About this weblog

What you need to know: This weblog captures key data points about the global telecoms industry. I use it as an electronic notebook to support my work for Pringle Media.

Friday, August 7, 2026

Uber Gears Up For Self-Driving Future


Uber said it expects to commit more than 10 billion US dollars, across equity investments, infrastructure, and vehicle offtake commitments, "over the coming years" to bring autonomous vehicles to market at scale. 

Autonomous vehicles are live on Uber in seven cities, and that number should rise to 15 by year-end, the company added.  "Across our ecosystem, partners have now committed approximately 120,000 vehicles to the Uber network over the coming years."  Source: Uber

Wednesday, August 5, 2026

SpaceX Lifts Capex Sixfold

SpaceX reported a 92% year-on-year increase in revenues for the second quarter to 7.8 billion US dollars, driven by a 66% rise in connectivity revenues and a 247% rise in AI revenues. 

However, capital spending for the quarter rose more than sixfold to 18.4 billion dollars, with investments in AI accounting for 15.8 billion dollars of that. SpaceX said it has expanded compute capacity to 1.4 GW, up from 0.4 GW a year ago, "with the continued build-out of Colossus II (a large data centre in Tennessee) and with significant incremental capacity under construction." source: SpaceX statements

Saturday, August 1, 2026

Supply Constraints Will Slowdown Apple

Apple reported a 16% year-on-year increase in revenue for the quarter ended June 27 to 109.4 billion US dollars, driven by a 22% increase in iPhone revenue. In the current quarter, Apple expects revenue to rise between 9% and 11% year-on-year, due to foreign exchange headwinds and a significant increase in supply constraints, related to memory chips. Source: Apple statements



Tuesday, July 28, 2026

Alphabet Flags Big Leap in AI Investment

Alphabet reported a 23% year-on-year increase in revenues to 120 billion dollars at constant currencies for the second quarter, boosted by an uplift of 82% in cloud revenue driven by strong demand for AI infrastructure and AI solutions. It also reported a "cloud backlog" of 514 billion dollars.

Alphabet said its model APIs are now processing approximately 22 billion tokens per minute, up from 16 billion just a quarter ago. Over the past 12 months, more than 2,000 enterprises consumed over 100 billion tokens, the company added.

In the Other Bets division, which includes the Waymo self-driving unit, revenues rose only marginally to 382 million dollars (compared with 373 million), and the operating loss was 1.8 billion dollars, up from 1.25 billion dollars

Alphabet also said it now plans to invest between 195 billion and 205 billion dollars in capex in 2026, up from its previous estimate of between 180 billion and 190 billion, as it anticipates further growth in demand for AI. Source: Alphabet statements

Friday, July 24, 2026

Robotaxi Reverse and Robust Revenue For Tesla


Tesla reported a 26% year-on-year rise in revenues for the second quarter to 28.2 billion US dollars, lifted by a 23% rise in automotive revenues to 20.5 billion dollars. However, a graphic Tesla provided (shown above) suggests its new robotaxi business provided fewer paid rides in the quarter than in previous quarters.

Energy generation and storage revenues rose 13%, thanks to "record energy storage deployments in EMEA, supported by record deployments from Megafactory Shanghai." 

Capital expenditure for the quarter rose 142% year-on-year to 5.8 billion dollars. Tesla said it has started production of Cybercab, its purpose-built autonomous vehicle, which is designed to be the workhorse of its robotaxi fleet. Engineering test drives of production Cybercabs on public roads also began during the quarter. 

The company added that its Tesla Semi truck and Megapack 3, a new energy storage system, remain on schedule for production starting in 2026. First-generation production lines for Optimus (its humanoid robot) are being installed in anticipation of production in 2026.  Source: Tesla earnings report



Thursday, May 21, 2026

SpaceX Capex Outstrips Revenue


Filing for an IPO, SpaceX said it generated revenue of 18.7 billion US dollars in 2025, up 33% year-on-year. Connectivity revenue rose almost 50% to 11.4 billion dollars. Space revenues were up just 7.6% to 4.1 billion dollars.

Capital spending climbed 86% to 20.7 billion dollars, as SpaceX ramped up investments in AI infrastructure.

In May 2026, SpaceX entered into cloud services agreements with Anthropic, an AI research and development public benefit corporation, to access compute capacity across SpaceX's COLOSSUS and COLOSSUS II data centres. It said Anthropic has agreed to pay 1.25 billion dollars per month through May 2029, with capacity ramping in May and June 2026 at a reduced fee. Source: SpaceX IPO prospectus


Wednesday, May 20, 2026

Apollo Go More than Doubles Rides

In the first quarter of 2026, Apollo Go, Baidu's self-driving ride-hailing service, "delivered 3.2 million fully driverless operational rides, with weekly rides peaking at over 350,000 in March."  Total rides were up by more than 120% year-over-year.  By way of comparison, Waymo says it is delivering 500,000 "fully autonomous" rides per week.

In Europe, Apollo Go said it is on track to commence open-road testing in Switzerland, and expects to begin testing in London with Uber and Lyft soon. In the Middle East, Apollo Go's fully driverless operations are running across multiple zones in Dubai, following the launch of the Apollo Go app in March.

Apollo Go says its fleets have accumulated more than 220 million fully driverless autonomous kilometres. Source: Baidu statement

Tuesday, May 19, 2026

Capital Spending by the Magnificent Seven

 


An AI arms race is sparking a massive surge in capital spending by the major cloud service providers.



Deutsche Telekom Sees Steady Growth


Deutsche Telekom reported a 4.7% year-on-year rise in revenue in organic terms for the first quarter to 29.9 billion euros, propelled by a 6.1% rise in revenues in the US. In Germany, revenues rose 2.1%.

The telco said that more than 13 million homes in Germany can now directly connect to its fiber-optic network, while the number of homes taking out a FTTH (fibre-to-the-home) contract has now reached 2.2 million - the penetration rate has climbed from 15.5% to 17.1% over the past 12 months.

T-Mobile US reported a 6% year-on-year increase in the number of postpaid accounts to 34.4 million at the end of March 2026.  The operator defines a postpaid account as a billing account which is used to bundle multiple contracted services, such as mobile communications, 5G internet, and fiber-optic lines, as well as various connected devices including smartphones, tablets, hotspots, and wearables. For the 2026 full year, T-Mobile US expects postpaid net account additions of between 950,000 and 1,050,000, up from the 900,000 to 1,000,000 anticipated at the start of the year. Source: Deutsche Telekom statements

Friday, May 1, 2026

Bumper Quarter for the iPhone

Apple reported a 17% year-on-year increase in revenues for the quarter ending March 28th to 111.2 billion US dollars, driven by a 22% leap in iPhone revenues and a 16% rise in services revenues. However, Apple's R&D spending rose 32% year-on-year to 11.4 billion dollars.

Apple said it expects total revenue to rise between 14% and 17% in the current quarter, despite supply constraints. Source: Apple statements

Thursday, April 30, 2026

Alphabet Even More Bullish on AI

Alphabet reported a 19% year-on-year increase in revenue in constant currencies for the first quarter of 2026 to 110 billion US dollars. Cloud revenues were up 63% to 20 billion dollars, driven by strong demand for AI models, such as Gemini 3, and AI infrastructure "due to continued deployment of TPUs and GPUs."

Alphabet also said its revenue backlog nearly doubled quarter-on-quarter to more than 460 billion dollars, with the majority related to Google Cloud Platform agreements. Just over half of the backlog will convert to revenue in the next 24 months, the company said, with TPU hardware sales beginning to come through as revenue later in 2026, with more in 2027. 

Alphabet said its AI model Lyria 3 has generated more than 150 million songs since launching on the Gemini App in mid February, while Nano Banana 2 has created one billion images in nearly half the time of Nano Banana 1. Alphabet reported it now serves 350 million paid subscriptions, with YouTube and Google One being the key drivers.

The company raised its full year capital spending guidance by five billion dollars to 180 billion to 190 billion dollars, following the recent acquisition of Intersect, which provides data centre and energy infrastructure.

Noting that its strong results "reinforce its conviction" to invest to capture the AI opportunity, Alphabet said it expects its 2027 capex to be significantly higher than in 2026. 

Alphabet's self-driving unit, Waymo, is now operating in 11 US cities and is delivering 500,000 "fully autonomous" rides per week, doubling in less than a year. The company's Wing drone delivery service "continues to expand across the US in partnership with Walmart and Doordash." Source: Alphabet earnings.



Wednesday, April 29, 2026

T-Mobile US Prepares for Physical AI

As T-Mobile US deploys artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance its radio access network, it is bringing compute capacity closer to end users, Srinivasan Gopalan, CEO of T-Mobile US, noted in an earnings call with analysts. "As we build more AI into our network, we will generate a bunch of fallow compute, especially at the edge. Now the fallow compute plus low latency creates an incredible opportunity because if you're thinking of scale, automation -- it's impossible to do that without low latency," he said. "Low latency has to be essential to any form of robotics or automation that you do."

The telco's 5G Advanced network means it is well placed to serve the demands of so-called physical AI (robotics) systems, John Saw, president of technology at T-Mobile US, added.  "We have a bunch of innovations that we have developed with 5G Advanced to increase spectral efficiencies and capacity like especially for the uplink, which is really needed for physical AI, like things like uplink transmit switching, higher transmit power and uplink MIMO, right?... we believe that we have a multiyear advantage over the competition for this." Source: T-Mobile US collateral

Amazon Talks Up In-House AI Chips

Amazon reported its net sales increased 15% year-on-year on a constant currency basis to 181.5 billion US dollars in the first quarter.  “AWS is growing 28% (our fastest growth in 15 quarters) on a very large base, our chips business topped a 20 billion dollar revenue run rate (growing triple digits year-over-year), advertising grew to over 70 billion in TTM revenue, and unit growth in our stores reached 15% (the highest since the tail end of covid lockdowns)," said Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon. 

He also claimed that Amazon's Trainium chip, which is designed for AI, will save its tens of billions of dollars of capex each year "and provide several hundred basis points of operating margin advantage versus relying on others' chips for inference." 

Jassy noted that the faster AWS grows, the more short-term capex Amazon will spend. "AWS has to lay out cash for land, power, buildings, chips, servers, and networking gear in advance of when we can monetise it, typically six to 24 months before we start billing customers, depending on the component," he explained. "However, these capex investments fund assets with many year useful lives, 30+ years for data centres, five to six years for chips, servers, and networking gear."

Jassy also cautioned that in times of "very high growth like now, where the capex growth meaningfully outpaces the revenue growth, the early years free cash flow is challenged until these initial tranches of capacity are being monetised and revenue growth outpaces capex growth."

Claiming that billions of people do not have access to broadband connectivity, Jassy said that Amazon Leo, its satellite arm, will "be one of two offerings that are on the current technology edge, and I think that we will have a meaningful advantage in performance. I think we'll be about 2x better on the downlink than existing alternatives and about 6x better on the uplink performance than existing alternatives. I think we'll have a cost advantage for customers."

He suggested Amazon Leo will become a "many billion-dollar revenue business", but will, like AWS, be capital intensive upfront. Source: Amazon earnings call transcript


Monday, April 27, 2026

Tesla Rows Back on Robotaxi Timetable

Tesla reported a 16% year-on-year increase in revenues for the first quarter of 2026 to 22.4 billion US dollars, thanks to growing demand for its vehicles in APAC and South America, and a rebound of demand in both EMEA and North America

Although Tesla expects to begin volume production of its self-driving Cybercab this year, it sounded a cautious note on the rollout of its robotaxi propositions.  "You should expect that initial production of Cybercab and Semi will be very slow, but then ramping up, and going exponential towards the end of the year and certainly next year," CEO Elon Musk said. "We certainly hope to have unsupervised FSD (full self driving) or Robotaxi operating in, I don't know, a dozen or so states by the end of this year. Initially, we're taking a very cautious approach to the rollout here. ... probably unsupervised FSD or Robotaxi revenue will not be super material this year, but I do think it'll be material probably in a significant way next year."

Asked when its FSD (unsupervised) software will be available for customers cars, Musk said: "I'm just guessing here, but probably in the fourth quarter. It's difficult to release this to everyone, everywhere, all at once because we do want to make sure that there are not unique situations in a city that particularly complex intersection. ... I think we would release unsupervised gradually to the customer fleet as we feel like a particular geography is confirmed to be safe."

Tesla reported that paid Robotaxi miles nearly doubled sequentially in the first quarter and it further expanded its unsupervised operation area in Austin and launched unsupervised rides in both Dallas and Houston in April.

Major step up in capex

Tesla's capital spending leapt 67% year-on-year in the quarter to almost 2.5 billion dollars, as it invests to ensure "access to key materials and componentry in each region across vehicle, energy and AI as trade and geopolitics become more uncertain."  

Tesla said it expects to spend more than 25 billion dollars in 2026 on capex, compared to about 8.5 billion dollars in 2025.  "We are paying for six factories which were going to go into operation," noted Vaibhav Taneja, CFO of Tesla. "Some have already started, some would go into operation later part of this year. We're further increasing our investment in AI-related initiatives, including the AI infrastructure to support Robotaxi and the launch of Optimus. We've already started placing orders for the research semiconductor fab in Austin and for solar manufacturing equipment."

In its energy generation and storage business, Tesla said it began meaningful customer deployments of a new solar panel, which has 18 individual power zones – 3x more than a conventional residential panel – enabling it to reliably produce more energy in shady conditions. 

Preparations for Tesla's first large-scale Optimus (robotics) factory are scheduled to start in the second quarter, with significant production set for 2027. "The first generation line, designed for one million robots a year, will replace the Model S and Model X lines in Fremont," Tesla said. "We are also preparing Gigafactory Texas for the second-generation line, which is being designed for long-term annual production capacity of 10 million robots."

Musk said it plans to put a lot of intelligence locally in the robot. "It needs to be enough intelligence that if the robot gets disconnected, like if it's a bad cellular signal or there isn't Wi-Fi, Optimus can't just get stuck. ...The car does not need any cellular or Wi-Fi connection to be able to drive safely." Source: Tesla collateral.


The Cash Generated by the Magnificent Seven

 


In 2025, Alphabet overtook Microsoft to become the biggest cash generating engine in the Magnificent Seven. With six of the seven now generating more than 100 billion US dollars per annum from their operating activities, big tech has the financial leeway to make massive capital investments in data centres and other infrastructure.

Friday, April 17, 2026

Operating Income of the Magnificent Seven

 

In 2025, Microsoft overtook Apple in terms of operating income. But Nvidia is gaining fast.




Wednesday, April 15, 2026

The Revenue Growth of the Magnificent Seven

 

During this decade, AI chip supplier Nvidia has grown more than tenfold - far, far faster than the major tech giants. But, in absolute terms, Amazon and Alphabet have added more to the top line in the past five years.




The Revenues of the Magnificent Seven


When it comes to revenues, Amazon continues to run well ahead of the other tech giants. In 2025, the aggregate revenues of the Magnificent Seven was 2,373 billion US dollars, up 16% on 2024. In 2024, the aggregate revenues of the Seven grew 12%.

Friday, April 10, 2026

More than One Million Robots now Work for Amazon

In a letter to shareholders, Amazon said it now has one million robots operating in fulfilment centres helping with stowing, picking, sorting and intra-facility transport. The online retailer also reported that Prime Air, its drone delivery service, now has a design that will scale, "with plans to serve communities with 30 million customers by year-end, and expects to deliver half a billion packages by the end of this decade (with an aim to deliver inside 30 minutes)."

Written by CEO Andy Jassy, the letter also noted that AWS’s annual AI revenue run rate was more than 15 billion US dollars in the fist quarter of 2026. Jassy said the second version of Amazon's custom AI silicon (Trainium2) has about 30% better price-performance than comparable GPUs, and has largely sold out. Trainium3, which just started shipping at the start of 2026 and is 30-40% more price-performant than Trainium2, is nearly fully-subscribed, he added. 

"At scale, we expect Trainium will save us tens of billions of capex dollars per year, and provide several hundred basis points of operating margin advantage versus relying on others’ chips for inference," Jassy estimated. "Our annual revenue run rate for our chips business (inclusive of Graviton, Trainium, and Nitro—our EC2 NIC) is now over 20 billion dollars, and growing triple digit percentages year-on-year." 

If Amazon's chips business was a standalone business, and sold chips produced this year to AWS and other third parties (as other leading chips companies do), its annual run rate would be 50 billion dollars, according to Jassy. "There’s so much demand for our chips that it’s quite possible we’ll sell racks of them to third parties in the future."

Source: Amazon shareholder letter


Friday, March 27, 2026

China Mobile Pushes Deeper into Computing



For 2025, China Mobile reported a 11% increase in computing services revenue to 89.8 billion Chinese yuan (13.2 billion US dollars). The telco also said that revenue from AI services rose 5% to 90.8 billion yuan (13.3 billion dollars). As it helped 10,000 Chinese enterprises to expand their global presence, China Mobile's international market revenue grew 28.5% to 29.3 billion in 2025.  

In 2026, China Mobile plans to invest 136.6 billion yuan (20 billion dollars) in capex, down by 9.5% year‑on‑year, but its investments in computing and AI networks will rise by 62.4% and 19.8% respectively. The proportion of investment allocated to computing and AI networks will exceed 37%, the telco said. Source: China Mobile's financial results.







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