Results

Dell CFO David Kennedy, speaking at a Citi technology conference, laid out how the company goes about procuring components. He said:

“I think the conversation in the market is around supply access. So if you go back to -- let's go back 6-months ago, was there a few savvy customers who foresaw some of this and did some advanced purchasing to kind of get ahead of that game? Yes, there was.

But what we're now seeing is, if I pick an enterprise customer, they come forward I know they're buying history. If all of a sudden, they're looking to buy 4-years worth of equipment from me, I'm not in a position to fulfill that. Our job is to try and make sure we diversify it to as many customers as we can and solve as many customer needs as we can. But what we're doing now is entering into conversations about what are your supply needs and your infrastructure needs going out into year 2, year 3 and year 4. And our commitment that for those who want to partner with us, we'll give them that supply access and provide some guarantees that we can position that for them as we look out. Guarantee supply does not guarantee price. That's a specific differentiation. But that's what the market is looking for. It's that supply access.”

Anthropic published research on economic scenarios for 2030, outlined a few options including a modest impact and extreme outcome and noted that the future isn't set. The short version is an in extreme scenario AI could result in a 17.9% unemployment rate for knowledge workers and a 11.5% decrease in wages. The modest scenario rhymes with the US economy today and substantial impact features a knowledge worker unemployment rate of 4.5%. In a nutshell, the economy will be much bigger due to AI but anyone who actually has to work for a living may be hosed. Trust fund babies unite!

HPE CFO Marie Myers said its Helios efforts with AMD are being evaluated and are likely to boost results later in 2027 and beyond. Speaking at an investment conference, Myers said:

"I'm personally super excited about Helios because it gives us an opportunity to really get out there and participate in a segment of the market that we potentially haven't been as competitive in. What's great about Helios, it incorporates a networking tray. And then obviously, we work with AMD on the server architecture.

But frankly, by having the networking tray in the stack, it obviously gives us a much better margin profile on these types of deals. So what I would say is where are we in terms of looking at these opportunities.

Right now, we are in POC stage with a number of different customers. And I'd say we've got some strong interest. Customers are obviously testing those workloads because they have to evaluate performance. It's a new stack. Many of them have been accustomed to working on their existing architecture, their existing stacks, so they're happy to gain confidence that they can see these workloads really performing at the levels that they want."

Meta launched Muse, a personal AI agent, and may have stumbled onto a monetization model. Muse, which is powered by Spark 1.3, is designed to handle tasks and runs in a secure Muse Secure VM, a dedicated secure computer with its own browser.

Muse has context, memory and integrations with various apps. Meta also said Muse can use checkout with Link from Stripe. Nothing Muse does reaches the internet unless a service call Sentinel approves it. The human has to approve any actions and Muse has an audit trail.

Muse

According to Meta, Muse will be on iOS and Android and will be free for most people with "subscription plans for people who want to do more."

It'll be interesting to see whether Meta can land subscriptions.