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cover of episode Nvidia Closes In On a $4 Trillion Market Value

Nvidia Closes In On a $4 Trillion Market Value

2025/6/27
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Bloomberg Technology

AI Deep Dive AI Chapters Transcript
People
C
Chase Lockmiller
E
Ed Ludlow
F
Fiona Sincoda
H
Howard Lutnick
J
JB Straubel
J
Jonathan Webb
J
Joseph Nathan
K
Kayleigh Lyons
K
Kurt Wagner
M
Mandeep Singh
M
Mike Gallagher
S
Summer Mersinger
Topics
Ed Ludlow: 自四月低点以来,英伟达股价上涨超过60%,这表明市场对其增长潜力持乐观态度。云计算公司持续投入购买英伟达GPU,为英伟达的增长提供了更多空间。然而,英伟达也面临着超大规模企业定制芯片和来自AMD等其他市场参与者的竞争。我们现在需要关注英伟达能否突破164美元,达到4万亿美元市值。 Mandeep Singh: 所有的数据都支持对英伟达的估值持续上升。随着OpenAI O-Series等模型的推理能力增强,对计算的需求也随之增加,推动了市场对英伟达的热情。即使不包括中国市场的收入,英伟达今年2000亿美元的营收目标也很明确。随着主权基金的参与,特别是中东和欧洲,英伟达有能力实现营收增长。英伟达开放其NVLink平台,支持其他芯片,这是一个明智之举,有助于公司发展。英伟达目前表现出色,但其持久垄断地位面临挑战。 Fiona Sincoda: 市场情绪有所改善,不仅仅是因为中美贸易协议。市场现在能够更多地关注宏观和基本面分析。市场对乐观情绪的定价可能还有上涨空间。特朗普的关税冲击和中东局势等因素曾对市场造成干扰。总体而言,科技环境正在改善,美联储未来可能采取更温和的立场。投资者现在可以将注意力重新转向基本面和人工智能。人工智能一直是潜在的强劲增长点,但早些时候的干扰因素分散了投资者的注意力。英伟达有可能成为第一家市值达到4万亿美元的公司。英伟达在人工智能芯片领域几乎拥有垄断地位。英伟达的客户群非常重要,包括亚马逊、Meta和微软等大型科技公司。人工智能支出可能会继续增加。竞争对手开始缩小与英伟达的差距,这可能会限制其上涨空间。人工智能市场巨大,可能容纳多个顶级公司。

Deep Dive

Chapters
This chapter analyzes Nvidia's potential to become the first $4 trillion market cap company, discussing supporting factors like strong compute demand and the expansion of its platform. However, it also acknowledges potential threats such as custom silicon from hyperscalers and competition from AMD.
  • Nvidia's stock is up over 60% since April lows.
  • Micron's HPM sales are exceeding expectations.
  • Increased compute demand is driving Nvidia's growth.
  • Nvidia's opening up its platform to support other chips is a strategic move.
  • Competition from hyperscalers' custom silicon and AMD pose potential threats.

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To learn more, go to developer.microsoft.com slash AI. That's developer.microsoft.com slash AI. For enterprise organizations, managing all your food needs is a tall order. But with Easy Cater, you get a single workplace food vendor with the tools and resources to make it easy, giving teams across your organization an easy way to order from a huge variety of restaurants, all on one platform, all while consolidating your corporate food spend so you can control costs.

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This is Bloomberg Tech, and coming up, Nvidia within reach, heading to be the first company to hit a $4 trillion value. Plus, the US and China finalize a trade truce, which includes China's commitment to deliver rare earths.

And Crusoe teams up with Redwood to tackle AI's biggest challenge, power, the largest deployment of reused batteries globally for an AI data center. When we talk about technology and equity markets, there's a story right now that everyone's focused on. Could NVIDIA be the first $4 trillion market cap

company. We're at $3.83 trillion right now. Actually, we have some way to go. The stock's up like 1.3, 1.5% in this session. It would need a gain of almost 6% to hit that milestone this Friday. But there's a longer term story. Since those April lows in markets that were coming out of that post deep seek anxiety, NVIDIA is up more than 60%. We've come through earnings and there's a bullish thesis emerging that actually NVIDIA has more room to

because of the commitment of those cloud computing companies to keep on spending and buying those NVIDIA GPUs. Will NVIDIA be the first $4 trillion company? Let's get more. Mandeep Singh of Bloomberg Intelligence joins us now. And Mandeep, why it's so crucial we have you on the show is you cover the full spectrum of mega cap tech.

$4 trillion for NVIDIA. What would be supporting that valuation? Yeah, look, every data point that we have tracked this quarter has been supportive of estimates going up. The latest one being Micron talking about how their HPM sales

continue to ramp up better than expected. And when it comes to inferencing, clearly the trend of spending more compute at the time of query, the reasoning capabilities that these models have added, especially with OpenAI O-Series, what that has done is really reinforce compute demand

tied to inferencing. And that, to me, is what's driving this wave of enthusiasm around Nvidia's runway because the $200 billion number for this year, clearly there is a line of sight, even when you take out all the China revenue, which they did with the guide in the last quarter. And so the question is, how much will they grow next year? And right now, consensus is around $250 billion.

So with sovereigns coming into play, especially Middle East and now Jensen being in Europe, you feel like they have line of sight to that revenue as well. And that's why the multiple seems to be expanding here.

Okay, the stocks are just below $157 per share. I was doing the math with the team and I think that $164 per share or just below it would get us to $4 trillion of market cap. Nvidia was the first chip maker to hit a trillion dollars of market value. And of course, it's gone well beyond that.

but there are headwinds. And I think what, Mandeep, would be helpful to the audience is to explain what's the threat to NVIDIA. Some of it is the custom silicon that the hyperscalers are looking at, but there are other players in the market. AMD will have something to say about this monopoly that NVIDIA currently holds. Yeah, and that's why, you know, NVIDIA opening up its platform, the NVLink, now supporting other chips, was such a big move and coming in at a great time because now they are saying you can get

Broadcom gear, but we'll be able to integrate it with our NVLink and that's where the opening up of ecosystem, I think it's a very wise move and that helps NVIDIA because all the investment that companies are making in NVIDIA stack now can support some other chips. So with that being said, look, I mean the numbers are getting bigger and bigger so you kind of think, yes, NVIDIA is a durable monopoly, but for how long?

given all the other factors that you just described. But for right now, it feels like they clearly are executing very well on that front. Mandeep Singh, who leads technology research at Bloomberg Intelligence, thank you so much. Let's get to the other top story in Washington. U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick says a trade truce between the U.S. and China has been signed. So the China deal, we inked the deal. You remember we had

a trip to Geneva and then that was being slow played. We got back together in London and that deal was signed and sealed two days ago. For the details, Bloomberg's Kayleigh Lyons joins us. And Kayleigh, that was your conversation, your interaction. And I think that what you were trying to get to is that there are deals to come. But where did China sit within what's being negotiated and what's been signed?

Yeah, that's exactly right, Ed. And we should note this deal that was signed earlier this week that we just learned about yesterday evening and has now been confirmed by the Chinese side as well is far from the kind of comprehensive trade agreement that could take much longer to negotiate. What it does solidify, though, is finalizing the framework that was initially, as we just heard the secretary say, agreed to in Geneva, talked about again in London, and now finally is looking toward implementation. And what that will mean is that China will start approving once again the export of rare earths

That was a sticking point, obviously. And the Commerce Secretary says once those exports start flowing, the U.S. will lift its own restrictive measures on exports on things like ethane. So it definitely is a step forward in the relationship, trading relationship between these two countries. But, of course, it's just one step in what is a multifaceted approach by this administration to re-approach trade, not just with China, but other trading partners as well. The other thing the Commerce Secretary told us in our conversation last night is that China

July 9th trade deadline is looming is that the administration is expecting about 10, expecting about 10 trade deals to be announced over the course of the next few weeks. While he didn't get specific as to what countries exactly, he did echo the words we heard from President Trump at the White House yesterday that they're getting closer with India. He also expressed some opposition

optimism around negotiations with the European Union specifically, suggesting those have picked up in recent weeks. And we understand that optimism is being expressed privately by the European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in recent days as well.

There had been an idea, and it was an idea rather than something put forward by the parties, that there could be this kind of trade-off or quid pro quo where rare earths might come in exchange for some change in policy on the semiconductor side. What content of this discussion do we know if there is anything specifically relating to chips?

Well, when it comes to chips, that is something that the U.S. had suggested was going to be factored into this conversation. What we still don't know at this time, Ed, though we know a deal has been signed, is actually what the nuances of it are. We didn't even know it had been signed until two days after the fact when the president suggested

said it kind of slipped up in the news conference or an event at the White House yesterday and the Commerce Secretary confirmed it. But we do know it all really does hinge on these critical minerals actually arriving in the U.S., those exports actually beginning. That is what the administration had been lobbying or levying accusations against China, rather, saying that they were slow walking it, which is why there were some questions as to whether this accord would be able to move forward in the first place. But China...

officials are telling Bloomberg today that they are going to start sifting through those applications and that process should be underway. And that is when they can get into more where we could see the U.S. actually starting to lift those restrictions. We just haven't set them yet as the Commerce Secretary is effectively saying China has to move first.

Bloomberg's Kayleigh Lyons, and I highly recommend you watch her interview with Commerce Secretary Lutnick. Thank you very much. Let's get more on the broader impact of both of those stories on the tech markets. Fiona Sincoda is the Citi Index Financial Markets Senior Analyst, and that trade piece is where I want to start. We know more now than we did yesterday about the trade relationship between the U.S. and China. As somebody that looks across the technology sector, has the market factored that in?

Yes, it does feel that there is an improved sentiment, but it's not just on that China-US deal. I think there has just been sort of a broad improvement in sentiment. It's been a very disruptive start to the year overall. So the fact that it feels that things are starting to slowly

line up and fall into place. For example, the improved relations between the U.S. and China, that feels like it's starting to be priced in. Obviously, we've had the disruptions with regards to the Middle East and the impact that that's had on sentiment. But I feel that we are now able to sort of shift the focus more towards typical sort of macro and

fundamental analysis and focus, which we haven't been able to do for much of this year. So, yes, you know, I feel that there is optimism that is being priced in, but I think that there potentially is more to run to. We're in a place right now, this moment, Friday, June 27th, where the S&P 500 should close at a fresh record, largely to do a trade if you go just on the market summary on the Bloomberg Terminal.

Over the course of this week, we've talked about what has changed since April, where markets kind of had that low. And it is Micron, it is Palantir, and now NVIDIA, potentially at $4 trillion. What is the biggest, do you think, driver of growth in this market at the moment?

It's a really good question. You know, I think what the problem that we had was that there was that massive shock and scare from Trump and what the impact of those potential trade tariffs could be. Now, we didn't get that worst case scenario. In fact, we've been sort of peddled back quite a lot.

And potentially now the outlook isn't so bad, although we'll find more out on July the 9th. But as far as tech is concerned as well, I think the environment, broadly speaking, the environment is much improving. There is a potential of a more dovish future.

Federal Reserve. We heard from Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell this week. He did seem to have a slightly less hawkish stance perhaps than at the end of the Fed meeting in the previous week. So, I think that is also helping. And also, we've got sentiment. Investors are able to turn their focus back to the fundamentals, back to this AI trade, which really well

And there were so many disruptions earlier on in the year between Trump's tariffs, between the Middle East, between raging oil prices, that investors weren't able to focus on that AI story. It's always been there. It's always underlying. But once again, now those fears and worries have sort of calmed down. Attention can get back to AI, which is going to be still a very strong story across the second half of the year.

Okay, let's zero in on NVIDIA. Could NVIDIA be the first $4 trillion market cap company? I'm going to throw it out there and say yes. Yeah. You know, if we...

If we think about what Nvidia does, I mean, it's got this almost monopoly play, it would feel, on that AI chip area. I mean, we obviously had that sort of, at the beginning of the year, we had that deep seek unveiling, which concerned the markets, but

But not really, because the recovery has been very solid since then, as you said, up 66%. So that wasn't enough to really disrupt the bullish play for Nvidia. The customer base of Nvidia is extremely important. You've got those big tech in there. You've got Amazon, Meta. There are all these Microsoft, the big companies that are really supporting the revenue growth here as well. So I think that almost feeds into itself.

Spending on AI, I think, is only likely to increase from here where we are right now. Obviously, there are risks to that outlook, but I don't think they're necessarily so concerning that it's a potential limit to reaching that $4 trillion level.

So at this scale, you know, at the index level, it's not surprising that NVIDIA is the biggest points contributor across the NASDAQ 100, S&P 500, Philadelphia Semiconductor Index. I'm going to do the math for the audience. We're at $157.50 a share. I think we need to get to just below $164 a share to hit $4 trillion. If that happens in this session, I'd be surprised. Nonetheless, those risks that you outlined are there.

Custom silicon at the hyperscale is potentially a product competition. There are others in this space, AMD, we spoke to Mandeep Singh about earlier. Which of those kind of headwinds do you think is worth paying most attention to, Fiona? Yeah, so as you point out, I think the concept of having components

competitors starting to close the gap with Nvidia is something that is a potential limit to the upside. But then saying that, you know, this is still a huge market, so there is potential to have, you know, more than one top dog here. We don't know that yet because this is still very much discovery phase, it does feel. But, you know, given the potential huge uses for AI, that could be the case.

Fiona Sincoder of Citi Index Financial Markets, great to have you back on BTEC. Thank you so much. I want to take a quick look at a story out of China. Shares of Xiaomi, these are the Hong Kong listed shares, they closed up 3.6% overnight, but at one point up 8%. 289,000 pre-orders for their brand new SUV in just one single hour. There have been several million people on the webcast on X when they were presenting this new SUV. We'll continue to track

that story. Coming up, we have a lot more to come. This is Bloomberg Tech. 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.

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A German privacy regulator has warned Apple and Google that DeepSeek, available on their app stores, constitutes illegal content because it exposes users' data to Chinese authorities. The formal notification comes after DeepSeek ignored a May request to either pull its app from app stores in Germany or put in place safeguards when collecting local users' data and then transmitting it to China.

Elsewhere, Meta is in talks to acquire Play.ai, a startup that uses AI to replicate voices. That's according to sources. The deal would give Meta access to Play.ai's tech and some of its employees, a move that could boost Meta's own AI assistant features. For more, Bloomberg's Kurt Wagner joins us with the story. The Meta playbook is kind of emerging here in the AquaHire context. What does Play.ai do for Meta's own efforts?

Yeah, so Play.ai specializes in voice assistants. And so if you think about what Meta is trying to accomplish with its Meta.ai chatbot and the hands-free devices we've talked about before, Ed, right, the Ray-Ban glasses, the Orion AR devices,

glasses that they're building. The whole notion is that you are going to need to control those devices with some type of voice assistant, right? And so I think this is the type of deal that could help sort of push that technology and that progress forward a little bit. It's also something where they could put some of this

technology into their large language model, the Lama model that's open source, right? And then everybody who uses Lama might have more AI capabilities, voice AI capabilities as part of that. So I think it fits into a bunch of different things that they're working on right now. So AquaHire, we had Scale AI. Are we reporting that the structure of this would be similar to that?

So this is slightly different. I'm told that this is going to include the technology that Play.ai is building. So it is both talent and technology in this deal. Again, it's not closed as of yesterday when we reported this news, but it is certainly expected to happen.

And so, you know, how much of the technology is ultimately going to be hoarded over used? I don't know for sure, but I think it's maybe slightly different than the scale AI thing because it does feel like they're bringing at least some of the technology in with them.

Meta is spending a bit of money. I feel like, I don't know, it's like let's throw money to get in this AI thing. They're innovating internally. I see reports about Boz kind of rallying the troops on what Meta is or isn't going to do compared to others. Just make sense of the strategy big picture for us.

Well, you may remember that Mark Zuckerberg last summer spoke with our own Emily Chang, and he basically said that this is the kind of technology, AI, and the race for AI is the kind of technology that companies are going to overspend on. They are going to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to try and develop this stuff and be a leader in the world.

in this stuff not only because it then recruits other people but because consumers are presumably going to go to whichever products are the the highest quality and and the most like interacting with another human being and so you know it would you when you look at this through that lens like here's a company in a CEO dead set on getting AI right they have this this basically money printing machine in their advertising business with Facebook and Instagram and they're choosing right now to to push those profits those proceeds into

the ai race and so i do think there's a realistic chance that meta is over overspending here right we'll look back in a few years and say wow they they maybe they open the checkbook too much but mark zuckerberg has acknowledged that that might be what it takes in order to win this this race and so clearly that's something he's willing to do right now bloomberg's kurt wagner with all the meta reporting thank you so much

Crusoe and Redwood Materials are tackling AI's biggest challenge, power. The two companies have teamed up to create North America's largest microgrid, powered by large-scale solar and recycled batteries. The goal, delivering rapidly deployable mobile and scalable AI data centers that operate efficiently off-grid.

Crusoe CEO Chase Lockmiller joins us now along with Redwood CEO JB Straubel. You're both in the field and on the ground. Thank you so much for your time. Chase, I'll start with you. As a means to provide power to scale data center, this is a really significant step. Absolutely. Thanks for hosting us, Ed. Thrilled to be joining you here from the field where Redwood and Crusoe have partnered on building this very cool off-grid

uh ai data center that's powered by on-site solar and end-of-life ev batteries you can see the the array of batteries behind me you can see this uh uh this mobile and modular ai data center that we've dubbed crusoe spark um each of these data centers houses about 500 gpus and there's going to be four of them here uh all powered with this off-grid uh right uh microgrid and and and and batteries

JB, it's good to have you back on Bloomberg Tech. It's been a while. You know, we've been tracking the progress of Redwood, but I think there'll be a lot of value in you explaining the opportunity for you here in providing this technology platform to power AI data centers specifically.

Well, it's great to be back and yeah, thanks for the opportunity. We've been growing steadily for quite a few years and today find ourselves in a position where there are a huge amount of transportation battery packs coming back from the field. We're in pole position to make best use of a lot of those assets and we've, I think, really invented a platform that you see behind us here that can deploy those cost efficiently to provide grid energy storage.

And I think one of the best and highest value applications of that is to do things like what we're seeing here to provide very fast and reliable energy for AI expansion. JB, could you just give us a sense of any capacity constraint that you have, where you're sending your batteries to and how you're going to prioritize them as you go through the recycle or reuse process?

Yeah, so we aim to reuse and repurpose every battery that we possibly can, anything that has remaining life. We already have gigawatt hours of batteries in the pipeline to do that. This project alone is already the largest microgrid in North America and also the world's largest deployment of second-life reused batteries. But we're already aiming at projects that are 20 to 100 times larger than this. So there's a lot to come in the growth in the pipeline.

Chase, you and I very recently discussed, and we indeed, we had Drew Baglino on the show right from Heron, the need to modernize energy infrastructure in the context of the data center build out. Are you able to kind of quantify or give our audience a sense of the challenge of how much a bottleneck the energy component is when you're building out these data centers around this country?

Yeah, absolutely. You know, one of the major aspects to the bottleneck for energy really is the speed. You know, people are applying for grid interconnections and they're finding themselves in multi-year, you know, five, ten year queues to basically get that load approval. What we've done here is rapidly deployed these modular and mobile data centers alongside this solar and battery installment.

um and this all came together in about four months um so we were able to rapidly sort of uh manufacture uh in the crusoe factories these modular data centers and deploy this large array of uh batteries in partnership with uh with redwood to effectively drive power to ai infrastructure on a really fast basis um you know from our perspective our philosophy is that um

The future of AI is going to be abundant and it's going to be ubiquitous, which means that we're going to need very large scale AI data centers like what we're building in Abilene, Texas. They're going to be gigawatt scale, five gigawatt scale, 10 gigawatt scale, massive facilities to train the next frontier models. And then you're going to have lots of smaller modular inference data centers that are deploying and serving customers near the edge, like what we built here in Sparks with Crusoe Spark Unit.

And for so many technology companies, on-prem is so bad. Chase, how much of a premium is there on the cost of JB's technology versus other sources of energy and other storage options?

Yeah, that's actually one of the magical things about this is it has something that I call the negative green premium. We are powering this site entirely with solar and batteries. We're getting round-the-clock, 24-7 power, all from the sun. And it's cheaper than our overall cost of power in a market like Northern Virginia. So it's faster, cheaper, and can be rapidly deployed almost anywhere. So it's something we're really proud of and really excited about.

JB, this is obviously a big deal and a big milestone for Redwood. But again, it's been some time since you've been on the show. Update us on your progress to date and the next steps as you scale this process. We just have one minute. Well, at Redwood today, we're by far the largest battery recycler in North America. We have hundreds of millions in revenue from the recycling operations. And this new energy business that we're launching is our next chapter of growth.

All right. Crusoe CEO Chase Lockmiller alongside Redwood Materials CEO JB Straubel live from the ground. Great to have you both back on Bloomberg Tech.

Welcome back to Bloomberg Tech. In equity markets, it is the tech sector that's kind of leading the way over the course of this week. Major indices, the Nasdaq 100 is where I focus, right, because of that high concentration of tech on track to close at fresh record highs. The narrative is really progress in trade talks, principally between the U.S. and China. But then there are those single names, and NVIDIA is our main focus right now.

NVIDIA, once again, the world's most valuable company, pushing to fresh record highs, but now at $3.85 trillion in market cap. Could this be the first $4 trillion market cap company? That's what we're looking for. We're up about 1.5% in this session. We need a gain of almost 6% to get there.

Maybe not today, maybe in the coming weeks, but that would be the milestone, the first $4 trillion market cap company. There are some other stories out there that we're paying attention to that link AI and energy. One of them, Palantir, it wants to power up nuclear energy

in America and is teaming up with the nuclear company to co-develop and deploy the first AI-driven real-time software system built exclusively for nuclear construction. I caught up with Palantir's head of defense, Mike Gallagher, and the nuclear company CEO, Jonathan Webb, to discuss the significance of the partnership, but why nuclear is a national security priority.

I think it is how we revitalize not just a defense industrial base, but an American industrial base, right? If you think about it in terms of a relative competition with our primary geopolitical threat, China, we can't win merely by throwing more money and more human beings at the problem. That's sort of a losing bet. We have to leverage our asymmetric advantage, which is innovation and AI-enabled software innovation. So applying that to the entire American industrial base, I think, is how

we begin to build things faster, more quickly. As Jonathan mentioned, it shouldn't take over a decade to build a reactor in this country. That's not just a consequence of over-regulation, though that is a key variable. It's about liberating the human beings who are involved in producing these things day-to-day to focus on their most important task rather than trying to find a piece of paper somewhere or an Excel spreadsheet. It's about allowing them...

And the focus and maximizing their productivity. That's what we're seeing with our deployment of warp speed in other spaces. That's what makes me so bullish about this partnership. And that's ultimately, again, how we keep this country strong, secure and ahead of all of our geopolitical rivals.

Yeah, and to piggyback off- Please jump in, please. Well, what I would say is that this is absolutely a national security concern. And we should all be deeply concerned that China in the next few years is gonna become the largest nuclear power producer on planet Earth. They will pass the US for the first time since the history of nuclear power was invented. This is unacceptable.

That was Palantir's head of defense, Mike Gallagher, and the nuclear company's CEO, Jonathan Webb. An Israel-based robotics startup aiming to improve and expand access to crucial eye surgery has recently closed a $125 million Series B funding round. The company, Foresight Robotics, says its platform uses AI-based algorithms, advanced computer vision, and micro-mechanics to access any point within the human eye.

Foresight co-founder, president and chief medical officer Dr. Joseph Nathan joins us live. I think I'm right in saying that in the context of robotics history, this was one of the top Series Bs of all time. It's a significant sum of money. Let's start with what you're going to do with that funding and what you need to do to make progress. Right, Ed. First of all, thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.

What we're developing at foresight as you said it's a robotic platform to talk to one of the biggest needs in medicine Which is the vision crisis so currently today? We have over 2 billion people or a vision impaired and that creates a yearly 3 trillion dollar economic burden and this crisis is mostly due to the lack of surgeons to cater to this massive amount of patients and the lack of stand or quality of standard in

in eye care. So what we're doing at Foresight, as you mentioned, we're taking AI and other technologies to augment surgeons' capabilities and have them doing many more procedures in a very precise and accurate way. And we're starting with Care Act, which is our first indication. Dr. Nathan, how big is the addressable market here?

So this is one of the biggest markets in medicine. This is the most common procedure in all medicine. Keratosis is not a disease, it's a widespread condition that happens during age. So it will happen to everybody eventually. And we don't keep up with the amount of surgeries that needs to be done. So today, for example,

We can do globally 30 million procedures a year, but there's over 600 million patients who need it. So there's really no human way to close this gap. And as you mentioned, this is the second largest B round in surgical robotics history. And this round is going to take us from where we are today. So we did 3,300 procedure in animal models.

And we're gonna do our first in human clinical trials later this year. And it's gonna take us through regulatory approvals and early commercialization. - Dr. Nathan, you join us from Israel and we have to address the events of the last few weeks. Would you just reflect on what it's been like closing this round, but also just trying to build out the technology in an environment where Israel is at war with Iran?

Yeah, you're definitely right. There's volatility in the Middle East, but this was different. We had ballistic missiles dropping from the sky. We had to run with our kids through the shelters. But in our spirit and the Israeli spirit is that Israeli tech delivers no matter what.

And during missiles coming from the sky, we closed this B round. And, you know, this company was started five years ago during COVID. We went through a very big economic recession, the war in Gaza, and now Iran.

So this vote of confidence by investors and also a strategic partner that we joined to this round is truly amazing. And I think it's a testament to the Israeli resilience and our ability to get through hurdles. If it's uncertainty in the Middle East, it could be uncertainty during development. We're developing a disruptive solution.

that's very hard to do. So I'm very, very proud of the team for enduring this. - I ask you about the operational experience of recent weeks, because we also talked about the addressable market and it's likely right that that addressable market is outside of Israel. So is it the future of this company that you maintain your talent pool, your operations in that country, or you need to look at expanding globally to capture that market?

Right. We are a global company. Our first target market is the U.S. We're going to transition our operation to the U.S.,

We are very privileged, Ed, as you said, to be doing good. And our addressable market, you know, people have Cataract regardless of their ethnicity, geography, etc. So our first target market is the U.S. We're going to transition our operation there, but also to other places. So you're definitely right. It's outside of the realms of Israel.

What I find so interesting about the technology is it blends robotics hardware with software. What would you say is your core competence? Well, it's phased. So you start with a lot of building very small mechanics and then software is like the brain takes over. So think of what we're doing like superhuman extension of the surgeon hands and arms.

coupled with best-in-class visualization and this software brain that operates everything and gives the surgeons the ability to be more precise and accurate in every case. And when I try to explain what we're doing, what we want to achieve...

We want to transition, transform the average surgeon to the Michael Jordan of surgeons, but in every procedure, regardless if it's the first procedure of the day or the last procedure of the day. And that's really what it's all about. I'll ask you again what you plan to do with the funding. There's a real premium on software talent in particular right now, but across robotics.

Right. So, yeah, you know, we were fortunate enough to get and we have, I saw you, NVIDIA is, you know, our neighbors and Facebook and Apple. So we're competing with the, you know, those companies with the best talent. What we have is, you know, the ability to give customers

our team member joined a journey to transform the ophthalmic market. So currently there's no robotics on the ophthalmic market while other specialties have gained robotics for 10 to 15 years.

And this is because we didn't have the miniaturization, the technological advancement that happened over the last maybe five years in order to get a robotic platform doing such a precise micro-level movements. And when you're talking about computing power or software,

The NVIDIA of the world gave us the ability to have this computer power to control this micro-level precision. So it's interconnected here. Dr. Joseph Nathan, co-founder, president, and chief medical officer for Foresight Robotics. Thank you.

Okay, coming up, former CFTC commissioner and newly appointed CEO of the Blockchain Association, Summer Mersinger joins us to talk about the push for crypto legislation. That's next. This is Bloomberg Tech.

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CFTC, and the new CEO of the Blockchain Association. Let's start with this latest news, right? This is what Bloomberg put out last night, yesterday evening out of DC, that the idea is to advance two separate meshes in a single procedural vote. We actually had David Sachs, the crypto czar, on the show a couple of weeks ago, where we put this idea to him. What do you make of that structure and the impact that it might have?

Yeah, it's important that they're able to bring the two bills to the floor, but also have them separate so that the Genius Act can move on its own and be signed into law. I think the House is very committed to having both stablecoin legislation and market structure legislation done before the August recess. This allows them to do that while also freeing up Genius to move directly to the president. How consequential is that?

movement of these two pieces of legislation combined as one in sort of the history of how crypto and the crypto industry and the underlying technology has built up in this country and around the world, frankly? Yeah, this is a pivotal moment, and I think it's pretty historic where we are. We have two very important pieces of legislation moving through Congress at the same time that will have enormous impact on how this technology and the

businesses that have layered on it, how they are regulated. It's rare that Congress has two pieces of legislation in the same industry moving at the same time. So I think that is historic in and of itself. But given how far the industry has come, just a few years ago, they were facing enforcement, lack of clarity, almost a hostile regulatory environment. And now we have a

crypto administration, a pro-crypto Congress, and we're going to see major legislation put into place that will provide a framework for this industry. You say a hostile regulatory environment. Does the content of these two bills provide the sort of safeguards and ethical safety net that many in the industry and Democrats also were calling for in the writing of it?

It does, and it provides a framework for the industry to abide by regulations. I think previously they were trying to be regulated. They wanted to be regulated. They were trying to walk in the door of the regulators to say, what can we do to follow the rules?

and they were being met with enforcement cases. Now they're going to have a framework they can follow so they can come under the regulatory sphere. That's both very helpful for the industry because it provides the certainty they need to continue to be the innovators that they are, but it also gives a lot of safeguards to those who want to be in this market, to retail participants, to those who are buying and selling crypto. Those safeguards are missing right now, and this framework will provide safeguards.

Summer, what the industry keeps telling me, what your association members keep telling me is this is about dollarization. Do you share that thesis? Yeah, for stablecoins, for sure. It's very important that we have the stablecoin legislation. There's a lot of national security interest in having a stablecoin regime here in the United States, making sure the U.S. dollar is the backing for stablecoins.

and to continue to have the U.S. be the kind of the first place where stable coin issuers want to go and want to use the U.S. dollar as their currency backing for those coins. I think what many of our audience might appreciate, like to many people, they don't know what a stable coin is, what its function is, how the utility of it to everyday financial procedures. Do you have an explanation of that for the lay person that's watching right now?

Yeah, it's another way to move funds electronically. And, you know, I think for a lot of people in their mind right now, when you move funds electronically, it takes time. It's not immediate. Developers like you are building the future and you need the right AI tools to push what's possible.

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