00:00 Speaker A
First up, chip stocks climbing, Nvidia extending its rally after announcing a deal to sell chips to Saudi Arabia. Super Micro Computer also higher after entering a partnership with Data Vault, a data center operator based in Saudi Arabia. You’re taking a look at shares of both of those tickers here. Uh they are moving higher pre-market here. Super Micro jumping, jumping as Destiny’s Child would say, by about 20% right now. And of course, this wave of deals still adding a question back onto the table of will these chips actually stay in Saudi Arabia? Will they make their way into other countries? That was one of the larger risks that was of concern, especially given how the kind of chip flow internationally has been also deemed a national security threat as well. That aside, you think about some of the opportunities that Nvidia is looking for in other countries if there continues to be a roadblock for them to sell into the Asia-Pacific region, specifically in China, and where they could potentially see some of these dollars and commitments flow into their business as well. Saudi Arabia this week, of course, is the du jour for all of these businesses.
02:14 Speaker B
Right. Yeah. Security, security, I guess is is the theme coming out of all of these talks in the Middle East, right? With all of this following of the money and following of the big deals. And we keep talking about this morning the Bank of America commentary around this, calling this a multi-billion dollar opportunity for these chip companies. Um and Bank of America talks about sovereign AI. That’s sort of the buzzword name for these um countries investing in their own sort of governmental AI and data center build out. And BVA says quote this that that sovereign AI nicely complements commercial cloud investments with the focus on training and inference of LLMs in local culture, language and needs, could be 15, 10 to 15% or $50 billion dollars plus annually in the longer term in terms of the AI infrastructure opportunity. And Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia has talked a lot about sovereign AI in the past and working with these countries on this stuff.
04:22 Speaker A
Absolutely.
04:24 Speaker B
Yeah. Well, next, Sony warning of a $680 million hit to profits this year due to President Trump’s tariffs. Company also announcing a $1.7 billion share buyback and provided details on the partial spin-off of its financial unit here. Um so the company’s forecast not definitely not necessarily pleasing investors here. Um but the company is pushing ahead with this buyback and also gave a forecast for how many PlayStation 5s it plans to sell, um or it hopes to sell, 15 million in the year ending March 2026, its fiscal year, but that is a um a decrease from the 18 and a half million units that it sold uh in the last fiscal year.
05:45 Speaker A
Which is interesting. I mean, they’re raising prices too in several key regions here, in some of the international markets, Australia, New Zealand, Europe. Uh and still citing a challenging economic environment here, including high inflation, uh fluctuating exchange rates as well here. So PS5 prices still on the rise there in those strategic markets here. Also, one of the other things that I kind of noted off here, um looking at the half a percent drop in the previous year uh versus the previous year in revenue in this most recent most recent release for Sony here. Uh and then looking at some of the other categories, we’ve talked about how difficult, or at least it’s come to the president’s attention, how difficult the the media and specifically in some of the motion picture and the box office production, how difficult that environment is right now with within that larger division for Sony here. Uh we’re taking a look at some of the sales within uh pictures coming in at 1.493 um in in sales at least, uh billion. Uh and thinking about what that means more broadly here, I think all of them are in a massive kind of investment phase for some of those motion pictures, and we’ll see be interesting to see what Sony continues to say on that front as well.
