company has roughly 10,890 customers. Moreover, IT research firm Gartner estimates that UiPath has a 36% share of the robotic process automation market -- a larger slice than behemoths such as Microsoft, SAP, Salesforce, and IBM.

Some of Wood's most noteworthy activity in the market has included taking large positions in Tesla, Palantir, and Twilio. While these companies operate in different industries, there is one obvious common denominator among them. Each of these technology enterprises collects a ton of data. Wood has made it clear on several occasions that she prefers to take positions in companies that have more data than the competition.

Given the stats above about UiPath, I think it's safe to say that the business is processing a large, and growing, volume of data. So even though the RPA market is dense with competitors, UiPath has set itself apart and become the de facto leader. Despite not having nearly as robust a balance sheet as its big tech counterparts, my hunch is that UiPath has been able to move past the competition because it is focusing solely on dominating one market. Said differently, Microsoft, IBM, SAP, and Salesforce have all sorts of solutions geared toward small and medium-sized businesses, as well as large enterprises. But UiPath primarily operates within one core market.

Another reason UiPath is likely seeing so much success is its ability to support various integrations. For example, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Amazon are all investing aggressively in generative AI. Microsoft is integrating OpenAI into various parts of its business, while Alphabet and Amazon are developing competing large language models. UiPath has the luxury of being able to work with all of these solutions. The company's RPA software can integrate with OpenAI, but also support critical applications in the cloud for Amazon or Alphabet.

The combination of the company's leading market share and its ability to work across the various ecosystems in Big Tech make UiPath's data-aggregation story pretty compelling.

Although UiPath's prospects may look attractive, investors should consider a few things when valuing the stock. UiPath is not yet profitable on a generally accepted account principles (GAAP) basis. However, the company is generating positive free cash flow.

The chart above illustrates UiPath's price-to-free-cash-flow ratio over the last year. Over the last few months in particular, the stock's valuation by that metric was well below its prior highs, which could make this an interesting opportunity to buy the dip. I would encourage investors to consider the long-term picture here. An investment in UiPath should be predicated on your view of the outlook for AI and its various applications.

Given the progress the company has already made, UiPath looks like a compelling stock to own for the long haul. But remember, big tech companies have deep pockets, and they have shown an ability to make headline-grabbing investments. For UiPath to evolve into a bigger force, it will need to reach consistent profitability and continue to innovate.

For now, though, the company's impressive growth and technological capabilities should not be discounted. As data becomes increasingly more important for companies' digital transformations and AI becomes more prevalent in IT budgets, UiPath appears to be sitting in an enviable position.

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>>> Palantir scores an AI contract -- Shares of Palantir Technologies, however, got a slightly bigger pop early Tuesday, rising about 3%. The data integration and management platform specialist said that it had expanded a key partnership that should provide more momentum in Palantir's efforts to build out its artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities.


https://www.fool.com/investing/2023/10/10/pepsicos-popping-a-bit-but-ai-investors-might-pref/?source=eptyholnk0000202&utm_source=yahoo-host&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=article


Palantir announced that the U.S. Army has awarded it a new contract for up to three years. The contract supports the Army's armed services, special forces, combatant commands, and intelligence community in their joint efforts to test, utilize, and scale up their use of AI and machine learning capabilities. Payments under the contract could amount to up to $250 million.

The Army has a long-standing relationship with Palantir. With the need to coordinate information in order to work together effectively, the various armed services members, special operations forces, and command personnel have sought the data integration, management, and AI model training that Palantir has brought to the table.

Palantir has dramatically expanded its AI efforts recently, but it also faces heavy competition. Winning contracts like these is instrumental in demonstrating the effectiveness of its research and development work. Shareholders recognize that success and how important it is for Palantir's long-term prospects.

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>>> Warren Buffett Just Sold $619 Million of This Stock in 3 Weeks. Here's Why.


Motley Fool

By Adam Levy

Oct 10, 2023


https://www.fool.com/investing/2023/10/10/warren-buffett-just-sold-619-million-of-this-stock/?source=eptyholnk0000202&utm_source=yahoo-host&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=article


KEY POINTS

Buffett bought a 12.5% stake in a major computing company in early 2022.

He's sold at least 20% of his position in three weeks.

He could sell more without reporting it until next February.


The Oracle of Omaha doesn't like what he sees less than two years after buying shares of this company.

Warren Buffett might be one of the greatest stock investors of all time, but not everything he buys turns out to be a winner.

Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A) (BRK.B) bought a major stake in a leading computing brand at the start of last year. Less than two years later, the Oracle of Omaha is selling a good portion of that investment, seemingly taking a loss.

And more share sales may be yet to come.

The Buffett stock getting cut from Berkshire's portfolio

Over a three-week period from Sept. 11 through Oct. 3, Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway sold more than 23 million shares of Hewlett Packard (HPQ) valued at over $619 million.

The sales reduce Berkshire's stake in the PC and printer maker by roughly 20%.

It's worth pointing out that this information comes from disclosures required by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Shareholders with a stake larger than 10% in any company must disclose any trades in that stock within three business days. That's why we didn't have to wait around for Berkshire's quarterly 13F filing.

But with its last reported HP sale on Oct. 3, Berkshire's stake in the company fell below that 10% threshold. So, it's possible Buffett could continue to sell the shares without having to report those sales. And since we're already in the fourth quarter, we may have to wait until February before we find out if Buffett sold more of Berkshire's position.

So, why did Buffett change his tune on HP?

While HP benefited from a surge in demand for its PCs and printers at the start of the pandemic, sales have dropped off a cliff over the past year. Sales over the trailing 12 months have fallen below pre-pandemic levels after HP pulled forward a lot of sales into 2021.

More importantly, the outlook doesn't look that bright.

Chief Executive Officer Enrique Lores warned investors in HP's Q3 earnings release, "the external environment has not improved as quickly as anticipated and we are moderating our expectations as a result."

Indeed, the International Data Corporation (IDC) forecasts an decline of almost 14% in PC sales this year. What's more, it only sees the market rising by 3.7% in 2024. Longer term, it sees a 3.1% growth rate in shipments between 2023 and 2027, but it sees Apple taking market share in that time, especially as Microsoft's support for Windows 10 expires in 2025.

The outlook for printing isn't much better. As more and more businesses push toward a paperless future, and the ability to e-sign documents becomes more common, demand for printers and printer supplies is declining. Still, the global market could grow, led by Asia, with Mordor Intelligence expecting a 4.55% annual growth rate through 2028.

On top of that, macroeconomic factors have been weighing on demand and pushing down prices. As a result, HP has seen its operating margin contract over the past year, falling from 8.6% in Q3 2022 to just 7.2% last quarter. Again, that number is below pre-pandemic levels, and there's no clear sign of a turnaround.

When Buffett bought HP, it was coming off booming, pandemic-driven sales. There was no doubt that it would see a return to normal over the coming years. But sales and profits are falling rather than stabilizing, which makes it a much less appealing investment.

Even with shares trading at a valuation of just 7.4 times next year's consensus-earnings estimate and yielding over 4% with its dividend, it's not the most attractive stock in the market. It's cheap for a reason. There are better investment opportunities, and Buffett is selling his stake to go out and buy those instead.

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>>> Palantir secures contract with UK's National Health Service


Yahoo Finance

by Angel Smith and Seana Smith

October 4, 2023


https://finance.yahoo.com/video/palantir-secures-contract-uks-national-144918392.html


Palantir (PLTR) Co-Founder Peter Thiel has negotiated a service contract with the United Kingdom's National Health Service. The 5-year contract aims to strengthen the NHS's data analysis capabilities with Palantir providing access to its artificial intelligence tools. Yahoo Finance's Brad Smith and Seana Smith break down the details of this contract and the analysts chatter around it.

SEANA SMITH: The Palantir's co-founder Peter Thiel is set to secure a contract with the UK's National Health Service. Now, the controversial five-year contract is valued at more than 480 million, and it's meant to enhance the NHS's data analysis capabilities. Many, though, criticized the NHS's association with the analytics company, citing patient data privacy concerns, something that we know has been top of mind and an issue now for some time.

But when it comes to Palantir, whether or not that's going to materially move the business, we're seeing some excitement around this with shares up just about 2%. But, Brad, Palantir is a company and is a stock that initially at the start of the year was riding a lot of that enthusiasm for AI.

Palantir really saying that they are one of the critical players within AI. Over the last month or two, we've seen some on the street come out question just that and how quickly their business could potentially benefit from AI. Morgan Stanley was one of those on the sell side.

Analyst Keith Weiss coming out saying that stock's valuation fully reflects the AI euphoria, and any tailwind from this trend is going to take some time to materialize. So a deal like this may be offsetting some of those concerns. Year-to-date, we're still up nearly 140%, but we'll see what this deal does to its business.

BRAD SMITH: Yeah. Summer sputtered did not diminish some of those major returns that investors had seen. As you were mentioning, 140% roughly year to date returns for Palantir. And a company that hinges a lot on some of those major government contracts.

Of course, governments trying to figure out where they can deploy some of their own AI research and then additionally, kind of making sure that goes into their own defense mechanisms, so many different instances where Palantir already plays as well. So we'll see how they continue to be a near-term beneficiary, perhaps even further, long term as well.

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>>> Palantir Closes In on Controversial UK Health Data Contract


Bloomberg

by Thomas Seal, Olivia Solon, Alex Wickham and Kitty Donaldson

October 4, 2023


(Bloomberg) -- Palantir Technologies Inc., the data analysis firm co-founded by tech billionaire Peter Thiel and contracted by government intelligence agencies and military forces around the world, has emerged as the top pick for a contract to overhaul the UK’s National Health Service.

The five-year contract, which may be extended by as long as two years and is worth much as £480 million ($579 million), is designed to help the agency analyze medical data, detect patterns and ultimately overhaul its entire system. The deal is subject to final approvals and legal arrangements, but the government was on track to announce Palantir as the winning bidder as soon as this month, people familiar with the discussions said, asking not to be identified because the information isn’t public.

Palantir shares rose about 1.4% in premarket trading on Wednesday following the news.

Read More: Palantir Had Plan to Crack UK Health System: ‘Buying Our Way In’

The arrangement is both somewhat predictable and extremely controversial. Palantir has been working with the UK government since the Covid-19 pandemic, helping manage the country’s vaccine rollout for a £1 fee that positioned it well for more lucrative deals. Its relationship with the NHS has drawn fire from civil rights and patient advocacy groups that are concerned about the privacy of patient data.

Palantir and the National Health Service didn’t respond to requests for comment. In an Aug. 25 blog post, NHS’s chief data officer said a software vendor would “never hold or have access to NHS data for any purpose other than as directed by” the agency and indicated that patients would have a say in how their information is used.

Named after the all-seeing stones in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, Palantir got its start working for the US Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon, helping analysts interpret intelligence from the battlefield in Afghanistan and Iraq for signs of suspicious behavior or impending terrorist attacks. The FBI and police have used the software in criminal probes and it’s been deployed by banks, helping managers watch for suspicious behavior from employees.

Controversies around Palantir’s work with the NHS have mainly concerned transparency about what data the NHS is handing over, how it’s being used and whether patients can opt out.

In 2020, a leaked copy of a contract showed that the Denver-based tech company had been allowed access to sensitive data about patients, employees and members of the public in an attempt to help the health service cope with the coronavirus outbreak. Those details included political and religious affiliation and past criminal offenses, according to a copy of the documents published by politics website OpenDemocracy and the group Foxglove at the time.

Read More: Palantir Given Access to UK Health Data on NHS Patients

Two years later, the Doctors’ Association UK, National Pensioners’ Convention and Just Treatment sent a letter to NHS England demanding information about a pilot project that would use Palantir’s Foundry software platform and how client data would be safeguarded.

Thiel, who is still Palantir’s chairman, has described the UK’s affection for the NHS as “Stockholm syndrome,” and recommended that the country could “rip the whole thing from the ground and start over,” in a speech at the Oxford Union in January. Palantir said at the time that Thiel was speaking in a private capacity and that his views didn’t reflect the views of the company.

The NHS is the UK’s national health service, the publicly funded operation providing medical care that’s free at the point of access for the 67 million people living in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Still, it’s been beset by staff shortages and backlogs after the pandemic delayed less-urgent procedures.

The impact on England’s public healthcare system may be larger than the impact on Palantir’s bottom line. The firm generated more than $1.07 billion in government revenue in 2022 and is on track for $1.26 billion this year. The UK contract, while lucrative, is spread over the course of several years. So while it may not have a major effect on Palantir’s immediate results, it could serve as beachhead for future sales.

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