You don’t think of General Motors as a company that takes a hit on memory costs, but reality bites. GM CEO Mary Barra, who noted that GM partnerships with Micron Technology and Samsung, said on the company’s second quarter earnings call: “We continue to expect commodity inflation, logistics and higher DRAM costs to be a headwind of $1.5 billion to $2 billion for the full year. We realized approximately $600 million in commodity costs in the first half and expect that headwind to increase in the second half, largely because it reflects 2 quarters of higher costs rather than just 1. In addition, spot rates continued to rise after our first quarter earnings call. And while they have eased somewhat recently, several commodities remain above those levels.”
Results
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang released an open letter on how America needs to focus on open weight models. Huang isn't wrong that the world needs both frontier closed models and frontier open models. Also note who signed on and who didn't.
I'm not a huge believer in open letters and think the problem in the US will largely take care of itself due to competition. Here's what I noted in my newsletter this week.
The breakneck pace of open LLM releases from Chinese AI players has US executives and a few policymakers freaked out. You can regulate China models all you want but all the signs are that US companies will also apply pressure on frontier AI companies. If you’re an enterprise trying to wrangle your AI budget you might as well cheer all of the open source LLM crowd on.
Anthropic said it has launched Claude Opus 5. The company said it comes close to Fable 5 performance at half the price and now is the default model on Claude Max. Here's all the benchmarks and details, but notice how everyone in the LLM race is talking costs.
Intel's second quarter was strong and illustrates how the company is recovering well. But I can't get too wound up. For starters, the foundry business is a big unknown. Yes, Intel can ride CPUs, which are the AI inference darling of the moment, but AMD has only become stronger. On GPUs, Intel is all roadmap.
The most notable thing on Intel's earnings call was an AMD question from an analyst asking about market share and losing server share. There's work to do. AMD's AI event upstaged Intel, which was also asked about Arm.
ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott has a knack for buzzwords. Here's one that you'll hear every AI agent orchestrator say soon: Kill switch.
Given OpenAI's Hugging Face fiasco, CIOs everywhere are going to worry about rogue AI agents (or just ones programmed to cheat benchmarks). Spotting an opportunity to put ServiceNow in the security conversation, McDermott said on the company's second quarter earnings call:
"For any company that's running ServiceNow and you get a rogue AI, there's a kill switch, it doesn't get through. And then you think about how you use the right model and you hire it for the right job. And we do that, too. And people are realizing you don't need to take a Ferrari to mail a letter. So using the right technology for the right job and then managing the budgets, including all the tokens and the security of this has become pretty important."
The upshot here is ServiceNow wants to be seen as the AI grownup in the room.
Tesla said its 2026 CapEx will top $25 billion and the company will pursue up to $30 billion in debt capacity.
Why?
Robots.
CEO Elon Musk said:
"This is a massive CapEx year, but I'm confident that all the things that we're investing in will yield incredible returns, really the best CapEx returns that we've ever seen. And the Tesla team has performed incredibly well. The Cybercab has started production. We will soon start production with Optimus."
He added:
"I think Optimus will be the biggest product ever, but it is a very complex problem to solve. It's one of the hardest things to solve to make an autonomous humanoid robot that can do tasks that if you simply ask it to do something or show a video, it can do the task without any programming.
It's a lot of work to scale. The production scaling challenge is very substantial. This is going to be the hardest product to scale manufacturing that we've ever made at Tesla because everything on the robot is new. And the difficulty of scaling the production ramp is proportionate to the newness of the parts in the robot."
And yes, Tesla makes cars, but whatever (see second quarter results).
Infosys said Ashiss Kumar Dash is the company's CEO designate. Kumar, who leads Infosys' energy vertical, will take over for Salil Parekh. Parekh's term ends in March 2027.
The company also reported first quarter earnings of 20 cents a share on revenue of $5.08 billion, up 2.8% from a year ago.
Monday said it will cut 20% of its workforce in a restructuring that'll incur about $45 million to $55 million in charges. Of that sum, $30 million to $35 million will be severance and related items.
Monday said the layoffs reflect "the Company's ongoing transformation of its product, marketing, and go-to-market strategy and is intended to support a leaner, more focused operating model as the Company continues to invest in its AI-driven growth strategy."
The company maintained its revenue growth outlook and adjusted cash flow.
Samsung's Unpacked event in London included the usual complement of smartphone upgrades complete with price increases due to memory costs for some models. Samsung also outlined its intelligent eyewear efforts with Gentle Monster and Warby Parker.
The most interesting thing the Fold8 has a passport-sized form factor. That's nice but the $1,900 price tag is a bit much (reviews).
Here's the recap:
Cisco launched Antares, a family of security small language models built for pinpointing where vulnerabilities exist in a code base. The models Antares-350M and Antares-1B were released on Hugging Face. The big takeaway is that Cisco claims Antares is 172x cheaper than OpenAI's GPT-5.5 and 15.2x cheaper than Z.ai's GLM-5.2.
Super Micro said fourth quarter revenue will be at the low end of its guidance of $11 billion to $12.5 billion. Wall Street was looking for $11.73 billion. Non-GAAP gross margins will be between 15% to 17%, which is well ahead of the 8.2% and 8.4% guidance. The company received new orders worth $60 billion in the fourth quarter.
Overall, the preliminary report is mixed, but 16% of the shares are sold short. With that many traders leaning the wrong way, shares surged 15% in after hours trading.
General Motors reported a solid second quarter and CEO Mary Barra said the company is busy expanding beyond autos.
Barra said:
"Our high-margin software and services revenues continue to grow rapidly with 1 million new subscriptions expected this year, contributing to more than $3 billion in recognized revenue. Next year, the growth should be even higher because we're making Super Cruise standard on high-end Silverado and Sierra trims and optional on most everything else. We're estimating 160,000 incremental Super Cruise units from this product enhancement strategy.
Alongside our core vehicle portfolio and software growth, new businesses initiatives like GM Insurance and GM Defense are reaching critical mass because we offer unique value propositions. For example, when a customer purchases GM Insurance, we create a reoccurring revenue stream from premiums, along with incremental parts and vehicle sales, all while driving customer loyalty and higher satisfaction. The business has scaled from 3 states in early 2024 to 21 states today, making GM Insurance available to over 60% of GM's U.S. sales, and we are on track to reach over 80% in the near term. GM Defense is another compelling growth opportunity that enables us to deliver defense solutions faster with better economics for the U.S. taxpayer. The Chevrolet Colorado-based Infantry Squad Vehicle is a case in point. After initial multiyear order of about 1,200 ISVs, the U.S. Army now plans to procure more than 10,000 if the appropriation is passed."