TeeJay Tech Bro

  Beijing and Washington are playing a game of robot chicken as trade tensions over humanoid tech escalate.  China’s commerce ministry on Thursday threatened to retaliate over the Federal Communications Commission’s ban on foreign-made robots. The FCC said two days before that it was adding advanced robotics, including humanoid and quadruped robots, to a list of restricted imports. The tech poses cybersecurity risks that could threaten critical infrastructure, according to the agency. The FCC did not explicitly call out China, but Beijing was quick to take the ban personally. That’s probably because Chinese companies dominate the robotics industry. Sorry, Tesla Optimus Interact Analysis has found Chinese companies make up 90% of global android shipments. More than 13,000 humanoid robots were shipped last year, and of that, China’s top two robot-makers, Agibot and Unitree, shipped more than 5,000 each, Omdia found. US competitors including Figure AI and Tesla shipped at most ...

  In an earnings call key to soothing skittish investors, the world’s biggest company by revenue arrived with its head in the clouds. And that was just fine by Wall Street. Shares of Amazon jumped as much as 9% in after-hours trading Thursday after second-quarter earnings results that included rip-roaring cloud revenue, demonstrating the world still can’t get enough compute. Investors took it as a sign that generating a return on enormous artificial intelligence investments is possible, which is more than can be said about some fellow hyperscalers. Tipping of the Hyperscales Jittery investors are finally starting to get an idea of what they do and do not like to see from Big Tech hyperscalers. Meta plummeted nearly 8% on Thursday following its after-the-bell earnings call the day before, in which executives increased the lower end of its capex forecast even as AI spending was already eating into its free cash flow. Microsoft, on the other hand, had its best trading day since 2008 ...

  They’re a picky bunch on Wall Street lately. Will Palantir, when it reports its latest quarterly results this afternoon, have enough good news? Despite a better-than-expected $1.6 billion revenue haul in the first quarter , an 85% year-over-year gain, shares in the software and data analytics giant have tumbled 31% in 2026. An aggressive second-quarter sales forecast of $1.8 billion, representing an 80% increase, couldn’t summon the momentum to escape this year’s protracted selloff of software holdings, either. Whatever today’s result, options pricing suggests traders expect a dramatic swing of up to 10%. So strap in   American Brand Best known for its Gotham platform, built for government, defense and intelligence organizations, the company boosted US government revenue by 84% year over year to $687 million in the first quarter. There’s also Palantir’s commercial side, where its Foundry operating system and Artificial Intelligence Platform provide tools to help companies ma...

  You thought gasoline prices have gone up? That’s nothing compared with the soaring cost of memory chips, which have become not only incredibly expensive but also increasingly scarce relative to demand because of the AI buildout. To see why, you only need to understand two things. The first is compute, the most famous component of the AI buildout. In short, it’s the hardware that provides the processing power to speed up AI and machine learning. As Big Tech hyperscalers and the major AI labs have raced to obtain as much processing power as possible for their more and more sophisticated advanced models, high-end hardware like Nvidia’s graphics processing units (GPUs) has become one of the world’s most coveted resources. The demand transformed the semiconductor designer into one of the most profitable and valuable companies on earth. Running Into the ‘Memory Wall’ It has also led to a dramatic GPU shortage, enabling the valuations of rival GPU makers AMD and Intel to take off, too. ...

  Even a killer earnings report may not be enough to help SpaceX stock escape the gravitational pull of lockup expiration dates. Not that sky-high financials are exactly expected at today’s inaugural quarterly earnings call for Elon Musk’s rockets and AI empire.  The real test for the newly public firm comes this Thursday, when a major tranche of insider shares exit their lockup period. The expiration could fuel a selloff that sends its share price, already down some 20% from its IPO, even lower. Rest assured, short-selling sharks are betting on it. (Space)X-it Strategy When SpaceX debuted at $135 per share in early June, 640 million shares, or less than 5% of total shares, were made available to the public. On Thursday, after the company has already shed hundreds of billions in value since its debut, employees and early investors will be able to sell another 911 million shares, amounting to another 12% of the company’s total.  That creates even stronger headwinds for the...