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Trade Wars
Intel Partners With SpaceX, Tesla to Operate New Chip Plant
Elon Musk is partnering with Intel I on his ambitious Terafab project, which aims to build specially designed chips for SpaceX and xAI as well as for Tesla. In an announcement Tuesday, Intel said it would work with the companies to “design, fabricate, and package ultra-high-performance chips at scale.” The company also shared a photo of Chief Executive Lip-Bu Tan shaking hands with Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla.
The partnership is a win for Intel, which has struggled in recent years, leading the company to cut its production capacity when demand was surging for data-center chips and when competitors like Nvidia and AMD have thrived. The fab will make chips for use in Tesla’s robotaxis and Optimus humanoid robot, two areas of priority for the electric-vehicle maker as it shifts its focus to artificial intelligence-enabled products. It will also make chips optimized for use in space, where SpaceX is planning to deploy huge numbers of satellites capable of handling AI computing tasks.
Read more at The WSJ
Samsung Enjoys Eightfold Jump In Quarterly Profit As AI Chip Demand Pumps Prices
Samsung Electronics (005930.KS), opens new tab on Tuesday projected its first-quarter earnings would exceed its entire profit for last year, beating expectations as booming demand for artificial intelligence infrastructure stretched supply and drove chip prices higher. Samsung has emerged as one of the major beneficiaries of the AI data centre boom that has constrained supply for traditional chips used in smartphones, PCs and game consoles and led to a near-doubling in chip prices in the first quarter alone. Research firm TrendForce expects contract DRAM (dynamic random access memory) chip prices to increase more than 50% in the current quarter as the shortage persists.
The world's largest memory chipmaker estimated an operating profit of 57.2 trillion won ($37.92 billion) for the January to March period, compared with an LSEG SmartEstimate of 40.6 trillion won and a more than eightfold jump from 6.69 trillion won a year earlier. The record-high results nearly triple Samsung's previous record quarterly operating profit of 20 trillion won, reached in the fourth quarter last year. The company is also gaining from a slump in the South Korean currency to a near 17-year low against the U.S. dollar, which has boosted repatriated earnings.
Read more at Reuters
Pentagon Requests More Than $20B For Strategic Capital Loan Program In 2027
The Defense Department is asking Congress for about $20.2 billion in the next fiscal year for a loan program designed to help eligible companies working in certain technology areas of interest. The funding request for the Defense Strategic Capital Credit Program, which is overseen by the Office of Strategic Capital, was included in fiscal 2027 budget documents recently released by the Pentagon and seeks to boost spending on the initiative by more than an order of magnitude.The program was allotted less than $1.5 billion for fiscal 2026, according to budget documents.
The OSC gave the office new authorities to issue loans and loan guarantees to eligible companies working on critical tech categories. The organization offers direct loans up to $150 million to finance projects. “OSC’s loan and loan guarantee authority is utilized to attract and scale investments for national security,” according to a Pentagon CTO website about the initiative. The 31 tech categories covered by the initiative include advanced bulk materials, advanced manufacturing, autonomous mobile robots, battery storage, biochemicals, bioenergetics, biomass, cybersecurity, data fabric, decision science, edge computing, external communication, hydrogen generation and storage, mesh networks, and microelectronics assembly, testing and packaging.
Read more at Defense Scoop
Iran War Casts Shadow On Otherwise Positive Sales Outlook At NY Auto Forum
The longer the Iran War lasts, the worse the consequences will be for U.S. auto sales and the U.S. economy in general, speakers said at the New York Auto Forum last week, even though – for now – sales forecasts remain largely unchanged. Besides the direct effect of higher energy prices, the Iran war also potentially disrupts auto-industry supply chains, he said. The war also creates economic unease and uncertainty, and that could lead to tighter borrowing conditions, Manzi said.
Meanwhile, even though the Iran war is an extra-extra-large asterisk, auto sales forecasts are surprisingly upbeat under the circumstances — roughly flat compared with 2025. At the forum, JD Power stuck with its 2026 U.S. light-vehicle forecast, issued in February at the NADA Show in Las Vegas, of 16.3 million cars and trucks, even with 2025.“While the industry will continue to face numerous macroeconomic uncertainties, we anticipate new-vehicle sales for 2026 will match the volumes we saw last year,” Thomas King, president, JD Power OEM Solutions, said at the forum.
Read more at Ward’s Auto
Used Car Prices Rise To Highest Point Since Summer 2023
Cox Automotive’s Manheim Used Vehicle Value Index — which tracks prices of used vehicles sold at its U.S. wholesale auctions — increased 6.2% last month compared with a year earlier. The index also hit its highest level since the summer of 2023, the company said Tuesday. Demand for used vehicles remains strong despite geopolitical tensions, high gas prices and the Iran war, according to auction data from Manheim.
Retail prices for consumers traditionally follow changes in wholesale prices, which Cox forecasts to rise at a historically stable rate of about 2% this year. The average listed price of a used vehicle was $25,287 as of February, according to Cox. That compares with new vehicles at an average price of more than $49,100. The stronger-than-expected demand for used vehicles so far this year caused Cox on Tuesday to slightly increase its used vehicle forecast for the year to 20.4 million, up from 20.3 million.
Read more at CNBC
Broadcom Signs Long-Term Deal To Develop Google’s Custom AI Chips
Broadcom said on Monday it has signed a long-term agreement with Google to develop and supply future generations of custom artificial intelligence chips and other components for the company's next-generation AI racks through 2031. The chip firm also signed a deal with Anthropic to provide the AI startup access to about 3.5 gigawatts of AI computing capacity drawing on Google's AI processors, starting in 2027.
Demand for custom chips such as Google's tensor processing units (TPUs), used for AI workloads, has surged in recent years as businesses seek alternatives to Nvidia's pricey graphics processors. Reuters reported in December that Google was pushing to make its TPUs a viable alternative to Nvidia's market-leading GPUs. TPU sales have become a crucial growth engine of Google's cloud revenue as it seeks to prove to investors that its AI investments are generating returns. Anthropic said on Monday that the new deal builds on the company's commitment to invest $50 billion in strengthening U.S. computing infrastructure.
Read more at AP
Novo Nordisk’s Explosive Wegovy Pill Launch Draws A New Wave Of Patients Into GLP-1 Weight Loss Treatment
Almost a month after starting Novo Nordisk ’s new Wegovy pill appears to be expanding the obesity treatment market, largely drawing in new patients rather than converting existing ones from injections. CNBC spoke with five U.S. patients who recently started the pill following its launch, all of whom said they have not previously taken branded GLP-1 injections. But it’s early days for the pill. Many patients have yet to reach higher doses of the drug, and their experiences vary.
Novo has a head start in the pill arena over Lilly, which just won U.S. approval of its own GLP-1 drug for obesity last week. Analysts previously told CNBC they still expect that rival pill, called Foundayo, to capture a segment of the market, in part because it lacks the dietary restrictions that come with Novo’s oral drug. Still, the Wegovy pill appears to have had the most explosive launch of a GLP-1 product yet. The latest number that Novo disclosed in February is that more than 600,000 prescriptions had been written since its launch, including for more than 3,000 patients in the first week.
Read more at CNBC
Artemis II Moon Crew Flies Farther Than Humans Have Ever Gone Before
The four astronauts of NASA's Artemis II mission flew deeper into space on Monday than any humans before them, as they cruised through a rare flyby of the shadowed far side of the moon that revealed a lunar surface under cosmic bombardment. The six-hour survey of the normally hidden hemisphere of Earth's only natural satellite was highlighted by the astronauts' direct visual observations of "impact flashes" from meteors pelting the darkened and heavily cratered lunar surface.
The six-hour flyby, which swooped to within 4,070 miles of the lunar surface, came six days into a spaceflight marking the world's first voyage of astronauts to the vicinity of the moon since NASA's Cold War-era Apollo missions more than half a century ago. Six of those missions landed two-man teams on the moon between 1969 and 1972 - the only 12 humans ever to walk on its surface. Artemis, a successor to the Apollo program, aims to repeat that achievement by 2028, ahead of China's first landing, and to establish a long-term U.S. lunar presence over the next decade, including a moon base to serve as a proving ground for potential future missions to Mars.
See the Artemis II mission pictures at NASA
Jet Fuel Supply Concerns Grow As War On Iran Drags On, Airlines Cut Flights
The surging price of jet fuel isn’t the airline industry’s only problem. Now, it’s whether it will have enough. Since the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran on Feb. 28, the price of jet fuel in the U.S. has nearly doubled, going from $2.50 a gallon on Feb. 27 to $4.88 a gallon on April 2, with the increases even sharper in other regions. The effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz is choking off supplies of both crude and refined products like jet fuel, further driving up the price.
The U.S. produces a lot of jet fuel and isn’t as exposed as other regions like Europe and parts of Asia are in comparison. But aircraft fill up locally, so some U.S. airlines could face shortages on international trips. United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby told reporters late last month that the carrier, which has the most service to Asia among U.S. airlines, would have to cut back its flights there. He also said it’s “not impossible” that airlines collectively would have to reduce service in that region. He noted that as the price of jet fuel goes up, it could be more acute in parts of the U.S. that aren’t as connected by pipelines.
Read more at CNBC
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