SpaceX’s China-less IPO and other astronomical figures

{"text":[[{"start":10,"text":"Hello from the suddenly-very-hot-again San Francisco Bay Area. This is Yifan, your #techAsia host this week."}],[{"start":18.3,"text":"Covering technology in Silicon Valley has always been busy, but this week is next level."}],[{"start":23.8,"text":"I started the week with Google I/O developer conference, where CEO Sundar Pichai spoke to a packed, sweat-drenched audience about the US tech giant’s latest efforts in artificial intelligence, including new models and revamping its search business."}],[{"start":39.4,"text":"Pichai started his meeting with reporters on Wednesday afternoon by apologising for the hot weather in California — not that it will stop Google from building more data centres, including the ones it is putting together with Blackstone to provide cloud services powered by the search giant’s in-house TPU AI chips."}],[{"start":58.5,"text":"Its Blackstone joint venture will put Google in direct competition with Nvidia, which dominates the market for AI data centre chips. That is probably why, on the same Wednesday afternoon, Jensen Huang spent a good part of the company’s earnings call telling analysts why his company is uniquely positioned to gain from the AI demand momentum due to the moat it has built on comprehensive hardware and software offerings."}],[{"start":83.7,"text":"But don’t worry, Nvidia is doing just fine, for now at least. It reported a record $81.6bn in revenue for the February-April quarter, up 85 per cent on the year, despite not shipping any data centre chips to China."}],[{"start":98.8,"text":"It turned out to be a day of eye-popping figures, as SpaceX filed a more than 300-page prospectus to the Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday afternoon. The Elon Musk-owned company is aiming for the biggest initial public offering in history at a $2tn valuation, but it is not without competition."}],[{"start":118.65,"text":"OpenAI, the company that kicked off the generative AI boom, is also reportedly planning to file for an IPO as soon as this week, seeking a more than $1tn valuation."}],[{"start":129.8,"text":"This week will have a far-reaching and long-lasting impact, and not just in Silicon Valley. Case in point, both the Japanese and South Korean stock markets jumped on Thursday morning. Perhaps we will see more trillion-dollar companies coming out of Asia as well."}],[{"start":145.20000000000002,"text":"Space minus China"}],[{"start":147.60000000000002,"text":"Elon Musk’s SpaceX filed for what could be the largest initial public offering in history on Wednesday, seeking to raise up to $80bn at a $2tn valuation. But unlike Tesla — a Musk-owned company that built its success on China — SpaceX says it is excluding the world’s second-largest economy as a market, now and in the future."}],[{"start":169.05,"text":"In the prospectus the company filed to the Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday, SpaceX said it has “identified the largest TAM [total addressable market] in human history”, but did not include China and Russia in the estimation, Nikkei Asia’s Yifan Yu reports."}],[{"start":187,"text":"The filing also warned investors that China could be one of the company’s biggest threats, as Beijing poured both money and policy support into its domestic space industry."}],[{"start":197.3,"text":"Fast forward"}],[{"start":198.95000000000002,"text":"Chinese AI groups have raced ahead of US rivals in video generation, gaining an edge in a technology with growing uses in advertising, ecommerce and entertainment, writes the FT’s Eleanor Olcott."}],[{"start":211.8,"text":"Companies such as Beijing-based ByteDance and Kuaishou are training systems on vast libraries of short-form video, pushing them ahead of American rivals such as OpenAI, Google and Anthropic."}],[{"start":223.45000000000002,"text":"Chinese-made services such as Kling, Seedance 2.0 and HappyHorse 1.0 all scored highly in Arena’s ranking of the best video models, compiled from votes by users on the independent platform."}],[{"start":236.3,"text":"Training video models requires vast amounts of high-quality footage, an area where Chinese platforms have an edge through their ownership of short-video apps, such as TikTok, and the data they generate. However, some experts argued Chinese groups have also been more aggressive on accessing copyrighted material."}],[{"start":254.8,"text":"“Most of the American models that we’ve tried are not very good at video generation,” said Ben Chiang, founder of Director AI, a start-up that produces AI-generated content such as cartoons and short dramas. “It comes down to quality and how well the model follows the prompt.”"}],[{"start":271,"text":"Astronomical profit surge"}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":273.35,"text":"If you thought the numbers Nvidia posted on in its Wednesday earnings release were crazy, think again. China’s top memory chipmaker ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) said net profit skyrocketed over 1,688 per cent on the year in the January-March period, while revenue surged more than 719 per cent, Nikkei Asia’s Cheng Ting-Fang reports."}],[{"start":298.1,"text":"The results, shared in an IPO prospectus submitted to the Shanghai Stock Exchange on Sunday, underscore the significant progress Beijing has made in its push to localise critical chip production."}],[{"start":309.6,"text":"Nikkei first reported that CXMT is undertaking its most aggressive expansion ever in Shanghai, aiming to not only multiply its production capacity but also develop high-bandwidth memory, the critical memory component used in AI data centre servers. The company is also expanding its production capacity close to its headquarters in Hefei, Anhui province."}],[{"start":332.05,"text":"AI on the (somewhat) cheap"}],[{"start":334.35,"text":"Silicon Valley is in a “tokenmaxxing” race, in which whoever burns through the most tokens — a measure of how much they are spending on AI compute — will come out the winner."}],[{"start":343.95000000000005,"text":"Companies are using up their token budgets faster than expected, and Google is seizing the opportunity to introduce a more cost-effective AI model, Nikkei Asia’s Yifan Yu reports."}],[{"start":355.1,"text":"At its annual I/O developer conference, CEO Sundar Pichai unveiled Google Gemini 3.5 Flash and said it could help top Google Cloud enterprise customers “save over $1 billion annually” if they shift 80 per cent of their workloads from other frontier models to 3.5 Flash."}],[{"start":376.65000000000003,"text":"Google is also revamping its search functions by turning the search box into an AI agent that can process tasks for users in the background."}],[{"start":385.00000000000006,"text":"Suggested reads"}],[{"start":null,"text":"

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"}],[{"start":386.6000000000001,"text":"#techAsia is co-ordinated by Nikkei Asia’s Katherine Creel in Tokyo, with assistance from the FT tech desk in London.  "}],[{"start":394.6500000000001,"text":"Sign up here at Nikkei Asia to receive #techAsia each week. The editorial team can be reached at techasia@nex.nikkei.co.jp"}],[{"start":412.75000000000006,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1779520446_6181.mp3"}