Long-standing Products Keep Apple Growing

Apple reported a 5% year-on-year increase in revenues for the quarter ending March 29th to 95.4 billion US dollars, despite a headwind of almost 2.5 percentage points from currency movements. While product revenues were up 3%, that growth was fuelled by iPhone, iPad and Macbook sales, rather than new product categories.

Apple didn't provide an update on Vision Pro sales. However, it did say that Dassault Systèmes, a leading provider for engineering and 3D design software, has integrated Apple Vision Pro into its next-generation platform, "bringing a powerful and immersive spatial experience to thousands of enterprise customers."

Total wearables, home and accessories revenue was down 5% year-over-year at 7.5 billion dollars, even though Apple noted the installed base of Apple Watch wearers continues to grow. Source: Apple

Meta Claims Threefold Increase in Smart Glasses Sales

Meta's Reality Labs division reported a 6% year-on-year fall in revenue for the first quarter to 412 million US dollars, as lower sales of Meta Quest VR headsets were only partially offset by increased sales of Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses. Reality Labs' operating loss was 4.2 billion dollars.  

Still Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, said that sales of Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses have tripled in the last year. "We've got some exciting new launches with our partner EssilorLuxottica later this year as well that should expand that category and add some new technological capabilities to the glasses," he added. 

Zuckerberg went on to note that "more than a billion people worldwide wear glasses today, and it seems highly likely that these will become AI glasses over the next 5 to 10 years....We’re seeing very strong traction with Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses, with over 4x as many monthly actives as a year ago, and the number of people using voice commands is growing even faster as people use it to answer questions and control their glasses. This month, we fully rolled out live translations on Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses to all markets for English, French, Italian, and Spanish. Now, when you are speaking to someone in one of these languages, you’ll hear what they say in your preferred language through the glasses in real time."  Source: Meta earnings transcript

Waymo Reports Another Leap in Riders

Alphabet reported that Waymo's self-driving vehicles are now serving over a quarter of a million paid passenger trips each week, up fivefold from a year earlier. In the first quarter of 2025, Waymo opened up a paid service in Silicon Valley, expanded in Austin with Uber and is preparing for a public launch in Atlanta in the summer of 2025. 

"We are also building up a network of partners, for example, for maintaining fleets of vehicles and doing all the operations related to that with the recently announced partnership with Moove in Phoenix and Miami," Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said. "There are future optionality around personal ownership as well."

Alphabet also reported that TV is now the primary device for YouTube viewing in the US. "According to Nielsen, YouTube has been number one in streaming watch time in the US for the last two years," Alphabet said. "YouTube Music and Premium reached over 125 million subscribers, including trials, globally." Source: Alphabet transcript

Nvidia Flags Next Wave of AI

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

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

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

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

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

Deutsche Telekom to Step Up Investment in the US

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

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

Baidu Predicts Fast Growth in Autonomous Rides

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

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

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

EssilorLuxottica Cranks Up Production of Smart Glasses

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

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

Amazon Ups the AI Ante Even Further

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

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

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