July 16, 2023: NASDAQ At Fresh 52 Week High; Eagerly Awaiting New Tech IPOs

Last week, Dow Jones rose 2.3%, and hit a 2023 high, just below its 52 week high, S&P 500 rose 2.4%, and Nasdaq composite was up, both setting fresh 52 week highs. It was the Nasdaq’s best weekly gain since the end of March. At the same time, according to market watchers, we haven’t seen a software IPO since the end of 2021 — this 18 month software IPO “drought” exceeds the last couple “droughts” of ~6 months each. Nvidia is in talks to be an anchor investor in Arm’s IPO, as the two parties discuss valuation and appear to be about US$40-45 billion apart. SpaceX, the most valuable private company in the US, is approaching a US$150 billion valuation in secondary share sales. Shares of Tencent and Alibaba on Monday gained after China’s central bank fined the companies, a sign that investors think the country’s regulatory crackdown is coming to an end. Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway is poised to score a US$1 billion profit after Microsoft beats FTC in Activision case.

In Canada, Sophic Client OneSoft (OSS-TSXV, OSSIF-OTC) hit another 52 week high.  Investors are beginning to think of the Company as a revenue generating Aritificial Intelligence Company, with a strong moat with unique data, trained machine, and proven tech with fortune 100/500 customers. Sophic’s recent research from a month ago highlighting these attributes can be found here.  Sophic Client UGE announces Q2 2023 milestones and business updates. In the second quarter, UGE’s project backlog (stages 3.1-5) increased 14% to 356MW from 313MW. Since the start of the year, the Company’s backlog has increased by 96MW, marking near-achievement of its 2023 annual goal to add 100MW to its backlog. UGE anticipates achieving and exceeding this goal during the third quarter, far ahead of schedule. HIVE debuts a strategic expansion to power the future of artificial intelligence with its NVIDIA GPU cards. Dye & Durham entered into agreement to sell TM Group for up to £91 million; with up-front proceeds to be used to reduce debt.

Sophic Client OneSoft Solutions Inc. (OSS-TSXV, OSSIF-OTC) hit another 52 week high. 

Investors are beginning to think of the Company as a revenue generating Aritificial Intelligence Company, with a strong moat with unique data, trained machine, and proven tech with fortune 100/500 customers. Sophic’s recent research from a month ago highlighting these attributes can be found here. https://tinyurl.com/2udzansa

Sophic Client UGE International (UGE-TSXV, UGEIF-OTC) announces Q2 2023 milestones and business updates.

In the second quarter, UGE’s project backlog (stages 3.1-5) increased 14% to 356MW from 313MW at the end of the first quarter. Since the start of the year, the Company’s backlog has increased by 96MW, marking near-achievement of its 2023 annual goal to add 100MW to its backlog. UGE anticipates achieving and exceeding this goal during the third quarter, far ahead of schedule. The Company’s stage 3.0 development pipeline, which represents projects with site control secured but in earlier stages of development, also grew by 27% in Q2 to 605MW. As of June 30, 2023, UGE has a pre-development pipeline (stages 1 and 2) of over 2 gigawatts, as well. https://bit.ly/46MPaEg

Dye & Durham (DND-TSX) enters into agreement to sell TM Group for up to £91 million; up-front proceeds to be used to reduce debt.

Dye & Durham agrees to sell TM Group to AURELIUS, a globally active alternative investment firm. Cash consideration at closing of approximately £50 million, with up to £41 million in potential additional earn-out payments between 2023 and 2026. Transaction will satisfy undertakings given by Dye & Durham to the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), thereby concluding the CMA’s merger investigation. https://tinyurl.com/mrxbayt6

HIVE Digital Technologies (HIVE-TSXV, HIVE-NASDAQ) debuts new name and strategic expansion to power the future of artificial intelligence with our NVIDIA GPU cards.

HIVE, while maintaining a strong presence in Bitcoin mining, intends to utilize its robust 38,000 Nvidia GPU fleet for computational tasks on a massive scale. In addition, the Company plans to branch out into the rental of GPU server clusters via marketplaces and the development of its new service, HIVE Cloud. This cloud service will empower users with access to a virtual instance of a single GPU, a bare-metal server equipped with up to 10 GPUs, or even clusters of multiple servers to provide an array of computing power. HIVE Cloud aims to provide small and medium-sized businesses with an efficient and cost-effective alternative with substantial savings from the major cloud service providers. https://tinyurl.com/29nkkpu6

Canada’s Postmedia Network (PNC.A-TSX, PNC.B-TSX) ends merger discussions with Nordstar Capital.

Postmedia Network Canada said on Monday that discussions with Nordstar Capital have come to an end, less than a month after saying they were in merger talks. Last month, Postmedia had said that it was in a non-binding discussion with Nordstar Capital for a potential merger with some operational assets of the Toronto Star and the Metroland newspapers. The Canadian news media company had also said last week that it was pausing all direct company advertising on Meta Platforms , including Facebook and Instagram, following Meta’s decision to stop access to news on the platforms in Canada over a law requiring payments to local news publishers. https://tinyurl.com/y5d95rbr

Canadian pension fund taps Europe’s green hydrogen hopes with Dutch investment.

Canada’s biggest pension fund, CPP Investments, has made its first bet on green hydrogen playing a growing role in cutting emissions, with a 130 million euro (US$143 million) investment and the purchase of a majority stake in a three-year-old Dutch firm. CPPI’s investment is mostly in the form of capital that Amsterdam-based Power2X can use to develop new projects in Europe that seek to decarbonise hard-to-abate industrial assets by adopting green hydrogen. Other Canadian funds have also been backing Europe’s cleaner energy drive. Last month Canada’s Investment Management Corporation of Ontario announced a US$400 million investment in Sweden’s battery producer Northvolt. https://archive.li/HGh8A

Roku users can buy products from Shopify (SHOP-NYSE, SHOP-TSX) merchants with their TV remote.

Roku is partnering with Shopify to give users the ability to purchase products from Shopify merchants through their TVs, the hardware company announced Tuesday. Viewers will be able to interact with a Roku Action Ad for a Shopify merchant by using their TV remote. (For context, Roku Action Ads are advertisements that either send users a text, prompt them to scan a QR code or make a purchase directly on the screen). Users can buy the product with Roku Pay, Roku’s payments platform. The merchant will send an email confirmation of the order once the transaction has been processed. https://tcrn.ch/3pIKCxU

Canadian cleantech continues fundraising streak as Orennia, CarbonCure raise collective US$105 million.

Despite the tight fundraising environment overall, Canadian cleantech companies continue to secure investments as CarbonCure and Orennia raise over US$100 million, combined. Halifax-based CarbonCure, which develops tech to store captured carbon emissions in concrete, announced an US$80-million investment round this week, as Calgary analytics startup Orennia closed a US$25-million Series B round. CarbonCure’s investment round was led by Swiss firm Blue Earth Capital. It also saw participation from global investors in the cleantech and energy spaces, including Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund and Microsoft’s Climate Innovation Fund. Samsung Ventures. Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Taronga Ventures, and BH3 Growth Equity, 2150 also contributed. https://bit.ly/3PYwFa1

i4 Capital closes over $40 million toward new $60-million deep tech fund.

i4 Capital announced the first closing of its deep tech seed fund, raising more than $40-million of what is anticipated to be a $60-million fund. The i4 Capital Fund won The Quebec Seed Fund Competition contest organized by the Ministry of the Economy, Innovation and Energy of the Quebec Government. As part of this contest, the following institutional investors have invested in i4 Capital Fund: Investissement Quebec, Fonds de solidarité FTQ, Teralys Capital and Fondaction, along with the i4 Capital GPs and several private investors. The Fonds québécois d’amorçage Teralys is a seed stage fund of funds. The firm invests in funds that in turn invest mainly in Québec-based seed-stage companies. To date, the fund has invested in four “innovation funds” and one life science fund. The deep tech fund closed on May 23. https://bit.ly/3JU2dd0

Graphite Ventures secures $10 million from AEC to continue Alberta commitment.

This AEC contribution brings Graphite’s total funding to $110 million. It was initially launched in January 2022 as a $100 million IAF fund from MaRS Discovery District. According to AEC, its investment will support Graphite as it provides seed-stage capital to startups in Alberta focused on B2B and enterprise software, as well as capital-efficient hardware. https://bit.ly/3OdviCZ

Formaloo raises $2.9 million to help businesses build apps without any code.

Formaloo, a startup dual headquartered in Canada and Estonia, has raised $2.9 million in seed funding to support the expansion of its no-code platform for building a variety of business applications. The round was led by Change Ventures, with participation from Hyde Park Venture Partners, Mana Ventures, and Startup Wise Guys. Founded in 2020, Formaloo allows businesses to create forms, customer portals, customer relationship management platforms, and other tools without using any code. https://bit.ly/3NN6foR

WaitWell closes $1.5 million to bring its queue management tech to new markets.

Calgary-based WaitWell, which sells queue management and service-delivery software, has secured $1.5 million in seed funding to expand its product and move into new markets. WaitWell’s equity seed round, which closed this week, was co-led by Toronto-based Graphite Ventures and Edmonton’s Accelerate Fund III, with follow-on participation from Calgary-based Metiquity Ventures. Per Vander Meulen, it came at an $8-million pre-money valuation. https://bit.ly/3XMGs4J

Nvidia in talks to be an anchor investor in Arm IPO.

Chip designer Arm is in talks to bring in Nvidia as an anchor investor while the SoftBank-owned company presses ahead with plans for a New York listing as soon as September, said several people briefed on the talks. Nvidia, the world’s most valuable semiconductor company, was forced last year to abandon its planned US$66 billion acquisition of Arm after the deal was challenged by regulators. The Silicon Valley-based chipmaker is one of several existing Arm partners, including Intel, that the UK-based company is hoping will take a long-term stake at the initial public offering stage, according to the people. The prospective investors are still negotiating with Arm over its valuation. One person familiar with the discussions said Nvidia wanted to come in at a share price that would put Arm’s total value at US$35 billion to US$40 billion, while Arm wanted to be closer to US$80 billion. The aim of bringing in large anchor investors as Arm launches an IPO in New York would be to help to support the stock as SoftBank, which bought Arm for £24 billion in 2016, sells down its stake. Arm is expected to be the most valuable company to go public in the US since automaker Rivian, which listed with an initial market capitalisation of US$70 billion in late 2021. https://tinyurl.com/bt5astr3

SpaceX nears US$150 billion valuation.

Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX is now worth nearly US$150 billion following a share sale by existing investors, according to CNBC. SpaceX shares are now valued at US$81 a piece, one shareholder told The Information. Shares are up 5% from US$77, where they were valued earlier this year ahead of the secondary sales, the person said. Secondary sales are when existing investors sell their shares to new or current investors, without raising new capital for the company. SpaceX, the most valuable private company in the U.S., organizes secondary share sales around twice a year to give liquidity to existing investors and employees. The company plans to sell US$750 million in secondary shares at the US$81 per share price, according to CNBC. https://tinyurl.com/ybh22fdw

Elon Musk launches his new company, xAI.

Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, and owner of Twitter, on Wednesday announced the debut of a new AI company, xAI, with the goal to “understand the true nature of the universe.” According to the company’s website, Musk and his team will share more information in a live Twitter Spaces chat on Friday. Team members behind xAI are alumni of DeepMind, OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research, Twitter and Tesla, and have worked on projects including DeepMind’s AlphaCode and OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 chatbots. Musk seems to be positioning xAI to compete with companies like OpenAI, Google and Anthropic, which are behind leading chatbots like ChatGPT, Bard and Claude. News of the startup was previously reported by The Financial Times in April, along with reports that Musk had secured thousands of GPU processors from Nvidia in order to power a potential large language model. That same month, Musk shared details of his plans for a new AI tool called “TruthGPT” during a taped interview on Fox News Channel, adding that he feared existing AI companies are prioritizing systems that are “politically correct.” https://tinyurl.com/3yn6n2cz

Alibaba, Tencent shares up as investors hope for end of tech crackdown.

Shares in Tencent and Alibaba on Monday gained in Asia after China’s central bank fined the companies hundreds of millions of dollars each, a sign that investors think the country’s regulatory crackdown is coming to an end. The People’s Bank of China on Friday fined financial technology giant Ant Group, an affiliate of Alibaba, almost US$1 billion, while Alibaba and Tencent’s financial unit were fined US$427 million and US$413 million, respectively, according to government and company statements. Shares in Alibaba and Tencent were up around 2% in midday trade on the Hong Kong stock exchange. Over the past few years, China’s tech companies have endured a harsh regulatory crackdown by Beijing that has gone after fintech, education, ride hailing, e-commerce and entertainment, wiping out more than US$1 trillion in value from Chinese stocks. Regulators also forced Ant to cancel its initial public offering in late 2020 and go through a drastic restructuring. https://tinyurl.com/2m9tdvfw

TikTok parent ByteDance to allow US staff to cash out on shares, sources say.

ByteDance, the Chinese owner of short video app TikTok, will allow shares owned by U.S. employees to vest without waiting for the company to list in the stock market, thereby letting them cash out, according to people familiar with the matter. The move is aimed at appeasing restless employees who have been waiting for an initial public offering (IPO) to profit from the shares they have been awarded as part of their compensation. It is also an indication that ByteDance, whose worth in excess of US$200 billion makes it the world’s most valuable startup, is in no rush to go public amid Beijing’s heightened scrutiny of China’s technology giants. ByteDance will now allow restricted shares held by U.S. employees to vest as long as sufficient time has passed, the sources said. The company previously set a “liquidity event”, such as an IPO or company sale, as a condition for the vesting to occur, the sources added. Once vested, the shares can be exchanged by the employees for cash in one of ByteDance’s stock buyback programs. https://reut.rs/3PUwT1Q

Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway is poised to score a US$1 billion profit after Microsoft beats FTC in Activision case.

Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway is poised to score a more than US$1 billion profit in its Activision Blizzard stake after Microsoft prevailed against the FTC on Tuesday in its bid to acquire the video game company. That’s assuming that Berkshire Hathaway held onto its stake in Activision Blizzard and didn’t sell any shares since it reported owning a US$4.2 billion position in the company at the end of the first quarter. Berkshire Hathaway first purchased a stake in Activision Blizzard in the fourth quarter of 2021, just a few months before Microsoft announced its proposed acquisition of Activision. https://bit.ly/3pSuwBM

KPMG is making a $2 billion bet on AI.

It’s another example of big changes that are coming to the workplace. KPMG, one of the world’s largest accounting and consulting companies, is putting AI to work — and with 220,000 employees in 147 countries, it’s one of the biggest signs yet just how fast the technology is spreading. The company is betting on its clients increasingly looking to AI to help them in areas like managing their supply chains and improving their cybersecurity defenses. Under a new partnership with Microsoft, KPMG will invest US$2 billion over five years into the team effort, Carl Carande, US vice chair and global head of KPMG Advisory, told Insider. Microsoft didn’t put a monetary figure on its part of the effort. https://bit.ly/3Dbu8ld

In battle with Microsoft, Google bets on medical ai program to crack healthcare industry.

Google is testing an artificial-intelligence program trained to expertly answer medical questions, racing against rivals including Microsoft to translate recent AI advances into products that would be used widely by clinicians. The November release of ChatGPT, a computer program that can fluently respond to a range of queries across subjects, has sparked early experiments at health systems across the U.S. to use the underlying technology in patient care. Google is betting that its medical chatbot technology, which is called Med-PaLM 2, will be better at holding conversations on healthcare issues than more general-purpose algorithms because it has been fed questions and answers from medical licensing exams. The company began testing the system with customers including the research hospital Mayo Clinic in April, said people familiar with the matter. Med-PaLM 2 can be used to generate responses to medical questions and perform tasks such as summarizing documents or organizing reams of health data, according to Google executives and research published by the company. https://archive.li/vkBWY

Nvidia deepens bets on AI in drug discovery with Recursion investment.

Nvidia invested US$50 million to speed up training of biotech firm Recursion’s artificial intelligence models for drug discovery, which the chip designer can then potentially license out, the companies said on Wednesday. Recursion shares jumped about 167% in premarket trading on the news. Recursion will train AI models on Nvidia’s cloud platform using its own biological and chemical datasets exceeding 23,000 terabytes. Nvidia could then license the AI models to biotech firms via BioNeMo, a generative AI cloud service for drug discovery that it rolled out widely earlier this year. The companies did not specify whether Nvidia will take a stake in Recursion. The drug developer did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for clarification. Recursion, which has partnered with drugmakers such as Bayer and Roche, plans to use Nvidia’s software to support its own pipeline as well as current and future partners. https://archive.li/oht8k

Instagram’s Threads surpasses 100 million users.

Instagram’s new Threads app has already surpassed 100 million users, meaning it reached the milestone dramatically faster than even ChatGPT. OpenAI’s chatbot passed the mark after two months, but Threads, which only launched last Wednesday, got there in a matter of days. The number of users can be found in the Instagram app, which tracks the size of the Threads userbase. Threads proved to be an early hit almost immediately. In the first two hours, it hit 2 million users and steadily climbed from there to 5 million, 10 million, 30 million, and then 70 million. The launch has been “way beyond our expectations,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on Friday. https://bit.ly/3NHgdbj

The rapid rise of Threads appears to be hurting Twitter.

Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of Threads parent Meta Platforms, said the new microblogging platform hit 100 million sign-ups less than a week after launching. At least two third-party estimates suggest Twitter traffic has been falling in tandem, an indication that its users may be leaving it for Threads rather than attempting to juggle both. Twitter said it had roughly 535 million monetizable monthly active users in June, The Wall Street Journal reported last week. In the first two days that Threads was fully available, traffic to Twitter’s website was down 5% compared with the same two days of the previous week, according to SimilarWeb, which tracks online activity. Year over year, such traffic was down 11%, the firm said. On Sunday Matthew Prince, CEO of cloud-infrastructure company Cloudflare, tweeted “Twitter traffic tanking” alongside a chart showing a decline in Twitter’s ranking relative to other top internet destinations. https://archive.li/1YDlZ

Twitter starts sharing ad revenue with verified creators.

Twitter is now paying creators for a share of the ad revenue earned from ads served in the replies to their posts. Users who subscribe to Twitter Blue and have earned more than 5 million tweet impressions each month for the last 3 months are eligible to join. According to owner Elon Musk, the first round of creator payouts will total US$5 million, and will be cumulative from the month of February onward. These payouts will be delivered via Stripe. https://tcrn.ch/3XStDWD

TikTok now wants to compete with Apple Music with a new streaming service.

The music streaming market has a lot of competitors, but Apple Music and Spotify have pretty much become leaders in this segment. However, there’s a new player entering this game, and that’s TikTok. The owners of the popular social network now want to compete with Apple Music and Spotify with their new music streaming platform called TikTok Music. https://bit.ly/46FFVpl

New York Times eliminates sports desk in favor of The Athletic.

The New York Times is cutting its national sports desk and will instead use content from the subscription sports site The Athletic, which the Times acquired in 2022 for US$550 million. Current NYT sports staffers will move to other desks around the newsroom and will prioritize general interest and investigative sports journalism “exploring the business, culture and power structures of sports,” while The Athletic staffers will focus on daily coverage of sports leagues, teams and players, according to a note from NYT publisher A.G. Sulzberger and CEO Meredith Kopit Levien. Layoffs aren’t planned, they said. What’s particularly notable is this shift brings The Athletic closer into the NYT newsroom: stories from the subscription publication will appear in print and on NYT’s homepage, while also being promoted across newsletters and social media platforms. NYT’s acquisition of The Athletic was a big bet by the news publisher to increase its subscription business and its coverage of sports. The Athletic accounted for about 5% of NYT’s overall revenues in the first quarter of 2023, rising to US$28.6 million in the first quarter from US$12.2 million the year prior. It is still not profitable. https://tinyurl.com/2vzmyszv

Disney CEO Bob Iger floats selling its cable tv channels.

Disney CEO Bob Iger floated the idea of selling ABC and the company’s cable channels, while also exploring a strategic partnership with another company to distribute ESPN directly to consumers. In a video interview with CNBC from the site of Allen & Co.’s annual Sun Valley conference, Iger said the ABC broadcast network and its cable channels, excluding ESPN, “may not be core to Disney.” He cited the ongoing decline in the cable-TV distribution business as a reason for considering selling those assets. Iger, whose contract was extended by Disney through 2026, also said Disney has held talks with possible “strategic partners” for ESPN, including to distribute its channels directly on streaming and outside of the pay-TV bundle. He added that Disney wants to “stay in the sports business.” “Whether it’s content value, whether it’s distribution value, whether it’s capital, whether it just helps the risk of the business some extent, but that wouldn’t be the primary driver,” he said. “But if they come to the table with value that enables ESPN to make a transition to its direct-to-consumer offering, then we’re gonna be very open-minded about that.” https://tinyurl.com/4kjp2kds

HCA Healthcare patient data stolen and for sale by hackers.

Personal information for potentially tens of millions of HCA Healthcare patients has been stolen and is now available for sale on a data breach forum as of earlier this week. HCA, one of the largest companies in the U.S., first acknowledged the breach earlier today. In a release, it warned patients that critical personal information had been compromised, including their full name, city and when and where they last saw a provider. https://cnb.cx/46FWfX8

FTC investigating OpenAI on ChatGPT data collection and publication of false information.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is investigating ChatGPT creator OpenAI over possible consumer harm through its data collection and the publication of false information. First reported by The Washington Post, the FTC sent a 20-page letter to the company this week. The letter requests documents related to developing and training its large language models, as well as data security. The FTC wants to get detailed information on how OpenAI vets information used in training for its models and how it prevents false claims from being shown to ChatGPT users. It also wants to learn more about how APIs connect to its systems and how data is protected when accessed by third parties. https://bit.ly/3rvev5u

E-Commerce sales hit US$12.7 billion during Amazon’s Prime Day.

U.S. e-commerce sales rose 6.1% year-over-year to hit US$12.7 billion during Amazon’s two-day Prime Day sale this week, according to estimates from Adobe Analytics published Thursday. The estimate provides some insight into how retailers performed during Amazon’s promotional period, during which rivals like Walmart and Target also drive sales by offering competing discounts. Amazon doesn’t share its Prime Day revenue, but said in a press release on Thursday that it had sold over 375 million items during the two-day sale. Amazon additionally said that Tuesday was “the single largest sales day in company history.” Amazon also used this year’s Prime Day to promote Buy with Prime, a feature that puts the company in competition with Shopify by letting non-Amazon sellers offer Prime checkout and delivery through their own websites. Amazon didn’t say how much revenue it took in through Buy with Prime this week, but said that merchants who participated in Prime Day saw an 8x increase in daily revenue. https://tinyurl.com/bdejnf4t

TikTok subsidizes returns costs in bid to grow u.s. shopping service.

TikTok is offering to shoulder some of the cost of returned items for TikTok Shop sellers, even if shoppers keep the item. It’s the latest sign of how aggressively TikTok is trying to grow its nascent U.S. shopping service, and comes on the heels of TikTok’s recent launch of fulfillment services for U.S. sellers. A post on TikTok’s Shop Academy page details the policy, which the company describes as a limited-time program that first launched on June 20. For items that cost US$20 or less, shoppers will be able to receive a refund without having to return the item, and sellers will be eligible for reimbursements from TikTok. TikTok will reimburse the seller for the full cost if the buyer returns an item because it doesn’t fit or is no longer needed. If the buyer returns an item due to quality or shipping issues, TikTok will reimburse the seller up to US$10. Recently, large retailers like Amazon and Walmart have started to incorporate similar policies allowing customers to keep some items they’ve received refunds for, due to the rising expense of shipping and processing returned items. https://tinyurl.com/2p94m3eb

XRP soars 61% after a judge says the cryptocurrency is not a security in a big win over the SEC.

Ripple, its CEO Brad Garlinghouse, and its co-founder Christian Larsen, were sued by the SEC in 2020 for the alleged failure to register its sale of US$1.4 billion of XRP tokens as securities. Since then, the company has been entangled in a drawn out lawsuit that could have a big impact on the broader crypto industry going forward. US District Judge for the Southern District of New York Analisa Torres said the XRP token is “not necessarily a security on its face.” “XRP, as a digital token, is not in and of itself a ‘contract, transaction or scheme’ that embodies the Howey requirements of an investment contract,” Torres said. https://bit.ly/3JZrJh0

TSMC sales ride AI demand boost to beat estimates.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. reported better-than-expected sales on a boom in artificial intelligence applications demanding more of the industry-leading firm’s chipmaking capacity. Second-quarter revenue totaled NT$480.8 billion (US$15.3 billion) according to Bloomberg’s calculations. That marked a 10% decline on the prior year, though the drop was not as bad as feared, beating an average analyst estimate of NT$476.2 billion. Sales in June came in at NT$156.4 billion. TSMC is the primary contract manufacturer of Nvidia Corp.’s AI accelerator chips, widely seen as the best hardware for training large data models such as the one underpinning OpenAI’s ChatGPT.  https:// bloom.bg/4497W6Z

iPhone manufacturer drops US$19.5 billion chip production deal with firm in India.

Apple has its eyes on India as the next major market to dominate. The nation is also a big part of Apple’s plans to diversify product manufacturing outside of China. Foxconn, Apple’s iPhone manufacturing partner, just dropped out of a US$19.5 billion chip deal in India, however. For its part, Foxconn has downplayed its role in helping Apple branch out of China. Despite having factories in India and Vietnam, Foxconn is compelled to maintain China as where most of its business exists. That was the message recently when Foxconn kicked off a hiring spree in the nation ahead of the iPhone 15 debut. New today is Foxconn’s announcement that it is pulling out of a nearly US$20 billion deal to develop semiconductors in India with Indian company Vedanta. https://bit.ly/3O7raEi

Tesla looking to make about half million EVs annually in India, Times of India reports.

Tesla is discussing an investment proposal with the Indian government to set up a factory with an annual capacity to produce about half a million electric vehicles, the Times of India reported on Thursday, citing government sources. The company, led by billionaire Elon Musk, is also looking at using India as an export base to ship cars to countries in the Indo-Pacific region, the report said. The starting price for the vehicles will be 2 million rupees (US$24,400.66), the report added, which is more than double of India’s cheapest EV, MG Comet, and half a million costlier than Tata Nexon EV, the top-selling electric car in the country. Last year, Tesla’s India entry plans were stalled after the country’s government refused to lower import taxes on its cars. The country levies as much as 100% import tax on electric vehicles. https://archive.li/7uIFk