Dell Tech World, Musk Commits to Staying at Tesla
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Live from Las Vegas at Dell Technologies World, this is Bloomberg Technology. Coming up this hour, we'll drill down into AI infrastructure and throughout the day with experts in the field right here at Dell Tech World. Plus, Elon Musk discusses everything from Tesla and Starlink to his political involvement and artificial intelligence. And the circuit returns with an exclusive look into OpenAI's first Stargate site,

in Texas. This is what financial markets look like right now. I'd say we're taking a bit of a breather. The Nasdaq 100, our big tech index, softer by about six tenths of one percent. There is also softness in semiconductor names and some infrastructure names. We're looking at specific movers as well.

One name to the upside, although it's paired some of its momentum, is Dell Technologies. In the last 24 hours, talking about its expanded AI enterprise solutions, partnership with NVIDIA. NVIDIA is one of the big movers to the downside, and indeed it's a points drag.

when you think about the index level, the Nasdaq 100 or the SOX. Then there is Tesla. Tesla is up 1% but had been much higher and pushed much higher in the pre-market because of statements by Elon Musk. Tesla CEO Elon Musk spoke to Bloomberg in a wide-ranging interview from the Qatar Economic Forum in a conversation with Bloomberg's Michel Hussain. Here is part of that interview.

Tell me then how committed you are to Tesla. Do you see yourself and are you committed to still being the chief executive of Tesla in five years' time? No doubt about that at all. Okay, short of that. I can't be sure if I'm dead, so there's a slight amount of doubt. Does that mean that the value of your pay doesn't have any bearing on your decision? Well, that's not really a subject for discussion in this forum.

I think obviously there should be a compensation for if something incredible is done, the compensation should match that something incredible was done. But I'm confident that whatever some activist posing as a judge in Delaware happens to do will not affect the future compensation.

This is the judge who twice struck down the $56 billion pay package that was awarded to you. I think the value on the basis, on the current value of stock options, yeah. Not a judge, not a judge. The activist who is cosplaying a judge in a Halloween costume. Okay, that's your characterisation. I think the value, on the current value of stock options, I think the actual...

On the current value of stock options, I think the value of that pay package stands at about $100 billion. Are you saying you are relaxed about the value of your future pay package? Your decision to be committed to Tesla for the next five years, as long as you are still with us on this planet, is completely independent of pay? It's not independent. So pay is a relevant factor then to your commitment to Tesla?

A sufficient voting control such that I cannot be ousted by activist investors is what matters to me. And I've said this publicly many times. But let's not have this whole thing be a discussion of mileage pay. It's not a money thing. It's a reasonable control thing over the future of the company, especially if we're building millions, potentially billions of humanoid robots. I can't be sitting there

and one day get tossed out for political reasons by activists, that would be unacceptable. That's all that matters. That was Tesla CEO Elon Musk speaking to Bloomberg at the Qatar Economic Forum. I want to keep the conversation going with Bloomberg's David Welch, who covers the auto industry out of Detroit. And David, let's just be frank about this. In the pre-market, because this conversation took place prior to the market open in the United States, the thing that moved the stock was very simply Elon Musk

explicit iteration that he is committed to Tesla for the next five years with the context being that there have been concerns about his position as CEO and how long he will stay in that role.

That's correct. Look, he said he was going to stay there for five years, that pay is not really the object for him. He wants to maintain control of the company. And I think that's something key in what he said. As long as he's able to keep control, and there's no reason to think that he cannot, he'll be around with the company. And since the shares took a hit when it appeared he was overly distracted, if he's engaged, he's in control,

He stays, and that's what keeps investors happy. So shares went up quite a bit on that. Now, they came down later. Maybe he was talking about too many other things, and investors are kind of getting the idea that even if he is CEO, Elon's always going to have a lot of different interests that are commanding his attention. But you're right. Bottom line is he's going to be there for five years at least. He'll be running the company, and he has his way controlling the company, and that's what investors want to know.

He discussed SpaceX, Neuralink, XAI, and I encourage our audience to go and watch the full 30-minute conversation. As it relates to Tesla, though, a part of the conversation was about Elon's politics. And Michel Hussain, our colleague, pushed him on whether sales had been damaged by his association with the Trump administration. He made the point that that weakness was largely felt in Europe, but that all automakers have also seen some weakness in Europe. What do we learn about the

health of Tesla's kind of core auto business, David? DAVID ROBERTSON: Yeah, look, he's kind of dismissing that there's a lot of weakness here. And clearly, they've had issues with their sales softening up in the US. They've got a lot more competition in China and Europe as well.

I think maybe the political side of that is more pronounced in Europe, but you've seen it here. You've seen more people turning in Teslas in the used market, and they've had a tough time selling them at decent prices, both because of the discounting that he had done over the past couple of years and also, I think, because of the politics. There's a lot of research that shows that EV buyers tend to be, let's call it, somewhere left of center to very liberal in terms of the political spectrum.

And some of them aren't going to like Elon's politics and have probably gone elsewhere. General Motors saying that Cadillac is getting 10% of their trade-ins, according to a CNBC report, are coming from Tesla owners. So clearly some other companies are benefiting from this in the U.S. and other places. The one thing he did say is you're seeing some more conservative, politically conservative consumers buy Teslas. And I can see that happening because...

Conservatives weren't quite looking at EVs as much, so maybe there's some mitigation to some of the sales loss that he's seen. But clearly this has taken an effect on the company's sales, and it's going to be something that he's going to have to deal with going forward, at least with fresher product, and maybe by talking a little bit less about politics in the future as well.

Bloomberg's David Welch, thank you very much. Another stock technology investors are watching, Alphabet. The company's Google I.O. conference kicks off with many hoping to get a glimpse of the company's AI advancements. Bloomberg's Ryan Veselica joins us now.

You take into account every single morning the macro and the micro. There are technology events happening all over the world right now. I'm in Las Vegas at Dell Technologies World, but back in Silicon Valley, Google I.O. is underway. And I guess as investors, you have to wait for the headlines to come out. What are we expecting and what is the anticipation that's driving this name?

Hey, thanks for having me. There's a lot of anticipation about this event because there's a lot of hope being put on Alphabet right now that it will be able to sort of shake off some of these AI-related concerns that have been dogging the stock, especially this year, but really for two years or so. Ever since ChatGPT first came out, people have been concerned that Alphabet's market share, especially with an internet search,

is at risk of some erosion from these newer AI-related startups. So it is very crucial for them to sort of really dazzle investors today and really show off some new functionality and services and integration across its products and applications. People really want to see that they are still a major player and help shift the narrative within AI from Alphabet maybe being a little bit behind to them still being at the forefront.

You look across financial markets this morning, Ryan, I see largely big tech under pressure, semiconductor names, NVIDIA dragging us lower. Is there a core story, even at a macro level right now for the tech sector?

Well, I think people just remain very focused on the economic outlook right now. There's been so much back and forth with respect to tariff policy and just kind of government policy overall. This comes at a time, you know, we just got out of the earnings season. And while it was probably a pretty strong season overall, I think there's a lot of concerns about what is this next quarter going to look like? What is going to be the real impact of tariffs? What is growth going to be? When are we going to start seeing a bigger return on all this AI investment? There's still a lot of

very big picture questions right now, coupled with valuations that are sort of in the middle of their longer term range right now. They're certainly well off their highs, but they're also well off their lows that we saw following the tariff situation in early April. So I think people are really in a wait and see mode right now, which is why you're seeing people looking to events like IO just to see what the next catalyst is going to be.

All right, Bloomberg's Ryan Vlaselica, thank you very much. Now, coming up, we'll hear from the CEO of Cohere about what the OpenAI rival is doing to attract enterprise clients right here at Dell Technologies World. This is Bloomberg Technology.

Welcome back to Bloomberg Technology. We're live from Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas and joined now by Aidan Gomez, the co-founder and CEO of AI developer Cohere, which provides security-focused LLMs to businesses, developers, the enterprise. And so a reasonable question for the audience is, why is an LLM builder like Cohere

at Dell Technologies World? Why would you look so deeply at infrastructure? And I think that very quickly takes us to the discussion around agentic AI, the issue of AI memory and why having at the edge proximity to where the data's from

That's, I think, what we're talking about here in your relationship. Yeah, definitely. So we're here to announce our partnership. And the reason that we're partnering with Dell is because for enterprises, as they're adopting this technology, security is incredibly important. And access to the infrastructure that powers the technology is important.

That means GPUs and hardware, which is what Dell does best. And so we're announcing our partnership to deploy our North platform, which is our AI agent platform, on-prem with Dell for their customers. It's a competitive field. Cohere is kind of seen as the smaller player when you think about entropic and open AI.

What is your competitive moat? What is it that makes Cohere different, Aidan? I think what makes us best is our focus and the fact that we're able to deploy so privately. So there's no other provider that's able to provide a product that goes on-prem, that goes on any cloud, and that enterprises feel comfortable plugging in all of their data. Because it's not being sent to Cohere, it's staying on their infrastructure. And so that security element is what

would push a customer to choose you over one of those names like OpenAI and Anthropic. Yeah, exactly. So if you're going to build agents, they need to be able to see the information and access the systems that the humans within your organization see and access. And to do that, you have to have a lot of trust in that system. You certainly don't want critical customer data, patient records, going to some other entity and maybe getting compromised. And so Cohere's deployment model is just by far the most secure one.

What kind of an unlock is Dell and working with Dell? Like in very simple terms, Dell takes an underlying technology, I'm assuming from NVIDIA when we talk about the accelerator, but AMD Intel puts it into the server format and helps you build that infrastructure out.

But that's not your area of expertise. So just reflect on what it's like working with Dell and how it's allowed you to kind of move more quickly, I suppose. So I think similar to Cohere, Dell has the trust of the world's enterprises. The most secure and private deployments are powered by Dell.

So we've been incredibly lucky to partner with them. For us, they are a go-to-market partner, they're a technology partner, and really they're helping us develop this product north for the enterprises in extremely regulated sectors that have those high privacy security constraints. There's been reports about Cohere's sort of financial success. I think on a run rate basis or annualized basis, $100 million of revenue, something like that.

Talk more about those numbers and the trajectory that you're on as a business selling to enterprise. Yeah, so since ChatGPT has come out, the enterprise world has kind of struggled to catch up and keep up with the consumer market, but it started now. So last year was kind of the year of the POC, but now we're seeing production. We're seeing these enterprise deployments hit.

hit the hands of every single employee within the organization. And so it's really started to scale. We've already doubled revenue since the beginning of this year. And so we're seeing a total takeoff on the enterprise side of the business. Profitable? We're not profitable yet. And what are the biggest factors in that? I'm guessing it is compute and talent that keeps you spending money.

Definitely compute. We have to build these models. But I think we're very, very close to crossing that line and becoming profitable. We're not far away. And so the enterprise market's growth is really fueling our own growth. But we'll continue to invest. We want to grow as quickly as possible. And so we'll keep scaling up the team, the compute, and marketing.

Unless I'm mistaken, because I look at the headlines every single day, I think it's been almost a year since you've raised any money. And even those bigger beasts, Anthropic and OpenAI, continue to use various mechanisms to raise funds. What will you do next? Of course, we're a startup, so we'll continue to fundraise and fuel the business. We have nothing to announce right now, but you can imagine we'll continue to fundraise and grow as we approach IPO. If you're...

In this environment with $100 million annualized revenue, and you think about growth into next year, you said revenues doubled so far this year, I think you said, right? More than doubled. More than doubled. What is it within enterprise that's driving that? Are there specific sectors in the financial industry or in healthcare where you're finding you get traction in those bigger deals? So because of how secure we are,

Our product really resonates with regulated industries. So think financial services, public sector, telco, energy. These regulated industries, they currently can't access the technology without having those security constraints met. And so our partnership with Dell, our private deployment model, really lends itself well to them. It's so funny how things change. You know, there was a time very recently where

trying to push a company to go on-prem basically was like unthinkable. We were all moving to the cloud. How hard is it to be not U-turned but pivot back to a different infrastructure model and say to customers that want to work with you, like, this is the best way of doing it?

I think we've gotten quite good at it. We don't want our customers to compromise. And the other piece of it is to really see the ROI of AI and these agents. Those agents need to have access to all of your systems. If you don't trust the technology, you're not going to plug it in to those systems. And so maximizing trust just points in the direction of on-prem or extremely private clouds. And for regulated industries, it's a must-have. It's the only option.

And so I think we've gotten quite good at that and it's not as painful as it used to be. Aidan, can Dell move as quickly as you need them to? I definitely think so. I think they are. Any illustrative example on that? I think that we were able to get a North instance up and running on Dell within a week. And so the velocity on that side, fitting to their hardware, their rack, that speed

I think proves that the urgency from both sides is there. Aidan Gomez, CEO at Co here, here at Dell Technologies World. Thank you very much. Now coming up, Google kicks off its developer conference where the focus will also be on search and AI. We're going to have those details next live from the ground. This is Bloomberg Technology. We're also watching shares overnight in Hong Kong.

This is CATL, the world's biggest maker of EV batteries and battery cells. Hong Kong debut surging 16%, more than 16% in its trading debut, something that we've covered increasingly on this show in recent days. We'll track it throughout the week. This is Bloomberg Technology. Remember when a single technology glitch could bring an entire workday to a standstill? I'm Mark Banfield, Chief Commercial Officer at TeamViewer.

Today, most technical issues are recurring. If you know the patterns, these issues can be remediated before they impact your business. One major UK retailer discovered a single point of sale outage cost them around $1 million in lost sales during a single lunchtime. Now, using TeamViewer's digital workplace platform, the same company is able to identify and fix those issues before they even happen. But proactive troubleshooting isn't just about the incremental improvements.

is about fundamentally reimagining how work happens for everyone. And the companies that move first get competitive advantages in terms of efficiency, productivity and innovation. To find out more, visit bloomberg.com forward slash teamviewer.

The world is built on code. From the apps we use every day to the systems powering industries, developers like you are the architects of tomorrow. But let's be real. The road to innovation can get a little tricky. You need the right tools to move fast, but you also need a community to help you go further. That's where Microsoft comes in. Microsoft has the tools to help you move at lightning speed, like GitHub Copilot, VS Code, and a ton of AI resources to keep you on the cutting edge.

But here's the best part. You can build with confidence, knowing that Microsoft security and compliance are already taken care of. No more worrying about vulnerabilities or threats while you focus on your craft.

And with Azure AI Foundry, you can build your way. The future is yours to build, no strings attached. From ready-to-code tools to full flexibility, it's all in one place. The future's in your hands. So learn more at developer.microsoft.com.

One of the many technology events taking place around the world this week is Google I/O. The Search Giant's annual developer conference, Bloomberg's Jackie Davlos, is in Mountain View for us. And we were talking earlier with Ryan Veselica, right, that there is this hope from investors and Google staff and technology industry participants that Google I/O will give us something that the dominant alphabet Google once had is not on shaky ground, Jackie.

AMNA NAWAZ: That's exactly right, Ed. The stakes are high today, and not just because it's Google's biggest event of the year, but because its rivals are really nipping at its heels when it comes to artificial intelligence. The big focus here today, along with some other announcements on the hardware front, is really going to be AI, its flagship AI model, Gemini.

has it been improved and how much of a leap is it from Gemini 2.0? We're going to be looking for specific examples of what sets this model apart in addition to how much it's going to cost its users, who is going to have access to it, and how it's going to be integrated across Google's suite of products. Think its Android operating system, but also Google productivity apps like Docs and Sheets. Search ultimately is what we're

all really going to be also paying attention to here. As you mentioned, Ed, investors are really starting to wonder if it is on shaky ground when it comes to rivals like OpenAI, not just competing on AI now, but also on the search front.

You know, Google I/O is a developer's conference, but we were just showing the calendar of all of the technology conferences in this kind of intense four-day period. And it's very much about business, right? What will Alphabet and Google tell us about how Gemini is being used by enterprise customers, about how it's helping drive growth for GCP, Google Cloud Platform?

That's exactly right. And if you actually think back to Llamacon, Meta's conference just a couple weeks ago, they announced that they were going to be creating a new kind of API to roll it out to that developer community in the same way that OpenAI has a competing product there. This is kind of another frontier of how we can monetize this with a community that is really

really plugged into this kind of technology. Developers are really the ones that almost get kind of the first wave of usage, and this is how you get to see what's working and what's not working. But at the same time, we're going to be looking for other ways that AI is going to be integrated across its ecosystem. We got some reports a couple weeks ago that search is also going to be maybe taking on a different form in multimodal ways that we could expect

to be rolled out today, what it's going to mean for the experience overall. Think shopping features. I think there was a report that really teased that this might be coming down the pipeline. How it rolls it out to its user base is going to be key. We just had 20 seconds, Jackie, but what's the vibe on the ground in Mountain View?

There's so much energy. As you can imagine, this has kind of been a really packed year for artificial intelligence, deep seek, meta, all these other rivals really starting to kind of generate buzz about the next frontier for AI. And you can really feel that today. The music's pumping. So I'm excited. Right.

Bloomberg's Jackie Davalos, thank you very much. Coming up, we go inside OpenAA's first site for Stargate. This is Bloomberg Technology.

Welcome back to Bloomberg Technology. I'm Ed Ludlow in Las Vegas, live from Dell Technologies World. This is what financial markets look like right now. We've lost momentum, particularly on our big tech index, right? The NASDAQ 100 has been under pressure, but it is semiconductors where you see underperformance. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index, or SOX, down six-tenths of a percent, and

Nvidia is a big reason why later in the show we're gonna get into it with Bloomberg's Ian King about what is happening with Nvidia There is a lot of news flow from here in Las Vegas and its partnership with Dell But also Computex in the last 48 hours out of Taiwan on that name I want to bring you a piece of news a technology headline that you might have missed Airbnb shares are also under pressure right now There was a report in the New York Times in the last 24 hours that Spain the country of Spain has asked

Airbnb to remove about 66,000 listings in that country. That seems to be the only catalyst out there. The stock down almost 3%. We'll continue to track that. Of course, Brian Chesky was just on the show last week talking about some of that expansion, particularly in Europe. The focus right now, as it has been for many days, is AI infrastructure. The CEOs of OpenAI and SoftBank have promised a lot

with their Stargate investment pledging to spend as much as $500 billion. In the latest episode of The Circuit, Bloomberg's Emily Chang spoke with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son about their hopes for the project and how it came about. How did you get to talking with Masayoshi Son and Larry Ellison and how did you all come together?

I did two kind of long trips around the world, and a lot of it was to talk to developers and governments, but a lot of it was also to just really try to, like, get my head around the supply chain. On one of those trips, I met with Masa, and we got to speaking about, you know, what it would take to do compute at this kind of scale. Hi, Masa. It's so nice to see you. What conversations did you have with Sam that led to Stargate?

Well, we have a shared vision of AGI coming soon and we need compute.

Of all the bets you could make, why this? Why Stargate? Well, I believe in the vision that this AI, the AGI, will change mankind's life in every aspect. And we are lucky to see this enormous revolution, and I'd like to be part of that. I get excited.

Explain the math to us. How does it all add up to needing $500 billion?

Well, that covers the capacity we think we need for the next few years, given our growth projections. The interesting question is if we knew how to get a trillion dollars right now, which we don't, would we be able to deploy that profitably in the next few years? And I'm not sure about that, but I feel confident we can make 500 billion of value back.

There was OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son there. Let's bring in Bloomberg's Emily Chang for more, who actually got exclusive access to that Stargate site in Abilene, Texas. And like any technology journalist, just take my word for it, dreams of going inside, you know, the cutting edge hyperscale data center. Seriously, they do. Even better to get into it is

Before it's fully built and operational, what was that like? What did you see? What did you record and report?

Well, Ed, as you know, I mean, after 15 years of covering technology, it's not necessarily the most visual story, but seeing the sheer scale and speed at which these data centers are rising from the red dirt in Abilene, Texas, was pretty incredible. You know, there's been a lot of mystery, a lot of, you know, secrets around this project. Some people don't even believe it is real, but I have to tell you, I was there. We saw the cranes and the excavators, and we walked around in the hard hats,

And there is building after building that right now is empty, but it's going to be packed with NVIDIA GPUs. And all of those GPUs are going to power what Sam Altman and Masayoshi Son believe will be the insatiable demand for AI. And right now, they just don't have enough compute. And that's why OpenAI really, really needs this project to succeed, really, really needs this money to fund the resources that will power ChatGPT, of course, and more.

The money the pledge is 500 billion dollars is Masayoshi's son really going to be able to raise all of it Yeah, lots of skepticism about that Ed In fact Bloomberg just reported that the tariffs are creating even more uncertainty Some investors are questioning whether they really want to invest in all these data centers. I did talk to Mas about this He said there are macro shifts all the time for you know the decades that he's been in this business and

You know, the economy is always changing, always shifting, but one thing that is so true for him is that AI is going to be big. And he talked about his conviction around AI, around AGI, that everybody is going to want to use this, is going to need this. He admitted, I've made mistakes. We work, of course. That was a mistake. He has the scars of...

from the mistakes he's made, but he believes that gives him a stronger conviction about what's coming next and that this is a bet that needs to be made. And he said step by step, it's not 500 billion all at once, let's take it one day at a time. - What's kind of wild is like Stargate is the headline, but they're not alone in this field, right? AWS and Amazon wanna bring Project Rainier online. There are all the deals in the Middle East for infrastructure. Do we really need like all of these data centers?

Right. Amazon, Microsoft, they actually have been pulling back. And there is this question, is a building stuffed with GPUs that get really hot, is that really the best way to power the AI of the future? And sort of everyone agrees there will be a more efficient way at some point, even Sam Walton said so, but that's not happening now. And so Sam said, we need these data centers now. We think we can...

return $500 billion in value. And sort of the idea is, you know, Stargate's around the world. And even if we've seen Microsoft and Amazon pull back a little, they are still building, like you mentioned, Project Rainier and others. So I actually want to introduce you to the developer of the Stargate project. It's a company called Crusoe Chase Lockmiller.

He's the guy that took me around and we rode around in our little ATV, maybe a big ATV, seeing all this red dirt be moved. And he talked about sort of just the scale of the infrastructure that's happening in the building that he expects to happen across the U.S. and around the world. Take a listen.

What we're undergoing right now is sort of the largest infrastructure build in human history. This is like where we built the interstate highway system. That enabled massive interstate commerce and transportation and catalyzed this massive boom in the US economy. What's happening in AI infrastructure is we're building the superhighway system that's going to enable modern intelligent systems.

So right now at Stargate, there are about 22,000 employees on site bringing this thing to life. They're building it. But the question is, how many people does it actually take to run a data center?

And the partners of Stargate have legally agreed to 350 or so jobs. The people of Abilene, however, are hoping that it'll create a lot more jobs than that. So if you watch the premiere episode of The Circuit, which is out now, you'll get to see, you know, not just those interviews, but we talked to the people of Abilene, the mayor of Abilene, and, you know, learn more about just how this project is coming to life.

Bloomberg's Emily Chang, thank you very much. And as Em said, do check out The Circuit with Emily. Season 3 premieres this Thursday, 6 p.m. Eastern on Bloomberg Television. You can also catch the full episode online at Bloomberg.com and, of course, on the Bloomberg Terminal. Another news headline, Builder AI, the AI startup,

backed by Microsoft and the Qatar Investment Authority, will go into insolvency proceedings and appoint an administrator to manage the company's affairs, according to a statement Bloomberg reported in March that the London-based company lowered the sales figures it provided to investors and hired auditors to examine its last two years of accounts.

Okay, coming up, we're gonna hear from OpenAI COO, Brad Lightcap on the company's global growth goals. A little bit more OpenAI for you. That's next. This is Bloomberg Technology. - Remember when a single technology glitch could bring an entire workday to a standstill? I'm Mark Banfield, Chief Commercial Officer at TeamViewer. Today, most technical issues are recurring. If you know the patterns, these issues can be remediated before they impact your business.

One major UK retailer discovered a single point of sale outage cost them around $1 million in lost sales during a single lunchtime. Now, using TeamViewer's digital workplace platform, the same company is able to identify and fix those issues before they even happen. But proactive troubleshooting isn't just about the incremental improvements. It's about fundamentally reimagining how work happens for everyone.

And the companies that move first get competitive advantages in terms of efficiency, productivity, and innovation. To find out more, visit bloomberg.com forward slash team viewer.

The world is built on code. From the apps we use every day to the systems powering industries, developers like you are the architects of tomorrow. But let's be real. The road to innovation can get a little tricky. You need the right tools to move fast, but you also need a community to help you go further. That's where Microsoft comes in. Microsoft has the tools to help you move at lightning speed, like GitHub Copilot, VS Code, and a ton of AI resources to keep you on the cutting edge.

But here's the best part. You can build with confidence, knowing that Microsoft security and compliance are already taken care of. No more worrying about vulnerabilities or threats while you focus on your craft.

And with Azure AI Foundry, you can build your way. The future is yours to build, no strings attached. From ready-to-code tools to full flexibility, it's all in one place. The future's in your hands. So learn more at developer.microsoft.com.

OpenAI's COO Brad Lightcap says he sees AI tools ultimately boosting productivity and detailed OpenAI's global expansion goals. He spoke exclusively with Bloomberg TV's Tom McKenzie, who began by asking if AI is potentially capping job growth.

I don't think so. And I think that's because the world is actually gated on resources, on productivity, right? I think if you talk to any enterprise, and we talk to companies all the time, I ask them, what's their number one concern for how they think about the next five years of investment? And oftentimes, one of the things we hear is, I can't hire enough software engineers.

We live in a digital economy. I know I have to transition my product, my services, my business processes into more software-based approaches, but I don't have enough people. So how do you now bring a tool to the market that enables a software engineer to be 50% more productive, 2x more productive? This is an incredible thing. And so that's actually kind of the way we look at it is to the extent you can enhance output.

Then it really is just on the company, the firm, the individual to figure out ways to do new things. And so the job question will inevitably be different. Jobs will change, but I don't think there's reason to believe that jobs will go away. Stargate is being built out in the US, obviously with your partners.

What about sovereign AI? What about Stargate outside of the US? Are you in conversations with governments around the world about building out Stargate outside of the US? What does that conversation look like? How many different countries are you talking to at this point? Well, we see this incredible demand not only from individuals, not only from companies, but even from governments for how do we start to bring AI kind of into our country, right? Into our kind of national consciousness and have it penetrate in a way that accrues benefit to the average person.

That was really the big initiative behind our recently launched OpenAI for Countries, was how do we actually work with governments to design some of these programs? And that includes infrastructure. It includes deploying the models. It includes figuring out how to integrate government services, for example, into ways that would be more AI-powered, AI-native. And it includes investment in the economies of these countries to enable a startup ecosystem that we see thriving in the United States. Which countries are on your list?

Right now, we're very early. We announced this very recently, but we think it's going to be a scalable program.

That was OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap speaking with her own Tom McKenzie. Staying on AI, shares of Nvidia are lower today. Investors are getting a little bit wary of pouring money into the chip maker, but Nvidia's reign as the AI chip king remains despite increased competition. I want to bring in Bloomberg's Ian King, who's been writing in a Bloomberg Quick Take about Nvidia's dominance and posing the question, Ian, can it last?

At the moment, there are no challengers who can take away that massive amount of market share. The challenge that Nvidia faces and the challenge that it's spending arguably as much time as on anything else addressing is, can we keep this massive spending on AI moving forward? You talk to other companies and they're like, oh,

we can get a bit of market share here and there, but nobody, even a company like Qualcomm newly coming to the market wants to work with NVIDIA. There's nobody thinking that we can knock NVIDIA off their perch right now.

There's a story on the Bloomberg terminal that reflects some concern on Capitol Hill, particularly from Democrats, about all of the infrastructure deals that were announced in the Gulf last week. NVIDIA was kind of the headline among them, right? Sending GPUs, the latest generation GPU, to both Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates. You were involved in some of that reporting. What is the concern?

Yeah, I mean, it's really important to note that there's a through line here that sort of spans the aisle. There are China hawks or China people concerned about national security on both sides of the Republicans and the Democrats.

What they are concerned about is that the Middle East will act as a gateway for US technology to leak, to diffuse, and for China to get access to in kind of a backdoor way. The key question, though, is whether they can get together and whether there are any mechanisms that would allow them to basically stop what is happening, what this Trump administration initiative is trying to push forward.

Bloomberg's Ian King in San Francisco. Thank you very much. Sticking with chips, Nintendo has partnered with Samsung to produce the main chips for the Switch 2, which may help Nintendo sell more than 20 million units by March next year. Samsung's working on a customized chip designed by NVIDIA and can ramp up production further if needed. The deal is a win for Samsung, which has struggled to compete with TSMC in the field of contract chip making. All right, coming up,

CoreWeave's Chief Strategy Officer Brian Ventura joins us to talk about the company's strategy for keeping up with AI data center demand. That's next. This is Bloomberg Technology.

Across many technology events taking place all over the world this week, the focus is AI infrastructure. That's true here at Dell Tech World. Brian Ventura is the chief strategy officer at CoreWeave. We've been focusing on meeting AI infrastructure demands and integration of AI in businesses of all types. Brian, really simple question to start.

What is the relationship between Dell and CoreWeave? I think about CoreWeave as a builder of data center or AI infrastructure, but Dell is a builder of servers. How do you work together? So it's a deep technical partnership first and foremost. And I'm going to be asked later today why that partnership started and how we choose partners. It's really rooted in trust.

I have to know that when we have a problem and when you're building supercomputers at the scale that we do, there are problems. When that happens, I can call somebody and they help me solve it very quickly. So Dell has been amazing from a trust perspective, from an engineering performance and expertise perspective. They've moved quickly. They've moved very quickly, which has been great for us. It's really important to be first to market for CoreWeave because our customers and the biggest AI labs in the world really trust us to help them be first to market with their products.

So Dell has been instrumental for us in the GB200 rollout. They've been a tremendous partner and we're excited to grow. And let me just jump in there because this is at the core of what we're talking about. You both rely on NVIDIA's core technology, the GPU or AI accelerator. NVIDIA historically does not have its own direct sales channel. They would go to a Dell.

or somebody else would go to a Dell and be like, I want some NVIDIA gear. Where do you fit in? Is Dell the sales channel for CoreWeave or CoreWeave's the sales channel for Dell? So...

It's a little bit of both. Right. Right. And the lines have been blurred there for sure. You know, we're working with customers before we purchase infrastructure. We call it success-based financing at CoreWeave. You know, we're only investing the capital when we have a contract in place. So we'll deal with the customer and we'll go through Dell. We'll work with Dell and NVIDIA to get our allocations to actually build the servers and deploy them in CoreWeave's data centers.

I'm going to ask you a question that I asked your CEO literally seven days ago, and I'm hoping that we can make progress on an answer. CoreWeave has a lot of workloads up and running. What is the proportion of training workloads versus inference workloads? So we have visibility into some of our customers' workloads and what they're doing just from our engineering partnerships. There's some customers that we don't necessarily know what they're serving on our infrastructure.

The vast majority of workloads that we're serving today, I believe, are inference-based. We still have big training workloads, but as the training of these models has increased in an order of magnitude via the scaling laws over the past couple years, I think the inference workloads are about a generation behind

Right. So as training went from one to 10 and then 10 to 100, inference went from one to 10, 10 to 100, just one step after that. And we're seeing that step change in demand now for inference. And it's definitely overwhelming the supply chain and what the clouds can actually deliver. It's the supply chain why I ask. I think everyone is trying to have a crystal ball into capital expenditures and the build out of more infrastructure capacity.

But, you know, inference is a slightly different calculus. What is the biggest geographic or sort of sectoral driver for you guys right now? Where is the demand coming from? You know, the demand there, our customers are still pretty indifferent, right? It's very early stages on this kind of order of magnitude expansion. So they're trying to figure out what do I need, not even where do I need it.

And as they're moving into enterprises in different, let's call it, different sovereign areas, they're starting to be more cognizant of where they're deploying infrastructure. But the story of the last couple of years has been more and more quickly.

I've been grateful to speak to you over a number of years as CoreWeave has also moved pretty quickly. The criticism of the company, or not the criticism, the anxiety is that the business model is very simply buying GPUs and renting them out. And it becomes a kind of commoditized capital game. You would argue CoreWeave's more than that. You're doing investment in software.

what is the value add going forward? - Yes, so I think that that's one of the biggest misconceptions about the entire industry, that this infrastructure is commoditized.

And the reason why we win the biggest labs and enterprises in the space over and over and over again, and OpenAI just expanded their relationship with us again, the reason for that is because the platform is decommoditized. The software matters. The way that we run the infrastructure matters. Day two operations matter. The engineering partnership matters. It's not just plugging in GPUs and delivering to a customer. And I think it's taking the market some time to figure that out.

And we're thrilled to tell that story over the next few years. There are competing forces. There are the headlines about data center leases being canceled or paired back, which the hyperscale has pushed back on. Then there are all of the mega deals announced in the Gulf last week.

which trajectory do you see for data center build out? So I said this to you in a fireside chat a year and a half ago. Right, almost two years ago. Data center demand was absurd. And at the time, I thought it was as crazy as it was going to get. And like I said, it's stepping up an order of magnitude. And

It seems that for this technology to find true enterprise adoption, the investments have to happen. So I think that some of the data center lease cancellations that you're hearing about or some of people pausing things, they're pausing certain aspects of their portfolio, not necessarily the long-term strategy. AI related. Yeah, AI related. If you look at this from a path dependent perspective,

it may cause you some worry. But if you look and say, AI over the next five years, is it more or less? It becomes pretty easy to understand what's going to happen. Really quick, we're up against time. Is there an opportunity for you in the Gulf in those deals that were announced? I guess we'll see.

All right, Brian Ventura, co-founder and chief strategy officer at CoreWeave. He'll come back if that proves to be the case. That does it for this edition of Bloomberg Technology, live from Las Vegas, live from Dell World. Just as the story's been all week, be it in Taiwan, be it here in Vegas, or maybe Microsoft Build out in Seattle.

heavy emphasis on AI infrastructure and how that's driving adoption, particularly in enterprise. So much more to come. Recap on the podcast. You know exactly where to find the Bloomberg Technology Podcast. It's on the Bloomberg platforms, on the terminal, as well as online on Apple, Spotify, and iHeart. There's a lot more to come even throughout the day and this week. But for now, from Las Vegas, this is Bloomberg Technology.

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