Business, Financial & Legal - Page 4

Intel lost a chunky $16.6 billion this quarter, which was revealed in the company's recent Q3 2024 financial results, just a week after the launch of its new consumer desktop CPU series in the Core Ultra 200 chips hitting the market, led by the flagship Core Ultra 9 285K.

The company beat expectations, pulling in $13.3 billion in revenues, but after its massive internal restructuring changes -- and many other happenings at Intel right now -- posted $16.6 billion in losses for Q3 2024. The $13.3 billion of revenue for Q3 2024 is down 6% year-over-year, but also up $500 million from Q2 2024.

Intel's massive upheaval and restructuring changes, and massive losses from its Foundry business, saw Intel's gross margin dropping to 15%, a historical minimum for Intel. Not good. Intel's product group had profits, generating revenues of $12.9 billion, Intel Foundry earned $4.4 billion (but down from $4.7 billion from Q3 2023) while its chip production unit bled $5.8 billion.

Supermicro is in a lot of trouble right now, with its stock price plummeting 35% today after its accounting firm, Ernest & Young, resigned citing unreliable management and possible law violations.

Ernest & Young's letter was cited in an SEC filing, which explained: "We are resigning due to information that has recently come to our attention which has led us to no longer be able to rely on management's and the Audit Committee's representations and to be unwilling to be associated with the financial statements prepared by management, and after concluding we can no longer provide the Audit Services under applicable law or professional obligations".

The accounting firm also put into question Supermicro's ability to act with "integrity and ethical values". Supermicro has of course rejected Ernest & Young's claims in its filing, saying that there were "no reportable events" that would implicate Supermicro in any wrongdoing.

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger made a "big mistake" when he took over as CEO three years ago, with a damning new report from Reuters stating that Gelsinger's comments over the years have strained the relationship wtih TSMC, losing the company a lucrative 40% discount in the process.

In the write up by Reuters, the site points that out that Intel had a "sweet deal" going with TSMC, where it would make the chips that Intel designed, but couldn't produce. TSMC was offering "deep discounts" to Intel, according to "four people with knowledge of the agreement".

Reuters says that instead of Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger nurturing the relationship with TSMC -- with Gelsinger hoping to restore Intel's in-house manufacturing process -- ended up offending TSMC by calling out Taiwan's precarious relations with China. Gelsinger said in 2021: "You don't want all of your eggs in the basket of a Taiwan fab". However, in December 2021 encouraging US investment in US chipmakers, Gelsinger said: "Taiwan is not a stable place".

Google revealed its quarterly revenue recently was approximately $88 billion, and while that is certainly an incredible amount of money, it falls extremely short of what a Russian court has ruled Google owes Russian media outlets.

A Russian court has ruled that Google owes Russian media stations an astonishing $2.5 decillion, which if you thought a million dollars was hard to mentally picture, is unfathomable amount of money. For perspective sake, the World Bank reported Earth's global revenue over a year, or the amount of money the planet generated as a whole was approximately $100 trillion. So, if Earth as a whole paid every cent to Russia, it would take the planet 200 quintillion years, or 200,000,000,000,000,000,000 years, to pay off the fine completely.

How did Russia arrive at this number? The ridiculous fine is the conclusion of a four year court battle that began after YouTube banned the Russian channel Tsargrad in 2020 in response to US sanctions. Additionally, more Russian-owned or backed channels were banned from Google's platform in 2022 following Russian President Vladimir Putin's invasion into Ukraine. So far, seventeen Russian stations have been banned from YouTube.

SK hynix vice president in charge of PKG Development, Lee Kang-wook, gave quite a keynote speech recently at the Semicon Korea 2024 event in Seoul, South Korea.

Lee Kang-wook said: "Packaging has evolved from enhancing the value of products in the past to creating new business opportunities. Next, it may determine the survival of companies. Packaging solves both technical and economic issues of semiconductors and drives industrial innovation".

He continued: "Previously, the law of addition applied, where packaging merely enhanced product value. Now, it's the law of multiplication. Even if a company excels in design and device manufacturing, without packaging capabilities, it cannot seize business opportunities".

Intel is struggling... we all know it, Samsung is struggling... we all know it... but now rumors are swirling that Intel Foundry and Samsung Foundry could combine forces to compete against the semiconductor leader: TSMC.

In a new video from leaker Moore's Law is Dead, his sources have said that Intel and Samsung could combine resources in their foundries, to compete with TSMC. As I was writing this story, I noticed that South Korea's Daily Economic News that Intel and Samsung are in discussions to form a "wafer foundry alliance" to fight TSMC.

UDN reports that the industry is concerned that Intel could shift its processor outsourcing orders as a "conditioin of exchange" with Samsung, which will affect TSMC (but not too much, they're too busy fabbing chips for NVIDIA, AMD, Qualcomm, MediaTek, Apple, and more).

Can you imagine the world as we know it, if Intel had acquired NVIDIA back in 2005 for just $20 billion? That's exactly what CEO at the time Paul Otellini floated to the board at Intel, but the "deal of a lifetime" was denied.

In a new report from The New York Times, we're learning that former Intel CEO Pat Otellini pitched the idea of buying NVIDIA during a board meeting at the time, with the intent that the design of graphics chips would be fundamental for data center scalability in the future, but the pitch was rejected... I bet that hurts now, real, real bad.

We don't know exactly why the board at Intel denied the pitch to buy NVIDIA at the time, but it would've been a rather big acquisition at the time and $20 billion would've been a decent chunk of coin in 2005... however, that $20 billion is now worth $3.5+ trillion now.

SK hynix has reported its Q3 2024 financial report, noting new records in revenue and net profit, achieving the best-ever quarterly performance with "increasing premium product sales" on based on its #1 AI memory technology.

The South Korean memory leader noted strong demand of memory for AI servers, with HBM memory share of DRAM revenues for SK hynix in Q3 2024 hitting 30% and forecasted to reach 40% in Q4 2024 (especially as NVIDIA's new Blackwell B200 and GB200 are now in the wild with the fastest HBM3E memory on-board).

SK hynix reported revenues of 17.5731 trillion won (around $12.6 billion USD or so), operating profits of 70.3 trillion won (around $5 billion USD or so) and net profits of 5.7534 trillion won (around $4.1 billion USD or so). The company emphasized that the demand for AI memory continued to be strong centered on data center customers, and the company marked its highest revenue since its foundation by expanding sales of premium products such as HBM and eSSD. In particular, HBM sales showed excellent growth, up more than 70% from the previous quarter and more than 330% from the same period last year.

Tesla released its Q3 2024 earnings with stock surging 17% on Thursday morning, including the fact that the EV automaker shipped 462,890 vehicles in Q3 2024.

Tesla explained in its press release: "In the third quarter, we produced approximately 470,000 vehicles, delivered approximately 463,000 vehicles and deployed 6.9 GWh of energy storage products".

The company said in its earnings deck: "We delivered strong results in Q3 with growth in vehicle deliveries both sequentially and year-on-year, resulting in record third-quarter volumes. Preparations remain underway for our offering of new vehicles - including more affordable models - which we will begin launching in the first half of 2025".

CrowdStrike, the company behind the software that caused the largest IT outage in history has been hit with a lawsuit by Delta Airlines, after the IT outage caused millions of Windows machines to be thrown into boot loops and as a result, Delta lost hundreds of millions of dollars.

It was back in early August that Delta Airlines CEO sat down for an interview and fired off accusations at CrowdStrike for its catastrophic IT failure. For those that don't know, CrowdStrike is a cybersecurity company that provides security solutions that operate within the kernel of Windows machines. CrowdStrike rolled out an update to its Falcon sensor (the company's cybersecurity software), and since this update contained a faulty driver, approximately 8.5 million Windows machines around the world were thrown into bootloops that required in-person remediation.

Delta Airlines was hit the hardest of any airline, and according to the company's CEO, the airline had to manually reset 40,000 servers and cancel more than 7,000 flights. In early August, the company's CEO said it hired a new legal team to pursue damages from CrowdStrike as it claims it has sustained approximately $500 million in damages from the outage.