Data Centres in Focus for Deutsche Telekom

To meet EU demand for an "AI gigafactory," Deutsche Telekom is thinking about how it can bundle its data centre activities, which include its investments in Mine Cubes and Green Scales, as well as its in-house facilities, Timotheus Hottges, CEO of DT said. "We see an unbelievable high pull from governmental and from industrial services for sovereign cloud architecture here."

Chip maker Nvidia has committed 10,000 graphic cards to its partnership with DT, he added. "We're going to start in the first quarter next year by deploying the NVIDIA chips already in data centre infrastructure so that the first customers can use and test these capabilities so that we are before the wave in this regard. ...The most likely scenario, by the way, for the AI gigafactory is an off-balance sheet investment."

Hottges also flagged DT's partnership with the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. "That is where we are -- where our headquarters are sitting. We are trying to partner as well with RWE, not final decided on sites, former coal sites or nuclear power plant sites, where we have water and power supply and access to -- where approvals have been given in the past, where we can implement the data centre infrastructure.

"And on top of that, without saying too much here, we have a partnership with Brookfields, a very successful one, as you know, which is our tower company. And these guys are very, very committed and interested to build this gigafactory with us so that we have a very strong partner on the co-investment side. So we have a strong -- a very strong group of people together." Source: DT earnings call transcript

Uber Reports Growing Enthusiasm for Autonomous Vehicles

Uber has expanded its operating zones for autonomous vehicles (AV) in Austin with Waymo and Abu Dhabi with WeRide, and has also launched with Waymo in Atlanta.  But "I think the commercialisation is going to take time,"  Dara Khosrowshahi, CEO of Uber, told analysts. The "Austin launch continues to go really well in terms of utilisation. Atlanta launch has been -- it's early, but the Atlanta launch has been great. And in both cases, the average Waymo is busier than 99% of our drivers in terms of completed trips per day... the focus now is how do we bring this product to market as quickly as possible because it looks like from a consumer standpoint and from a safety standpoint, it's a real hit."

Uber said in July that is is aiming to deploy at least 20,000 AVs made by Lucid equipped with the Nuro Driver over six years. The vehicles will be owned and operated by Uber or its third-party fleet partners and made available to riders exclusively via the Uber platform. The first Lucid-Nuro robotaxi prototype is  operating autonomously on a closed circuit at Nuro’s Las Vegas proving grounds.

"I do think that you will see us do more deals like Nuro, Lucid in the early days of autonomous as we're proving out the economics of the marketplace,"  Khosrowshahi told analysts. "Once we prove out the revenue model, how much these cars can generate on a per day basis, there will be plenty of financing to go around, third-party financing. We've talked to private equity players. We've talked to banks, et cetera. And while it will take some time, we're very confident that these assets are going to be financeable."

Affordable hardware is the bottleneck

The Uber CEO went on to say that the development of AV software has been accelerated by the arrival of larger AI models. "There are some approaches that are kind of perception models interpreting the world and then prediction models that decide what to do. Some players like Tesla and Wayve, for example, are going with single models. But whatever the approach is, it is really accelerating in terms of time to market. And we actually think the harder part of commercialisation is going to be hardware, bringing on hardware platforms and hardware partners that can build these platforms at scale affordably because today, at least AV vehicles that are able to be deployed at scale are pretty expensive."

However, he noted that Baidu has established hardware platforms that "look to be effective at scale and quite affordably.... The Apollo Go for is one example of that....And then in terms of Tesla, listen, we see them on the streets right now, the deployment that we're observing is very, very small." 

Uber has identified three potential business models - the merchant model (in which Uber will pay the EV partner a set fee per trip or per day), the agency model, which is a revenue share, and a licensing model in which Uber buys the vehicles and then licenses the software either by the month or by mile.  "I think you'll see all three of those models in our marketplace over the next five years," Khosrowshahi explained.

Uber's drivers are involved in data collection to support the development of autonomous vehicles. "It's not really something that I'm looking to make profits on but really helping AV get to market faster," Khosrowshahi noted. "And then one area that we're really excited about is kind of one way to look at Uber is, it is a platform for work. We've got almost nine million people who are earning on our platform, and they can earn in different ways other than driving or transporting things. An example of that is actually our Uber AI solutions...they are engaging in data labelling, translation, map labelling, tuning algorithms, et cetera. And these are sometimes drivers on our platform, sometimes kind of specialists that we bring on to the platform, but it's using the core Uber capability, which is sending out tasks to earners all over the world." Source: Uber earnings transcript

Threefold Leap in Sales of AI glasses

EssilorLuxottica said its "AI glasses gained further traction in the first half of the year, with Ray-Ban Meta more than tripling in revenue year-over-year. The new Oakley Meta was announced in June, being on the blocks with the HSTN collection equipped with Oakley Prizm lenses, that will be available later this summer." Source: EssilorLuxottica financial results 

Smart Glasses Momentum Continues at Meta

Meta reported a 5% year-on-year increase in sales in its Reality Labs segment for the second quarter to 370 million US dollars, due to increased sales of AI glasses, partially offset by lower sales of its Quest VR headsets. As Reality Labs' expenses were 4.9 billion dollars, up 1% year-over-year, the unit made an operating loss of 4.5 billion dollars.

Meta said "the growth of Ray-Ban Meta (AI glasses) sales accelerated in Q2, with demand still outstripping supply for the most popular SKUs despite increases to our production earlier this year. We’re working to ramp supply to better meet consumer demand later this year." 

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, added: "I continue to think that glasses are basically going to be the ideal form factor for AI because you can let an AI see what you see throughout the day, hear what you hear, talk to you. Once you get a display in there, whether it’s the kind of wide holographic field of view like we showed with Orion or just a smaller display that might be good for displaying some information, that’s also going to unlock a lot of value."

"The other thing that’s awesome about glasses is, they are going to be the ideal way to blend the physical and digital worlds together. So the whole metaverse vision, I think, is going to end up being extremely important, too, and AI is going to accelerate that, too. It’s just that if you’d asked me five years ago, whether we’d have kind of holograms that created immersive experiences or superintelligence first, I think most people would have thought that you’d get the holograms first. And it’s this interesting kind of quirk of the tech industry that I think we’re going to end up having really strong AI first." Source: Meta

Quarter a "Seminal Point" for Tesla

Tesla's revenues declined 12% year-on-year in the second quarter to 22.5 billion US dollars, as vehicle deliveries declined. Even so, the automaker described the quarter as "a seminal point in Tesla’s history: the beginning of our transition from leading the electric vehicle and renewable energy industries to also becoming a leader in AI, robotics and related services." 

Ashok Elluswamy, Director-Autopilot Software at Tesla, said the company's test robotaxis, which operate with a safety driver, have "been doing great so far in Austin.... and we'll continue to expand in Austin to probably more than 10x our current operating region. ... The next thing to expand would be in the San Francisco Bay Area. We are working with the government to get approval here and, in the meanwhile, launch the service without the person in the driver seat just to expedite and while we wait for regulatory approval. We are also testing a lot of other cities in the U.S., including Florida, Nevada, et cetera."

Elon Musk, Tesla, CEO,  added: "If we are not roughly making 100,000 Optimus robots a month in 60 months [time], I would be shocked." Source: Tesla

Waymo Doubles Mileage in Six Months

Alphabet said its Waymo robotaxis have driven more than 100 million miles without a human behind the wheel, doubling the mileage in about six months. Waymo has about 1,500 vehicles operating in San Francisco and some other Bay Area cities, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Austin and Atlanta. Source: Reuters

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 past 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