The inside story on the Asia tech trends that matter, from Nikkei Asia and the Financial Times
Hello from the suddenly-very-hot-again San Francisco Bay Area. This is Yifan, your #techAsia host this week.
Covering technology in Silicon Valley has always been busy, but this week is next level.
I started the week with Google I/O developer conference, where CEO Sundar Pichai spoke to a packed, sweat-drenched audience about the U.S. tech giant's latest efforts in artificial intelligence, including new models and revamping its search business.
Pichai started his meeting with reporters on Wednesday afternoon by apologizing for the hot weather in California -- not that it will stop Google from building more data centers, including the ones it is putting together with Blackstone to provide cloud services powered by the search giant's in-house TPU AI chips.
Its Blackstone joint venture will put Google in direct competition with Nvidia, which dominates the market for AI data center chips. That is probably why, on the same Wednesday afternoon, Jensen Huang spent a good part of the company's earnings call telling analysts why his company is uniquely positioned to gain from the AI demand momentum due to the moat it has built on comprehensive hardware and software offerings.
But don't worry, Nvidia is doing just fine, for now at least. It reported a record $81.6 billion in revenue for the February-April quarter, up 85% on the year, despite not shipping any data center chips to China.
It turned out to be a day of eye-popping figures, as SpaceX filed a more than 300-page prospectus to the Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday afternoon. The Elon Musk-owned company is aiming for the biggest initial public offering in history at a $2 trillion valuation, but it is not without competition.
OpenAI, the company that kicked off the generative AI boom, is also reportedly planning to file for an IPO as soon as this week, seeking a more than $1 trillion valuation.
This week will have a far-reaching and long-lasting impact, and not just in Silicon Valley. Case in point, both the Japanese and South Korean stock markets jumped on Thursday morning. Perhaps we will see more trillion-dollar companies coming out of Asia as well.
Elon Musk's SpaceX filed for what could be the largest initial public offering in history on Wednesday, seeking to raise up to $80 billion at a $2 trillion valuation. But unlike Tesla -- a Musk-owned company that built its success on China -- SpaceX says it is excluding the world's second-largest economy as a market, now and in the future.
In the prospectus the company filed to the Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday, SpaceX said it has "identified the largest TAM [total addressable market] in human history," but did not include China and Russia in the estimation, Nikkei Asia's Yifan Yu reports.
The filing also warned investors that China could be one of the company's biggest threats, as Beijing poured both money and policy support into its domestic space industry.
Chinese AI groups have raced ahead of U.S. rivals in video generation, gaining an edge in a technology with growing uses in advertising, ecommerce and entertainment, writes the Financial Times's Eleanor Olcott.
Companies such as Beijing-based ByteDance and Kuaishou are training systems on vast libraries of short-form video, pushing them ahead of American rivals such as OpenAI, Google and Anthropic.
Chinese-made services such as Kling, Seedance 2.0 and HappyHorse 1.0 all scored highly in Arena's ranking of the best video models, compiled from votes by users on the independent platform.
Training video models requires vast amounts of high-quality footage, an area where Chinese platforms have an edge through their ownership of short-video apps, such as TikTok, and the data they generate. However, some experts argued Chinese groups have also been more aggressive on accessing copyrighted material.
"Most of the American models that we've tried are not very good at video generation," said Ben Chiang, founder of Director AI, a startup that produces AI-generated content such as cartoons and short dramas. "It comes down to quality and how well the model follows the prompt."
If you thought the numbers Nvidia posted on in its Wednesday earnings release were crazy, think again. China's top memory chipmaker ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) said net profit skyrocketed over 1,688% on the year in the January-March period, while revenue surged more than 719%, Nikkei Asia's Cheng Ting-Fang reports.
The results, shared in an IPO prospectus submitted to the Shanghai Stock Exchange on Sunday, underscore the significant progress Beijing has made in its push to localize critical chip production.
