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Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts.
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Speaker 2: Radio. News.
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Speaker 3: This is the Bloomberg DVQ podcast. Good morning from London. It's Thursday, the 12th of November. I'm Caroline Hepker.
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Speaker 4: And I'm Ben Boulos. Coming up today, NVIDIA's board meets to discuss removing Jensen Huang as CEO amid a growing storm.
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Speaker 3: The NVIDIA scandal fuels calls for tighter China controls as Trump and Xi prepare to meet.
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Speaker 4: Plus, don't buy a return ticket. David Cameron tells Andy Burnham to drop talk of rejoining the EU as the UK Prime Minister heads to talks with other European leaders.
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Speaker 3: Let's start with a roundup of our top stories.
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Speaker 4: As we speak, NVIDIA's board is meeting to discuss the future of CEO Jensen Huang. The company's stock dropped more than 8% in extended trading following the reports. A source tells Bloomberg the board is considering how to proceed after Huang admitted on Sunday to an affair with Alice Huang, an executive at one of NVIDIA's largest Southeast Asian customers. She's been identified in reports as a suspected Chinese spy recruited by Beijing to target NVIDIA's CEO. Tom Giles is Bloomberg's news executive editor for technology.
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Speaker 5: The implications of a changing of the guard at NVIDIA would be vast. You know, again, investors are going to want somebody to be brought in soon, somebody who's reliable, somebody who's got some engineering chops.
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Speaker 1: This is.
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Speaker 5: And Jensen Wong is the public face of NVIDIA and has been for its entirety. You know, bringing in an unknown quantity, bringing in someone who is not well regarded in the chip industry would be a big mistake.
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Speaker 1: Tom Giles there.
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Speaker 4: Bloomberg understands the board is considering naming a temporary CEO while it searches for a permanent replacement. Ousting Huang would mean removing NVIDIA's founder and only CEO. The board has yet to announce its decision, with NVIDIA facing scrutiny over whether the relationship put the company's trade secrets at risk.
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Speaker 3: Well, the board meeting comes hours after the New York Times reported that the NVIDIA CEO had a second extramarital affair. Five people at the company told the Times that Jensen Huang had a relationship with his vice president of health care, Kimberly Powell. The developments have also shone a light on NVIDIA's lack of succession plan and how the company's success is tied to the 63-year-old CEO. Speaking last month to Bloomberg's Emily Chang, Jensen Wong was asked about what leading a company is like.
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Speaker 6: You know, I think you have to hold yourself responsible. You have agency. You're the CEO of the company, for God's sakes. You have to have high standards and expectations. I'm responsible for an entire industry. And so I think the pressure... of being the CEO is high, and.
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Speaker 1: It's
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supposed to be high.
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Speaker 6: It should not be an easy job. It shouldn't be a job that you take for granted.
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Speaker 3: Jensen Wong speaking there to Bloomberg in October. His potential exit is reverberating far beyond the company's operations. Shares in Nvidia Partners, including TSMC and Hynix, are down this morning as well, as in Core, Weave and Arm falling after market.
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Speaker 4: The suspected Chinese spy Alice Huang is currently living in Beijing. Bloomberg understands the woman at the heart of the NVIDIA scandal has returned to her home country. Beijing has denied that she was a spy. Bloomberg's James Wolcock has more.
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Speaker 7: Alice Huang's whereabouts have been subject to intense speculation ever since the revelations about her affair with the NVIDIA CEO. Bloomberg can reveal the suspected spy is living in Beijing and is known to security officials there. The company she founded, Megaspeed, is being investigated by both America and Singapore. The firm is accused of potentially shipping billions of dollars worth of export-restricted NVIDIA AI chips to China. In London, James Woolcock, Bloomberg Radio.
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Speaker 3: The NVIDIA scandal is also threatening to complicate Donald Trump's upcoming summit with China's Xi Jinping. Jensen Huang has been one of the most prominent U.S. tech executives arguing for greater engagement with Beijing. The allegations are now fueling calls in Washington for tighter restrictions on semiconductor exports to China. Dan Ives says the U.S. is in a tricky position.
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Speaker 8: The big thing that keeps China from leapfrogging the U.S. is Janssen and Biddy relative to the AI revolution. That's why this is so sensitive in terms of these charges. And that's why the nervousness is not just on Wall Street, but it's what you see in D.C. with more and more regulatory scrutiny on the horizon.
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Speaker 3: Dan Ives there. As the US and China approach a January deadline to renew their year-long trade truce, Bloomberg Economics says that Wang's departure would weaken one of the industry's most influential opponents of tighter China controls.
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Speaker 4: That's bringing you some of the day's other main news now. And UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham is in Dublin today for a meeting of the European political community. The gathering comes ahead of a meeting between the Premier and the bloc's top two officials in Brussels later this month. Burnham has made clear that rejoining the EU's customs union, its single market or becoming a full member again are all options on the table. But former Prime Minister David Cameron has warned against seeking to rejoin.
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Speaker 9: Instead of launching an argument about rejoining, which I think would be a very long and painful argument, and who knows where it would end up, instead of that, focus on how do we be the best friend, best neighbour, best partner.
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Speaker 4: David Cameron, who led Britain's unsuccessful campaign to stay in the European Union, speaking there to Bloomberg's Michelle Hussain. And the meeting in Dublin will focus on the war in Ukraine. President Volodymyr Zelensky arrived late on Wednesday to meet European leaders, as well as US envoys Steve Wyckoff and Jared Kushner.
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Speaker 3: 6,000 schools in Italy have received bomb threats, with some sending students home, according to the education ministry. Officials say that Prime Minister Giorgia Maloney chaired an emergency government meeting. Her government has previously blamed pro-Russian hackers for cyber attacks. Here is Italy's defence minister, Guido Corsetto, telling reporters that not all the threats are as serious as they appear.
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Speaker 10: It is part of a strategy that is now clear, that of sowing terror or creating concern. It is too easy for any of us with the tools that we have to send an email to a school, a kindergarten or an airline saying there is a bomb.
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Speaker 3: That was Italy's defence minister speaking there via a translator. Schools elsewhere in Europe have also received similar threats. The latest incidents followed disruption to airlines as a result of bomb threats which led to flight diversions and fighter plane escorts.
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Speaker 4: Germany's ruling coalition has cleared the way for a deal on the country's 2027 budget. A person familiar with the talk says planned taxes on sugary drinks and plastic packaging will be delayed until 2028. The parties also agreed to retain a benefit for children in low-income families that had been due to be scrapped. The concessions leave less room in an already tight budget, with about € 4 billion in reserves remaining.
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Speaker 3: In the US, Democrats have pulled off another Senate upset, this time in the Republican heartland of Mississippi. Scott Collum defeated incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith by about half a percentage point. He becomes Mississippi's first black US Senate representative, senator rather, since the post-US Civil War reconstruction. Speaking to supporters, he said his campaign is a testament to faith.
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Speaker 1: For months and months, I've been telling everybody everywhere I go that we're going to win this election.
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Speaker 3: So that was Scott Collum there. His victory gives Democrats their eighth Senate pickup and now a majority of five, with Alaska the only race left to call after the midterm elections. So those are our top stories today. Let's get to the markets. Global stocks are retreating as investors are weighing the impact of this leadership crisis at Nvidia. Nvidia shares dropped as much as 10% yesterday. In terms of what happened on the broader Nasdaq, we saw a slide of nine-tenths yesterday. The S & P 500 lost four-tenths. of 1% yesterday. And stock futures this morning are also deeply in the red. NASDAQ, E-mini futures down by 1%. US Stocks 50 futures, though, are in the green, up about three-tenths of 1%. But you also have
ramifications for the partner businesses, for the suppliers, for the rivals to NVIDIA. If you look at the Thai X, Taiwan, which is home to five of the top suppliers to NVIDIA, five out of the top 10. The TAIX is down 2.6%. The COSP is also lower, seven-tenths of 1%. MSCI Asia-Pacific Index also down seven-tenths of 1%. In other markets, the dollar is a little bit firmer and oil prices break crude flat at $ 92. 69. But that is a look at where we are in markets but first in terms of what we've been thinking about this breaking story jensen rung the subject of a board meeting in which he may be ousted how are we here this is the surprise It.
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Speaker 4: Is, but I suppose some would argue that it's the very job of a board to imagine the unthinkable and have contingencies and prepare for such a thing, especially where a company that is so valuable, that is so big, has one person at the centre of it, a single potential point of failure, especially the way it's run. There's detail on the Bloomberg Terminal in articles about how centrally Jensen Huang operated his company, this stadium-style seating around his desk, the fact he had 60 people reporting directly to him. He'd get emails every day from each of them. That's the sort of situation where the board needs to think hang on, if for any reason this person wasn't there, how does the company continue its success?
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Speaker 3: Yeah, well, this is why we've got this succession crisis because it seems the revelations of a second affair have now precipitated this meeting that is ongoing now. Look, on LinkedIn, Jensen Wang lists only two jobs, dishwasher and busboy at Denny's. Their tagline, remember, we're America's diner. and CEO and founder of NVIDIA. Look, I think this revelation of a second affair is hugely important. One analyst calling it a Twilight Zone episode that now seems to sort of be unfolding. NVIDIA contemplating a future without their visionary creator. To which, let's bring in Bloomberg's Tech Europe anchor, Tom McKenzie, and get more on this. Tell us about this board meeting, what the potential outcomes might be, Tom.
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Speaker 11: Well, the reporting from the Wall Street Journal suggests that the outcome will be that Jensen Huang will be fired, will be pushed out as the CEO. Now, there are other potential outcomes. He could be put onto the board as a chair role to oversee the new leadership. That seems unlikely to some of the analysts that we've been speaking to. The bottom line is that increasingly, Jensen Huang's tenure now has become untenable given the revelations of this second affair, one with, of course, the alleged spy and now with the vice president of the healthcare division, according to reporting from the New York Times, Kimberly Powell. So, it's hard to overstate how damaging this is, of course, for Jensen's reputation, not just within the company itself, but more widely within the global AI ecosystem. So, this is what we are waiting for, is the decision from the board. And again, the Wall Street Journal reporting suggesting that he ultimately will be pushed out of the CEO role.
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Speaker 1: All sorts of questions for investors then. Who takes over? For how long?
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Speaker 11: There's a very small pool of talent that has the kind of experience required the background and the vision and the communication skills and the operational skills to be able to take over from Jensen Huang. And to your point, arguably, he is largely irreplaceable because of the way that he's built the company around him.
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Speaker 1: This is a company he co-founded.
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Speaker 11: Look, he owns 3.6% of the stock and the board has the power to oust him. But this is a company very much molded around one man's vision. So, this is going to take months, possibly multiple quarters to resolve itself. And of course, the company, despite who's going to be in the seat of CEO, is going to face multiple points of scrutiny, particularly from lawmakers on Capitol Hill.
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Speaker 4: And Tom, there are two names that seem to be emerging as potential interim CEOs. What do we know about them?
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Speaker 11: The CFO, Colette Cress, is probably the most visible executive after Jensen Huang. It's interesting when you go to events where Jensen is appearing, none of the executives will speak or do anything until Jensen's spoken, which kind of shows you how much kind of sway he had over who was put forward and who was in the spotlight. Colette Cresto has been in the spotlight because she is on the earnings calls every quarter. So, she is by all accounts a very adept CFO and has done a very good job in that role. What she doesn't have is the operational experience. She also doesn't have the engineering experience. And she's not someone who's demonstrated that she's able to be a visionary in terms of how this technology evolves.
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Speaker 1: So, that will.
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Speaker 11: If anything, it's an interim role, is what people are expecting if Colette takes the role. Ian Buck is the other person. He really does have the energy and experience. He's one of the vice presidents who oversees the data center business and the chips themselves. And actually invented CUDA, which is this software that has made NVIDIA so successful at embedding itself across the AI ecosystem that developers are so reliant on. So, he has deep engineering expertise. But, again, he doesn't have the operational expertise.
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Speaker 1: Background.
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Speaker 11: So, there's no clear candidate, but those are two names that have risen to the top of the pile in recent days.
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Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely. In terms of, you mentioned the Washington investigations, Wong faces this threat of a subpoena to appear before US House Republicans to speak to them. They want a closed-door meeting with him. But then also, Senators Warren and Coons have asked the Trump administration to preserve all the records related to
NVIDIA. So, there are lots of questions now also about President Trump's ties to Jensen Wang.
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Speaker 11: Absolutely. President Trump, who, by the way, has been and has in the last 12 months bought NVIDIA stock to the tune of millions. of millions of dollars. This is a president who was informed by his national security team that there was a potential spy trying to infiltrate NVIDIA and having this affair with Jensen Huang. And nonetheless, he appears, according to the reporting, the president to have looked through that to a large extent. The Commerce Department is definitely under scrutiny. The Treasury and the Pentagon, according to reporting, have been warning the Commerce Department, have been warned for a about the potential espionage case. And yet, the Commerce Department, according to reporting, kind of slow walked their efforts to restrict chip smuggling. They have not been very successful in restricting that. And we know that NVIDIA's general counsel actually phoned the Commerce Department and tried to apparently put pressure on them around their investigation, their probe of Megaspeed. the company that is linked to Alice Huang, who, of course, was the and is the alleged spy with who Jensen apparently had this affair. So, there are increased questions and there will be increased scrutiny on the Commerce Department's role and on President Trump's role himself. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, by the way, his... Sons run Cantor Fitzgerald, which has a big stake in Nvidia. Just worth noting that that is the case. So, the Commerce Department will come under scrutiny, as will the President himself. This has a long way to go. There are going to be many twists and turns. And there's going to be a lot more that comes out of this.
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Speaker 1: Okay.
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Speaker 4: And I hope you'll be able to talk us through them as and when we get them. Tom, thank you very much. Tom McKenzie there.
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Speaker 3: Now, the turmoil at NVIDIA is unsettling investors and affecting rivals and suppliers across the global AI industry. Joining us now is Bloomberg's markets reporter, Anthony Stevens. Anthony, NVIDIA's shares are dropping. Analysts are weighing in left and right. What are the risks that they are flagging?
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Speaker 1: They're flagging his centrality to the build-out.
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Speaker 2: This AI boom was part of NVIDIA's journey, and a lot of that journey involves seeing behind market trends years into the future, seeing around corners, around technology development. staying high conviction in investment. These are things that have put NVIDIA ahead of the others, right? If you think about all the competition they have, all that competition can access TSMC just like anybody else, right? Locking that capacity down, building that network of suppliers across the world and executing these kind of servers to such a high level, to execute these designs to such a high level. And then the integration backwards and forwards with the LLM players and the semiconductor material players.
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Speaker 1: That sits in his head. That's the big worry here.
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Speaker 2: How much of Nvidia's secret sauce sits in Jensen Wang's head? And the market's voting that a lot of it is in his head, right? So now you see that reaction across not only the US stock for Nvidia, which is a fairly obvious reaction, you see it in the potential opportunity that it opens up with his competitors. So it was quite interesting for me, at least, to see the post-market performance being quite mixed on the competitors. Some of them were up, even though the Nasdaq futures did fall. With Asia, it's a bit of a much more nuanced story. Depending on where the money does end up going in the US ecosystem, that will be a very different kettle of fish.
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Speaker 1: Also, lastly, because this involves.
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Speaker 2: So much kind of noise around China, The pace of AI development in the US has to mathematically slow because everything becomes more reviewed. The investments that Nvidia made outside the US come into question. So as a result, more US sales become central. And it's those US sales that became a circumspect because of the Democrat victory in the midterm. So this is the market's nightmare scenario where they have to depend on American sales of AI to survive. in the AI trade, and those sales are now going to get constrained by all these hangups and distractions at Nvidia.
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Speaker 4: And, Antony, what does this mean for rivals like AMD and Broadcom? Do you think they sense potential opportunity?
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Speaker 2: They managed to not execute as well as Nvidia, right? So you Intel, you saw those results. You know, they do continue to struggle with the legacy PC business.
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Speaker 1: Broadcom is doing a much better job.
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Speaker 2: You also have a custom ASICs from the likes of Google and Amazon.
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Speaker 1: They will be lobbying for this.
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Speaker 2: And also, they will also have a very strong incentive to fill their own data centers with domestic.
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Speaker 1: Chips if this distraction drags on.
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Speaker 2: So custom chips definitely benefits from this noise. People will definitely see the benefit of diversifying your chip architecture, especially as the kind of compute crunch continues and perhaps gets worse after the US midterms. So people are diversifying their compute infrastructure for sure. That was happening anyway. because people just ran out of NVIDIA chips. Now that process is probably going to accelerate. It'll be interesting to see. We have Cerebras reporting soon whether that's the most kind of esoteric version of this trend, whether they're actually benefiting or what they see. And what's important to remember is we came into today expecting a tech bounce of quite a significant order given the huge bounce that we saw in Covive, right? So NVIDIA was a huge part of that Covive result. Obviously, they use NVIDIA chips.
So NVIDIA's results now that are next week have so much less to do with the fundamentals and a lot more to do with narrative.
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Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely. And you have to layer in there the downgrades that have come from a number of research houses, including Bernstein Research. Baird has downgraded the stock to neutral. Morgan Stanley also taking NVIDIA out of its top picks. What do you think it means for NVIDIA's biggest partners? Because they are largely where you are in Asia. I mentioned, you know, five out of the top 10 companies. partner suppliers being in Taiwan, but you can think of TSMC, Samsung, Hynix, lots of suppliers and related companies.
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Speaker 1: Absolutely, right.
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Speaker 2: You know, Jensen Huang is Taiwan's homegrown hero. And in the first time around, you know, Taiwan was up 4% on the back of NVIDIA, the first scandal. That's because NVIDIA gave out, you know, a plan to TSMC to expand into memory. They were handing out huge advanced packaging orders.
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Speaker 1: So that day the market was like, okay, whatever. And now this one.
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Speaker 2: Looks a lot more likely to, like as Tom was saying, a lot more likely to result in his departure. And you're seeing a markedly different reaction this time around. Taiwan's down around 3%. TSMC is down 2.3%. And there's plenty of damage of much bigger nature on less household names. because it was Nvidia that hands out these contracts for server racks or computers or cooling fans, all these minutiae that the integrated.
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Speaker 1: Ecosystem of Taiwan produces.
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Speaker 2: You also have a lot of weakness in Japan's semiconductor material names, right, because Nvidia had the clearest roadmap on using those materials. So it was a lot more kind of revenue visibility for these companies When Jensen was in charge, because he's, as you guys said, he's an operational and engineering mastermind. On the other side, that does open up an opportunity for Asia players. So for example, Samsung has its own foundry and they are likely to benefit from diversification. So Samsung's up 1.7%. The Chinese are much, much more likely to get cut out of American compute rigorously this time. So you see their domestic chip makers ramping here. You have Cambricon that was up almost 10%, and it's only recently that it's just come off a bit. It's only up around 7%. But the domestic Chinese ecosystem has really benefited today. Lastly, the big loser potentially is the Chinese hyperscalers. You know, they've been doing the best they can with any compute they can cobble together around the world. And now it looks like they're being chased out of all of that capacity. And you're seeing shares of the likes of Alibaba down 5%, Tencent's.
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Speaker 1: Down, Baidu's down.
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Speaker 2: These guys will have to go out and buy local compute, which is significantly of worse quality.
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Speaker 3: Yeah, okay. So, this is hugely important then to watch the
reaction around the world in stocks related to NVIDIA. Anthony, thank you so much for being with us. That is Bloomberg's markets reporter, Anthony Stevens. Really appreciate it. I'll mention a few other things. There is a live blog on the Bloomberg terminal that has been running for many hours already as this board meeting begins. takes place of Nvidia's board and the decision about Jensen Wang is being mulled. Elon Musk says that he would want to hire Nvidia's Jensen Wang. Is this in jest or not? We don't know. He would say that would be he replied to somebody saying that would be an honor to hire Jensen Wang. But look, there are different views on this. So, in terms of, you know, just looking at the investors and the analysts, Blue Bear Capital saying that they don't know if they've ever seen over history a key man holding so much of the industry up. But others say, actually, like Roman James, this doesn't change the fundamentals. You know, NVIDIA is more than its CEO. So, it really depends which side of that argument. Let's see what the board does. Stay with us. More from Bloomberg Daybreak Hub coming up after this.
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Speaker 4: And one of our other big stories today, we heard that warning from David Cameron against Britain trying to rejoin the EU. So, let's get straight over to our Dublin Bureau Chief, Jennifer Duggan, who's at the gathering of European leaders and others there today. Jennifer, how much weight will the former UK Prime Minister's warning carry, given that he was the very architect of the Brexit referendum?
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Speaker 12: I think here in Dublin, among EU leaders gathering here today, I think it will probably be seen as a domestic matter. I'm sure, you know, it could carry some weight within the party. But I guess here in Dublin and among the leaders who are gathered, I'm not sure how much it will kind of influence things today. You know, Burnham is obviously seen as the prime minister and that's who leaders in the EU are dealing with. And he will be meeting with those leaders here today.
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Speaker 3: Okay, Burnham has made it clear he wants closer ties with the bloc. How might that look? How receptive are those leaders then in Dublin to the idea?
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Speaker 12: I think they're probably quite open to it. I know in Dublin with Irish leaders, Ireland lost a big ally in the EU when the UK left. And certainly I think in Ireland, I think they would probably be quite keen for the UK to have deeper ties. And I think also, as we can see right now, the EU is keen to make allies other than the US. You know, they've been increasing their links with Canada, for example. So it certainly seems like a good time for the discussion and, you know, for him to be meeting with EU leaders. Prior to the meeting, we have seen the leaders of Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Denmark meeting. And called for deeper cooperation with the UK on the area of clean energy. So I think there's a number of areas where, you
know, EU leaders will be looking to kind of deepen ties with the UK. And certainly Britain's exit from the EU's internal electricity market, for example, has been seen as impacting Europe. the development of North Sea energy. So, yeah, I think there's a number of areas, energy, security. I mean, there's a lot of things that are top of mind that they will want to.
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Speaker 1: Discuss with the UK.
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Speaker 4: Of course, that's just one of many matters that will be on the agenda. We've got the US envoy, Steve Witkoff, and Jared Kushner also due to attend. How much do you think Ukraine is going to dominate the talks?
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Speaker 12: Yeah, I think Ukraine is definitely going to be the big agenda item here today. President Zelensky, if Ukraine is here, as.
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Speaker 1: You mentioned, he's due to meet with the U.S.
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Speaker 12: Envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner here in Dublin this evening. Zelensky this morning will update leaders here on the talks that have been taking place between Ukraine and Russian negotiators in Abu Dhabi. And Europe's involvement in future Ukraine talks will also.
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Speaker 4: Be a big issue.
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Speaker 12: And the Irish Prime Minister, Taoiseach Micheál Martin, met President Zelenskyy in government buildings here last night and at a press conference. And, you know, that was that was an issue that they both mentioned. Zelensky said that that will be on the cards today, as did Martin, who will represent Europe at those discussions. It seems like the Americans are warming to Europe being part of the talks. Zelensky said that at the press conference last night. You know, Russia obviously does not really want European countries who are concerned about Russia's conduct and their broader intentions in the continent involved in the direct negotiations. But it seems from comments by Zelensky last night that America certainly is warming to that discussion. Europe has struggled, though, to agree on who should speak.
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Speaker 1: For the entire continent in any peace talks.
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Speaker 12: Germany, France, the UK, big powers within the region have taken the lead. But other leaders of Norway and Finland have also created their own direct channel to Putin. So that will certainly be on the table for discussion this morning. There'll also be a meeting of a core group, Friends of Ukraine, that will be hosted by the UK and Ukraine on the margins of the meeting today. And they will talk about the negotiations that have been happening in Abu Dhabi.
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Speaker 3: Okay, Jennifer, thank you so much for being with us. We'll keep an eye then on what the leaders discuss in Dublin. Thank you so much to our Dublin Bureau Chief, Jennifer Duggan. So, it is 6.30am here in the City of London. Good morning. I'm Caroline Hepker.
00:28:42
Speaker 4: And I'm Ben Boulos.
00:28:43
Speaker 3: And Ben, we need to say hello to you. The first time that you've done the Bloomberg Daybreak Europe podcast. And what a day to be joining us when we have one of the most valuable companies in the world with not a very clear succession path in the past, but now a board meeting considering ousting Jensen Wong. I know.
00:29:02
Speaker 4: And I think this highlights why joining a team like this and joining a show like this, joining a podcast like this is so exciting. Because what am I in? A few days into my first week. And you just never know what's going to come up. You never know what big stories are around the corner. And it's really exciting to be part of this and covering it and helping explain it. for our listeners out there and make sense of it and to try and join the dots and give a sense of the bigger picture.
00:29:28
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think that's so exciting to have you with us, firstly. And also, yes, I think that's the point of having the podcast out early in the morning in European hours. It's that when you get the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg reporting all rushing to get this story out to audiences. Understand what is happening at NVIDIA in the heart of the AI ecosystem as they face what can only be described as a major crisis. You really want to know the absolute latest arriving in your inbox at 7 a.m. That's the little advert for the podcast. cast, okay? I'll leave it there. But I will also point out a few things around the NVIDIA story that I do just think are sort of important to understand. So, NVIDIA's board is working with an outside company basically now to identify potential replacements for the CEO, Jensen Wong. Why is that? It's not just because of this affair that her jensen wong admitted to with an alleged chinese spy it's also that there was the addition of another affair um that has been um discussed by a number of internal nvidia employees that he was that he also had a relationship with somebody internal to nvidia and that seems to have precipitated the board meeting that is ongoing now there is a t live blog on the what is happening around this board meeting as we wait we don't know how many hours it's going to take sometimes it can take you know quite a lot of hours to to think through all the ramifications by the.
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Speaker 4: Board of course and i think the thing that will be very much in the mind of the board as they discuss this is that whatever they decide will have ramifications beyond the four walls of that company. Remember, this is, at one point, its market cap made it the most valuable listed company in the world, and one that is so central to the AI trade, not just because of the chips they make, but remember, there have been instances of financing some data centers that then ultimately buy the chips from NVIDIA. So, it is so intrinsically interwoven into the whole AI ecosystem that That whatever the board decides, whoever, if they decide to oust Jensen Huang, whoever they decide to have as a replacement, even an interim CEO, will be crucial not just to that company, but to so many other companies, so many, how many employees, how many stakeholders around the world?
00:31:52
Speaker 3: Thanks for listening to Bloomberg Daybreak Europe.
00:31:55
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00:32:01
Speaker 1: Up with the news.
00:32:02
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00:32:12
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