Amazon.com Inc. – Digital Tech Blog https://digitaltechblog.com Explore Digital Ideas Sat, 29 Jun 2024 01:58:14 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.2.6 https://i0.wp.com/digitaltechblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/cropped-apple-touch-icon-2.png?fit=32%2C32&ssl=1 Amazon.com Inc. – Digital Tech Blog https://digitaltechblog.com 32 32 196063536 Amazon is doubling value of credits for some startups to build on AWS as Microsoft cloud gains ground https://digitaltechblog.com/amazon-is-doubling-value-of-credits-for-some-startups-to-build-on-aws-as-microsoft-cloud-gains-ground/ https://digitaltechblog.com/amazon-is-doubling-value-of-credits-for-some-startups-to-build-on-aws-as-microsoft-cloud-gains-ground/#respond Sat, 29 Jun 2024 01:58:14 +0000 https://digitaltechblog.com/amazon-is-doubling-value-of-credits-for-some-startups-to-build-on-aws-as-microsoft-cloud-gains-ground/

Amazon will double the value of credits it offers some startups to use its cloud infrastructure, CNBC has learned, as the company faces heightened competition from Microsoft in artificial intelligence services.

Starting July 1, startups that have raised a Series A round of funding in the past year will be eligible for $200,000 in credits through AWS’ Activate program, up from $100,000 before, the Amazon cloud unit said in an email to venture capitalists this week. Seed-stage startups will still be eligible for $100,000 in credits, AWS said.

Two people briefed on the changes confirmed the credit increase, though they asked not to be named because the information is private.

Matt Garman, who was recently promoted to CEO of AWS after running sales and marketing, was meeting with founders in Silicon Valley this week, the people said. Garman told the execs that collaborating with startups would always be a primary focus, one of the people said, adding that Garman described AI companies as AWS’ ideal customers.

An AWS spokesperson confirmed the increase in credits and Garman’s visit to Silicon Valley. The spokesperson added that in the past, the $100,000 would expire in one year, while the $200,000 credit will now expire in three years.

Amazon, which is best known for its massive online retail operation, derives most of its profit from AWS, a business it launched in 2006, well before rivals Microsoft and Google hit the scene. AWS leads the market, with $25 billion in revenue in the first quarter, up 17% from a year earlier.

But Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud are growing more quickly, and are benefiting from rapidly advancing AI models. Backed by Microsoft, OpenAI launched ChatGPT in late 2022 on Azure, and has since attracted a wave of AI workloads to Microsoft from companies big and small. Google has a number of large language models, most notably Gemini.

Amazon has been trying to catch up in generative AI and has poured billions of dollars into OpenAI challenger Anthropic.

Last month, AWS CEO Adam Selipsky announced his resignation after three years running the business, with Garman named as his successor. During Selipsky’s time at the helm, Microsoft and Google increased their share of the cloud infrastructure market. One analyst told CNBC that Microsoft “ran laps around” AWS in generative AI.

Startups have long been fertile ground for cloud infrastructure companies, as they try and lure ambitious founders who could be building the next multibillion-dollar business.

In November, Microsoft announced a partnership with Silicon Valley accelerator Y Combinator that would provide participating startups with $350,000 in Azure credits and access to graphics processing units (GPUs) for training AI models, a spokesperson said. Microsoft has since extended the $350,000 credit incentive to other accelerators, including the AI Grant.

Startups enrolled in Microsoft’s Founders Hub program, which doesn’t require previous venture funding, can receive up to $150,000 in Azure credits over four years.

In addition to its Activate offering, Amazon has a new 10-week generative AI accelerator program. Participants will be able to access up to $1 million in cloud credits, according to the website.

Earlier on Friday, Amazon’s head scientist, Rohit Prasad, told employees that the company has hired David Luan, co-founder and CEO of AI startup Adept, along with some of Luan’s colleagues. “Amazon is also licensing Adept’s agent technology, family of state-of-the-art multimodal models, and a few datasets,” Adept said in a blog post.

WATCH: AWS will boost investments in Singapore’s cloud infrastructure by $9 billion

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Nvidia remains a little-known brand despite briefly passing Apple, Microsoft in market cap https://digitaltechblog.com/nvidia-remains-a-little-known-brand-despite-briefly-passing-apple-microsoft-in-market-cap/ https://digitaltechblog.com/nvidia-remains-a-little-known-brand-despite-briefly-passing-apple-microsoft-in-market-cap/#respond Sat, 22 Jun 2024 12:30:01 +0000 https://digitaltechblog.com/nvidia-remains-a-little-known-brand-despite-briefly-passing-apple-microsoft-in-market-cap/

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang makes a speech at an event at COMPUTEX forum in Taipei, Taiwan June 4, 2024. 

Ann Wang | Reuters

Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Google were the four leading global brands at the end of 2023, according to consulting firm Interbrand. They’re are also four of the world’s five most valuable companies.

The other is Nvidia, which for a time this week, surpassed Microsoft to become the largest company in the world by market cap.

But despite its $3.1 trillion valuation (it reached $3.3 trillion before a two-day slide), Nvidia doesn’t even crack the top 100 most iconic names on Interbrand’s most recent list, which is populated by such companies as McDonald’s, Starbucks, Disney and Netflix.

Nvidia’s historic rise in valuation — the stock has climbed almost ninefold since the end of 2022 — has been driven almost entirely by demand for its graphics processing units (GPUs) that are at the heart of the boom in generative artificial intelligence and, more broadly, by the hype over AI. Nvidia has over 80% of the market for chips used to train and deploy AI software like ChatGPT. A handful of huge tech companies are the primary buyers of its chips.

The speed of Nvidia’s ascent and its relative lack of contact with consumers along the way combines to put the 31-year-old company’s brand recognition on Main Street far behind its allure on Wall Street. No. 100 on Interbrand’s list for 2023 is Japanese camera maker Canon, with Dutch brewer Heineken at No. 99.

“As a product company recently moving onto a global stage, Nvidia has not had time, nor has it dedicated resources, to change its role of brand and strengthen its brand to protect future revenue,” Greg Silverman, Interbrand’s global director of brand economics, said in an email. The risk for Nvidia, Silverman added, is that its “weak brand strength will limit how valuable it will be, despite its market cap heights.”

A spokesperson for Nvidia declined to comment.

The generative AI market is in the second year of 3-5 year deployment cycle, says BofA’s Vivek Arya

Nvidia’s annual revenue growth has exceeded 200% in each of the past three quarters. For fiscal 2025, revenue is expected to almost double from a year earlier to over $120 billion, according to LSEG.

The company’s data center GPUs, which made up 85% of sales in the most recent quarter, are installed in massive facilities, and typically require a team of expensive data science and supercomputing experts to configure them to efficiently create AI software.

By contrast, Apple, ranked No. 1 by Interbrand, makes the vast majority of its money by selling iPhones and other devices to consumers across the globe. Microsoft, ranked second, is an enterprise sales giant, but is ubiquitously known for its Windows and Office software. Third-ranked Amazon strives to be consumers’ everything store, and No. 4 Google is, for many people, the front door to the internet.

Rounding out Interbrand’s top 10 are South Korean electronics giant Samsung, along with three car companies (Toyota, Mercedes-Benz and BMW), Coca-Cola and Nike.

Further down the list, at No. 24, is Nvidia rival Intel, which is best known for making the processor at the heart of laptops and PCs and for its long-running “Intel Inside” advertising campaign. Even Hewlett Packard Enterprise, a company that builds servers, made the list at No. 91.

Gamers love it

However, a competing survey shows that Nvidia’s brand value is catching up to that of its peers.

In a ranking of the 100 most valuable global brands published this month by Kantar BrandZ, Nvidia landed at No. 6, leaping 18 places from its prior survey. The brand’s overall valued jumped 178% in a year to an estimate of about $202 billion. Kantar surveys enterprise buyers to evaluate brands that primarily sell to other businesses to come up with a total estimate of brand value.

“Nvidia is pound for pound as relevant and meaningful to that B2B buyer that’s looking to make big, large purchases in-house for their company as Apple is to the consumer who’s buying an iPad or a Mac,” Marc Glovsky, senior brand strategist at Kantar, told CNBC.

And while Nvidia may not be a name known to your parents — or your kids — it does have resonance in a particular corner of the consumer world. Just ask your hard-core gaming buddy.

When Nvidia was founded in 1991, AI was a nascent field. The company’s primary focus was on designing chips that could draw digital triangles quickly, a basic capability that led to a huge expansion in 3D games.

For years, Nvidia, and its GeForce brand and green logo were well known to the type of people who tweaked their computers to run the most advanced games. Nvidia provides the chips for the Nintendo Switch console, which has shipped over 140 million units around the world.

A Nintendo Switch console.

Philip Fong | AFP | Getty Images

Unlike Intel, Nvidia never put its name in front of consumers with flashy ad campaigns. And gaming is now just a nice side business for chipmaker. In the latest quarter, it accounted for $2.6 billion of revenue, or 10% of total sales, rising 18% year over year.

When it comes to Nvidia’s most important products, companies and institutions vying for its AI chips have to go through an extensive quoting and sales process, often through a computer-equipment company, like Dell or HPE. Those vendors sell complete systems, including memory, a central processor and other parts. Even experts who want to train AI models are more likely to rent Nvidia access through a cloud provider than build their own server clusters.

Still, Nvidia’s name recognition is rapidly increasing. Among retail investors, Nvidia has emerged as the most widely held stock, according to data collected and published last month by Vanda Research.

And while the name didn’t make Interbrand’s top 100 list for 2023, the firm’s data shows its brand awareness quadrupled in the past 12 months, which will help when it’s time for the next ranking, Silverman said.

Maybe by then people will know how to say its name, a topic that’d been the source of debate on obscure gaming forums. The company pronounces it en-VID-ia.

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Amazon fined $5.9 million for over 59,000 violations of California labor laws https://digitaltechblog.com/amazon-fined-5-9-million-for-over-59000-violations-of-california-labor-laws/ https://digitaltechblog.com/amazon-fined-5-9-million-for-over-59000-violations-of-california-labor-laws/#respond Tue, 18 Jun 2024 22:39:55 +0000 https://digitaltechblog.com/amazon-fined-5-9-million-for-over-59000-violations-of-california-labor-laws/

An Amazon warehouse

Getty Images

California’s labor regulator on Tuesday said it fined Amazon nearly $6 million for violating a state law aimed at curtailing the use of onerous warehouse productivity quotas.

The California Labor Commissioner’s Office said it investigated two Amazon facilities in Moreno Valley and Redlands, both located east of Los Angeles, and found 59,017 violations of the state’s Warehouse Quotas law, officials said. Productivity quotas have become a common source of consternation among Amazon workers.

The Warehouse Quotas law went into effect in 2022 and requires employers to disclose productivity quotas to employees and government agencies, as well as any discipline workers may face for not meeting them. The law also prohibits employers from requiring warehouse employees to meet unsafe quotas preventing them from taking state-mandated meal and rest breaks or using the bathroom.

Amazon “failed to provide written notice of quotas,” the Labor Commissioner’s office said Tuesday. The company argued it doesn’t need quotas because it uses a “peer-to-peer evaluation system,” officials said.

“The peer-to-peer system that Amazon was using in these two warehouses is exactly the kind of system that the Warehouse Quotas law was put in place to prevent,” Labor Commissioner Lilia Garcia-Brower said in a statement.

Amazon has in recent years faced scrutiny over how it treats its warehouse and delivery employees. Regulators and critics have specifically zeroed in on the pace of work, arguing that the speed requirements put workers at greater risk of injury.

Washington safety regulators in 2022 fined Amazon for “willfully” violating workplace safety laws by requiring employees to work at such a fast pace that it put them at higher risk of musculoskeletal disorders or problems such as sprains and strains often caused by repetitive tasks.

The Labor Department’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration has also cited Amazon numerous times for safety violations. Amazon has said it would appeal all the citations.

States including New York, Washington and Minnesota have passed similar regulations, and a federal bill was introduced last month by Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass.

Amazon, the second-largest private employer in the U.S., has previously said it doesn’t use fixed quotas. Rather, the company said, it relies on “performance expectations” that factor in multiple indicators, such as how certain teams at a site are performing. It’s also disputed allegations that employees don’t get enough breaks.

Amazon has also defended its safety record. The company said in March that its injury rates have improved, and it announced plans to invest more than $750 million in safety initiatives this year.

Maureen Lynch Vogel, an Amazon spokesperson, said the company disagrees with the allegations and has filed an appeal.

“The truth is, we don’t have fixed quotas,” she wrote in an email. “At Amazon, individual performance is evaluated over a long period of time, in relation to how the entire site’s team is performing. Employees can – and are encouraged to – review their performance whenever they wish. They can always talk to a manager if they’re having trouble finding the information.”

WATCH: Amazon’s worker safety hazards come under fire from regulators and the DOJ

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Apple faces pressure to show off AI following splashy events at OpenAI, Google and Microsoft https://digitaltechblog.com/apple-faces-pressure-to-show-off-ai-following-splashy-events-at-openai-google-and-microsoft/ https://digitaltechblog.com/apple-faces-pressure-to-show-off-ai-following-splashy-events-at-openai-google-and-microsoft/#respond Fri, 07 Jun 2024 22:38:02 +0000 https://digitaltechblog.com/apple-faces-pressure-to-show-off-ai-following-splashy-events-at-openai-google-and-microsoft/

Apple’s new Vision Pro virtual reality headset is displayed during Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) at the Apple Park campus in Cupertino, California, on June 5, 2023.

Josh Edelson | Afp | Getty Images

For years, Apple avoided using the acronym AI when talking about its products. Not anymore.

The boom in generative artificial intelligence, spawned in late 2022 by OpenAI, has been the biggest story in the tech industry of late, lifting chipmaker Nvidia to a $3 trillion market cap and causing a major shifting of priorities at Microsoft, Google and Amazon, which are all racing to add the technology into their core services.

Investors and customers now want to see what the iPhone maker has in store.

New AI features are coming at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), which takes place on Monday at Apple’s campus in Cupertino, California. Apple CEO Tim Cook has teased “big plans,” a change of approach for a company that doesn’t like to talk about products before they’re released.

WWDC isn’t typically a major investor attraction. On the first day, the company announces annual updates to its iOS, iPadOS, WatchOS and MacOS software in what’s usually a two-hour videotaped keynote launch event emceed by Cook. This year, the presentation will be screened at Apple’s headquarters. App developers then get a week of parties and virtual workshops where they learn about the new Apple software.

Apple fans get a preview of the software coming to iPhones. Developers can get to work updating their apps. New hardware products, if they appear at all, are not the showcase.

But this year, everyone will be listening for the most hyped acronym in tech.

Apple: Loop Capital cuts the iPhone maker's price target on weak demand

With more than 1 billion iPhones in use, Wall Street wants to hear what AI features are going to make the iPhone more competitive against Android rivals and how the company can justify its investment in developing its own chips.

Investors have rewarded companies that show a clear AI strategy and vision. Nvidia, the primary maker of AI processors, has seen its stock price triple in the past year. Microsoft, which is aggressively incorporating OpenAI into its products, is up 28% over the past year. Apple is only up 9% over that same period, and has seen the other two companies surpass it in market cap.

“This is the most important event for Cook and Cupertino in over a decade,” Dan Ives, an analyst at Wedbush, told CNBC. “The AI strategy is the missing piece in the growth puzzle for Apple and this event needs to be a showstopper and not a shrug-the-shoulders event.”

Taking the stage will be executives including software chief Craig Federighi, who will likely address the real-life uses of Apple’s AI, whether it should be run locally or in massive cloud clusters and what should be built into the operating system versus distributed in an app.

Privacy is also a key issue, and attendees will likely want to know how Apple can deploy the data-hungry technology without compromising user privacy, a centerpiece of the company’s marketing for over half a decade.

“At WWDC, we expect Apple to unveil its long-term vision around its implementation of generative AI throughout its diverse ecosystem of personal devices,” wrote Gil Luria, an analyst at D.A. Davidson, in a note this week. “We believe that the impact of generative AI to Apple’s business is one of the most profound in all of technology, and unlike much of the innovation in AI that’s impacting the developer or enterprise, Apple has a clear opportunity to reach billions of consumer devices with generative AI functionality.”

Upgrading Siri

Last month, OpenAI revealed a voice mode for its AI software called ChatGPT-4o.

In a short demo, OpenAI researchers held an iPhone and spoke directly to the bot inside the ChatGPT app, which was able to do impressions, speak fluidly and even sing. The conversation was snappy, the bot gave advice and the voice sounded like a human. Further demos at the live event showed the bot singing, teaching trigonometry, translating and telling jokes.

Apple users and pundits immediately understood that OpenAI had demoed a preview of what Apple’s Siri could be in the future. Apple’s voice assistant debuted in 2011 and since has gained a reputation for not being useful. It’s rigid, only able to answer a small proportion of well-defined queries, partially because it’s based on older machine learning techniques.

Apple could team up with OpenAI to upgrade Siri next week. It’s been discussing licensing chatbot technology from other companies, too, including Google and Cohere, according to a report from The New York Times.

Apple declined to comment on an OpenAI partnership.

One possibility is that Apple’s new Siri won’t compete directly with fully featured chatbots, but will improve its current features, and toss off queries that can only be answered by a chatbot to a partner. It’s close to how Apple’s Spotlight search and Siri work now. Apple’s system tries to answer the question, but if it can’t, it turns to Google. That agreement is part of a deal worth $18 billion per year to Apple.

Apple might also shy away from a full-throated embrace of an OpenAI partnership or chatbot. One reason is that a malfunctioning chatbot could generate embarrassing headlines, and could undermine the company’s emphasis on user privacy and personal control of user data.

“Data security will be a key advantage for the company and we expect them to spend time talking about their privacy efforts during the WWDC as well,” Citi analyst Atif Malik said in a recent note.

OpenAI’s technology is based on web scraping, and ChatGPT user interactions are used to improve the model itself, a technique that could violate some of Apple’s privacy principles.

Large language models like OpenAI’s still have problems with inaccuracies or “hallucinations,” like when Google’s search AI said last month that President Barack Obama was the first Muslim president. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently found himself in the middle of a thorny societal debate about deepfakes and deception when he denied accusations from actress Scarlett Johansson that OpenAI’s voice mode had ripped off her voice. It’s the kind of conflict that Apple executives prefer to avoid.

Efficient vs. large

Apple senior vice president of software engineering Craig Federighi speaks before the start of the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference at its headquarters on June 05, 2023 in Cupertino, California. Apple CEO Tim Cook kicked off the annual WWDC23 developer conference.

Justin Sullivan | Getty Images News | Getty Images

Outside of Apple, AI has become reliant on big server farms using powerful Nvidia processors paired with terabytes of memory to crunch numbers.

Apple, by contrast, wants its AI features to run on iPhones, and iPads, and Macs, which operate on battery power. Cook has highlighted Apple’s own chips as superior for running AI models.

“We believe in the transformative power and promise of AI, and we believe we have advantages that will differentiate us in this new era, including Apple’s unique combination of seamless hardware, software, and services integration, groundbreaking Apple Silicon with our industry-leading neural engines, and our unwavering focus on privacy,” Cook told investors in May on an earnings call.

Samik Chatterjee, an analyst at JPMorgan, wrote in a note this month that, “We expect Apple’s presentation at WWDC keynote to be focused on the features and the on-device capabilities as well as the GenAI models being run on-device to enable those features.”

In April, Apple published research about AI models it calls “efficient language models” that would be able to run on a phone. Microsoft is also publishing research on the same concept. One of Apple’s “OpenELM” models has 1.1 billion parameters, or weights — far smaller than OpenAI’s 2020 GPT-3 model which has 175 billion parameters, and smaller even than the 70 billion parameters in one version of Meta’s Llama, which is one of the most widely used language models.

In the paper, Apple’s researchers benchmarked the model on a MacBook Pro laptop running Apple’s M2 Max chip, showing that these efficient models don’t necessarily need to connect to the cloud. That can improve response speed, and provide a layer of privacy, because sensitive questions could be answered on the device itself, rather than being sent back to Apple servers.

Some of the features built into Apple’s software could include providing users a summary of their missed text messages, image generation for new emojis, code completing in the company’s development software Xcode, or drafting email responses, according to Bloomberg.

Apple could also decide to load up its M2 Ultra chips in its data centers to process AI queries that need more horsepower, Bloomberg reported.

Green bubbles and Vision Pro

A customer uses Apple’s Vision Pro headset at the Apple Fifth Avenue store in Manhattan in New York City, U.S., February 2, 2024. 

Brendan McDermid | Reuters

WWDC won’t strictly be about AI.

The company has more than 2.2 billion devices in use, and customers want improved software and new apps.

One potential upgrade could be Apple’s adoption of RCS, an improvement to the older system of text messaging known as SMS. Apple’s messages app diverts texts between iPhones to its own iMessage system, which displays conversations as blue bubbles. When an iPhone texts an Android phone, the bubble is green. Many features such as typing notifications aren’t available.

Google led development of RCS, adding encryption and other features to text messaging. Late last year Apple confirmed that it would add support for RCS alongside iMessage. The debut of iOS 18 would be the logical time to show its work.

The conference will also be the first anniversary of Apple’s reveal of the Vision Pro, its virtual and augmented reality headset, which was released in the U.S. in February. Apple could announce its expansion to more countries, including China and the U.K.

Apple said in its WWDC announcement that the Vision Pro would be in the spotlight. Vision Pro is currently on the first version of its operating system, and core features, such as its Persona videoconferencing simulation, are still in beta.

For users with a Vision Pro, Apple will offer some of its virtual sessions at the event in a 3D environment.

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Google unveils custom Arm-based chips, following similar efforts at rivals Amazon and Microsoft https://digitaltechblog.com/google-unveils-custom-arm-based-chips-following-similar-efforts-at-rivals-amazon-and-microsoft/ https://digitaltechblog.com/google-unveils-custom-arm-based-chips-following-similar-efforts-at-rivals-amazon-and-microsoft/#respond Tue, 09 Apr 2024 22:15:49 +0000 https://digitaltechblog.com/google-unveils-custom-arm-based-chips-following-similar-efforts-at-rivals-amazon-and-microsoft/

Google is trying to make cloud computing more affordable with a custom-built Arm-based server chip. At its Cloud Next conference in Las Vegas on Tuesday, the company said the new processor will become available later in 2024.

With the new Arm-based chip, Google is playing catch-up with rivals such as Amazon and Microsoft, which have been employing a similar strategy for years. The tech giants compete fiercely in the growing market for cloud infrastructure, where organizations rent out resources in faraway data centers and pay based on usage.

Google parent Alphabet still derives three-quarters of revenue from advertising, but cloud is growing faster and now represents almost 11% of company revenue. The segment, which contains corporate productivity applications, is also profitable. Google held 7.5% of the cloud infrastructure market in 2022, while Amazon and Microsoft together controlled around 62%, according to Gartner estimates.

Market leader Amazon Web Services introduced its Graviton Arm chip in 2018. “Almost all their services are already ported and optimized on the Arm ecosystem,” Chirag Dekate, an analyst at technology industry researcher Gartner, told CNBC in an interview. Graviton has picked up business from Datadog, Elastic, Snowflake and Sprinklr, among others.

Alibaba announced Arm processors in 2021, and Microsoft did the same in November.

Arm isn’t completely new to Google, which started selling access to virtual machines, or VMs, that use Oracle-backed startup Ampere’s Arm-based chips in 2022.

Porting applications to Arm machines has made sense for organizations seeking to reduce spending on cloud computing because of economic worries. When Arm Holdings filed to go public last year, it pointed to Amazon’s claim that Graviton could give up to 40% better price performance than comparable server instances, such as the common “x86” model used by AMD and Intel processors.

Google has used Arm-based server computers for internal purposes to run YouTube advertising, the BigTable and Spanner databases, and the BigQuery data analytics tool. The company will gradually move them over to the cloud-based Arm instances, which are named Axion, when they become available, a spokesperson said.

Datadog and Elastic plan to adopt Axion, along with OpenX and Snap, the spokesperson said.

Broader use of chips drawing on Arm’s architecture might lead to lower carbon emissions for certain workloads. Virtual slices of physical servers containing the Axion chips deliver 60% more energy efficiency than comparable VMs based on the x86 model, Google cloud chief Thomas Kurian wrote in a blog post. Arm chips, which are popular in smartphones, offer a shorter set of instructions than x86 chips, which are commonly found in PCs.

The chips can also speed up applications.

Axion offers 30% better performance than the fastest general-purpose Arm-based virtual machines in the cloud and 50% better performance than comparable VMs based on x86, Google said.

“I think it completes their portfolio,” Dekate said.

Correction: The Cloud Next conference is on Tuesday. An earlier version misstated the day.

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Nvidia posts revenue up 265% on booming AI business https://digitaltechblog.com/nvidia-posts-revenue-up-265-on-booming-ai-business/ https://digitaltechblog.com/nvidia-posts-revenue-up-265-on-booming-ai-business/#respond Wed, 21 Feb 2024 23:52:57 +0000 https://digitaltechblog.com/nvidia-posts-revenue-up-265-on-booming-ai-business/

Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, arrives for the Inaugural AI Insight Forum in the Russell Building on Capitol Hill on Sept. 13, 2023.

Tom Williams | Cq-roll Call, Inc. | Getty Images

Nvidia reported fourth fiscal quarter earnings that beat Wall Street’s forecast for earnings and sales, and said revenue during the current quarter would be better than expected, even against elevated expectations for massive growth.

Nvidia shares rose about 10% in extended trading.

Here’s what the company reported compared with what Wall Street was expecting for the quarter ending in January, based on a survey of analysts by LSEG, formerly known as Refinitiv:

  • Earnings per share: $5.16 adjusted vs. $4.64 expected
  • Revenue: $22.10 billion vs. $20.62 billion expected

Nvidia said it expected $24.0 billion in sales in the current quarter. Analysts polled by LSEG were looking for $5.00 per share on $22.17 billion in sales. 

Nvidia has been the primary beneficiary of the recent technology industry obsession with large artificial intelligence models, which are developed on the company’s pricey graphics processors for servers.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang addressed investor fears that the company may not be able to keep up this growth or level of sales for the whole year on a call with analysts.

“Fundamentally, the conditions are excellent for continued growth” in 2025 and beyond, Huang told analysts. He says demand for the company’s GPUs will remain high due to generative AI and an industry-wide shift away from central processors to the accelerators that Nvidia makes.

Nvidia reported $12.29 billion in net income during the quarter, or $4.93 per share, up 769% versus last year’s $1.41 billion or 57 cents per share. 

Nvidia’s total revenue rose 265% from a year ago, based on strong sales for AI chips for servers, particularly the company’s “Hopper” chips such as the H100, it said.

“Strong demand was driven by enterprise software and consumer internet applications, and multiple industry verticals including automotive, financial services and health care,” the company said in commentary provided to investors.

Nvidia posts Q4 beat on revenue and earnings

Those sales are reported in the company’s Data Center business, which now comprises the majority of Nvidia’s revenue. Data center sales were up 409% to $18.40 billion. Over half the company’s data center sales went to large cloud providers.

Nvidia said its data center revenue was hurt by recent U.S. restrictions on exporting advanced AI semiconductors to China.

“We understood what the restrictions are, reconfigured our products in a way that is not software hackable in any way, and that took some time so we reset our product offering to China,” Huang said. “Now we’re sampling to customers in China.”

Nvidia Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress said that while the company had improved supply of its AI GPUs, it still expected them to be in short supply, especially the next-generation chip, called B100, expected to ship later this year.

“We are delighted that supply of Hopper architecture products is improving,” Kress said on a call with analysts. “Demand for Hopper remains very strong. We can expect our next-generation products to be supply constrained as demand far exceeds supply.”

“Whenever we have new products, as you know, it ramps from zero to a very large number and you can’t do that overnight,” Huang said.

The company’s gaming business, which includes graphics cards for laptops and PCs, was merely up 56% year over year to $2.87 billion. Graphics cards for gaming used to be Nvidia’s primary business before its AI chips started taking off, and some of Nvidia’s graphics cards can be used for AI.

Nvidia’s smaller businesses did not show the same meteoric growth. Its automotive business declined 4% to $281 million in sales, and its OEM and other business, which includes crypto chips, rose 7% to $90 million. Nvidia’s business making graphics hardware for professional applications rose 105% to $463 million.

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How the NFL is transforming the media business with streaming https://digitaltechblog.com/how-the-nfl-is-transforming-the-media-business-with-streaming/ https://digitaltechblog.com/how-the-nfl-is-transforming-the-media-business-with-streaming/#respond Sun, 11 Feb 2024 23:21:14 +0000 https://digitaltechblog.com/how-the-nfl-is-transforming-the-media-business-with-streaming/

The NFL isn’t just the most popular sports league in the U.S., it’s also the most valuable with the highest-rated programming and the priciest ad time.

In 2021 the league signed an estimated $110 billion worth of media deals covering 11 years, which reportedly was nearly double the value of its previous contracts.

“If you’re the most valuable content on those platforms, you’re going to be the bulk of their investment. And that’s what we are,” said Brian Rolapp, chief media and business officer for the NFL.

Live updates now: Super Bowl commercials 2024

An average of nearly 18 million people tuned in to watch football games across TV and digital platforms during the 2023 regular season, the highest since 2015 and the second-highest ever, according to the NFL.

The pinnacle of the NFL’s popularity is the Super Bowl, the biggest television event of the year. Of the 30 most-watched broadcasts of all time in the U.S., 22 have been Super Bowl games, according to Nielsen.

The NFL’s move to ESPN in the late 1980s catapulted the rise of cable TV. Now, its jump into streaming is having ripple effects across the media and tech landscape.

“Media is 60% of the revenue of the NFL,” said Robert Kraft, principal owner of the New England Patriots. “If we don’t stay fluid and in tune with what the times are, then we’d have a real issue.”

With tech giants Alphabet and Amazon, along with NBCUniversal’s Peacock, snapping up digital rights to NFL games, and with the announcement this week that Disney‘s ESPN, Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery are launching a streaming service tailored to sports fans, it’s clear that streaming is poised to be the NFL’s next frontier, despite some backlash from fans.

“You will see us continue to lean into digital,” Rolapp told CNBC. “The trick will be doing it in a way that’s fan friendly, and doing it in a way that continues getting as much football to as many people as possible.”

Watch the documentary to learn more about how streaming is transforming the NFL.

Disclosure: NBCUniversal is the parent company of Peacock and CNBC

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Amazon reports better-than-expected results as revenue jumps 14% https://digitaltechblog.com/amazon-reports-better-than-expected-results-as-revenue-jumps-14/ https://digitaltechblog.com/amazon-reports-better-than-expected-results-as-revenue-jumps-14/#respond Thu, 01 Feb 2024 23:48:32 +0000 https://digitaltechblog.com/amazon-reports-better-than-expected-results-as-revenue-jumps-14/

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy speaks at the Bloomberg Technology Summit in San Francisco on June 8, 2022.

David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Amazon on Thursday reported fourth-quarter results that sailed past analysts’ estimates, and gave strong guidance for the current quarter. The stock climbed more than 8% in extended trading.

Here are the results:

  • Earnings per share: $1.00 vs. 80 cents expected by LSEG, formerly known as Refinitiv
  • Revenue: $170 billion vs. $166.2 billion expected by LSEG

Wall Street is also watching several other numbers in the report:

  • Amazon Web Services: $24.2 billion vs. $24.2 billion, according to StreetAccount
  • Advertising: $14.7 billion vs. $14.2 billion, according to StreetAccount

Amazon said first-quarter sales will be between $138 billion and $143.5 billion, representing growth of 8% to 13%. Analysts were expecting revenue of $142.1 billion, according to Refinitiv.

Amazon easily topped Wall Street’s expectations for earnings, indicating that CEO Andy Jassy’s efforts to rein in costs are paying off. Net income surged to $10.6 billion, or $1.00 per share, compared to $278 million, or 3 cents per share, a year earlier.

The company laid off 27,000 employees between late 2022 and mid-2023, and ended some of its more unproven bets. It has continued to look for ways to trim expenses in other areas, such as its fulfillment business. In January, it announced cuts in Prime Video, MGM Studios and Twitch, among other units.

Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky told reporters on Thursday that the company will continue to take a careful approach on new investments, but that it doesn’t see 2024 “as a year of efficiency type thing.”

“We’re going to continue to invest in new things and new areas and things that are resonating with customers,” Olsavsky said. “Where we can find efficiencies and do more with less, we’re going to do that as well.”

Revenue jumped 14% to $170 billion in the fourth quarter. The period reflects results from the holiday shopping season and Amazon’s October Prime Day event, both of which the company said exceeded its expectations.

“This Q4 was a record-breaking Holiday shopping season and closed out a robust 2023 for Amazon,” Jassy said in a statement. “As we enter 2024, our teams are delivering at a rapid clip, and we have a lot in front of us to be excited about.”

Sales at Amazon Web Services climbed 13% in the fourth quarter to $24.2 billion, in line with Wall Street’s forecast. That marks a slight uptick from the previous quarter, when sales expanded 12%, but it’s a deceleration from the year-ago period, when sales grew 20%.

For the past year, growth in AWS has slowed, as businesses trimmed their cloud spend. But Olsavsky said the company is seeing those cost optimizations diminish, and new workloads are picking up. He said there has been “a lot of interest” in AWS’ generative artificial intelligence products, such as “Q,” an AI chatbot for businesses.

Jassy said on a conference call with analysts that generative AI services remain a “relatively small” business, but the company believes they could drive “tens of billions of dollars” in revenue within the next several years.

Ahead of its earnings release Thursday, Amazon announced a generative AI shopping assistant, dubbed Rufus, which it’s testing among a subset of users in the U.S.

Amazon’s profitable advertising unit saw sales grow 27% year over year to $14.7 billion. Last month, the company began showing ads on Prime Video content, in a move analysts project will generate substantial new revenue for the business. Olsavsky said the company has seen “a lot of enthusiasm” from advertisers, but that Amazon plans to keep ad loads low.

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TikTok cuts about 60 jobs as January layoffs continue across tech industry https://digitaltechblog.com/tiktok-cuts-about-60-jobs-as-january-layoffs-continue-across-tech-industry/ https://digitaltechblog.com/tiktok-cuts-about-60-jobs-as-january-layoffs-continue-across-tech-industry/#respond Tue, 23 Jan 2024 23:55:11 +0000 https://digitaltechblog.com/tiktok-cuts-about-60-jobs-as-january-layoffs-continue-across-tech-industry/

TikTok Music has launched on Wednesday in Australia, Singapore and Mexico to a small group of users.

Jaap Arriens | Nurphoto | Getty Images

TikTok has cut about 60 jobs, CNBC confirmed, the latest tech company to downsize at the start of 2024.

A company spokesperson said all of those who were laid off “may apply to any open internal roles, of which there are over 120 similar roles posted currently.”

The job cuts were first reported on Monday evening by NPR. The ByteDance division characterized the layoffs to NPR as part of a routine reorganization that affected staff in sales and advertising who worked in the Los Angeles, New York, and Austin, Texas offices, as well as other global outposts.

Tech companies like Amazon, Alphabet, Unity, Discord and Trend Micro have all cut staff in January, continuing a trend from last year, when the industry slimmed down and slashed costs following an extended boom.

Earlier this week, Tencent’s Riot Games unit said it would cut 11% of its workforce, representing about 530 employees. In a letter to employees that was published as a blog post, Riot Games CEO Dylan Jadeja said the job cuts were necessary to “create focus and move us toward a more sustainable future.”

As of 2023, TikTok employed about 7,000 workers in the U.S. Meanwhile, ByteDance has a global workforce of over 150,000 employees.

In November, ByteDance slashed hundreds of jobs in the company’s gaming division, Nuverse. The layoffs indicated that ByteDance was scaling back its gaming efforts, an area where it’s been competing with Chinese rivals Tencent and NetEase.

“We regularly review our businesses and make adjustments to center on long-term strategic growth areas,” a spokesperson told CNBC at the time. “Following a recent review, we’ve made the difficult decision to restructure our gaming business.”

WATCH: The AI dark horse: Why Apple could win the next evolution of the AI arms race

The AI dark horse: Why Apple could win the next evolution of the AI arms race
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Amazon launches generative AI tool to answer shoppers’ questions https://digitaltechblog.com/amazon-launches-generative-ai-tool-to-answer-shoppers-questions/ https://digitaltechblog.com/amazon-launches-generative-ai-tool-to-answer-shoppers-questions/#respond Tue, 16 Jan 2024 23:15:04 +0000 https://digitaltechblog.com/amazon-launches-generative-ai-tool-to-answer-shoppers-questions/

Amazon trailers are parked at an Amazon Air gateway at Miami International Airport in Miami, Florida, on Sept. 26, 2023.

Joe Raedle | Getty Images

Amazon is rolling out an artificial intelligence tool that can answer shoppers’ questions about a product, a spokesperson confirmed, as the company continues to experiment with generative AI.

The new feature in Amazon’s mobile app prompts users to ask questions about a specific item. It then returns an answer within a few seconds, primarily by summarizing information collected from product reviews and the listing itself.

“We’re constantly inventing to help make customers’ lives better and easier, and are currently testing a new feature powered by generative AI to improve shopping on Amazon by helping customers get answers to commonly asked product questions,” Maria Boschetti, an Amazon spokesperson, said in an email.

The feature could keep shoppers from scrolling through pages of reviews or reading through a listing to find information about a product.

Unlike OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Amazon’s new feature isn’t equipped to carry out a conversation, but it can respond to creative prompts. On a listing for a women’s vest, it could write a haiku about the product. It was also able to describe the item in the style of Yoda from Star Wars. The tool is designed not to veer off subject, and will return an error message if it can’t answer questions such as, “Who is Jeff Bezos?”

The tool was first spotted by Marketplace Pulse, an e-commerce research firm.

Amazon has introduced several AI tools to its site in recent months. Last June, the company started testing AI-generated summaries of product reviews, and it has launched AI features for third-party sellers that help them write listings, as well as generate photos for ads. Elsewhere, it has rolled out “Q,” an AI chatbot for companies to assist with daily tasks, and Bedrock, a generative AI service for Amazon Web Services customers.

In Amazon’s latest earnings call, CEO Andy Jassy said the company is using generative AI to forecast inventory and to determine the best last-mile routes for drivers.

“Generative AI is going to change every customer experience, and it’s going to make it much more accessible for everyday developers, and even business users, to use,” Jassy told CNBC’s Jim Cramer last month. “So I think there’s going to be a lot of societal good.”

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