Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts. Radio. News. Bloomberg Tech is live from coast to coast with Caroline Hyde in New York and Ed Ludlow in San Francisco. This is Bloomberg Tech. Coming up, we sit down with the CoreWeave CEO, Michael Intrater, to discuss the company's earnings as it builds out data center capacity. Plus, we break down the jobs report and the impact of AI on today's workforce with Clara Shai from the New Work Foundation. And we bring down more earnings with Lyft CEO David Risher as the company spends on international expansion. But first, we check in on these markets that are moving on an international basis. Look, we still have eyes towards some sort of peace deal being broken between the US and Iran. But the focus is also on optimism around jobs data coming in stronger for the first back-to-back gain we've had in at least a year in terms of month-to-month non-farm payrolls. But tech, I'm afraid, down for 16 straight months in terms of jobs in the information technology area. We're up 1.7%, though, even as consumer confidence lags. And it's about the AI trade. It's about big tech. But there is a laggard out there. And I just want to shine a light on what's happening with CallWeave. We're off by 12%. The context is this company was up, let's say, 90% year-to-date in the run-up to these earnings. We see profit-taking. We also see some anxiety as we see the forecast perhaps not living up to some of the higher expectations. CEO Michael Entrator joins us now in the studio. Michael, earnings are always tough when the market has built up a lot of optimism around the business. So why do you think they're a little bit concerned about the forward-looking guidance when it comes to revenue, when it comes to operating profit? So look, I think this was, and I said this in the earnings call, a transformational and extraordinary earnings force. You know, the company really hit on all cylinders. We beat on revenue. We reaffirmed our annual revenue targets from a nominal perspective. We reaffirmed our 2026 ARR operating margin targets. Really a great quarter for us by the numbers, but also, you know, extending our product. You know, we can't keep up with demand from existing customers, which are, you know, historically have been AI labs and AI native and cloud. And now they're expanding? Yeah. And we're just being overwhelmed by new verticals that are coming in and integrating AI at scale into their workflows, right? And so, you know, you heard me talk a little bit about some of the trading and finance companies like Jane Street and Hudson River Trading, you know, that's adding to, you know, JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley, who are already clients. You know, you heard me talk a little bit about some of the physical AI into the robotics space, you know, where, you know, great new clients coming on to our infrastructure. It's really exciting. You know, stock's going to bounce around. You know, we understand that. But, you know, one of the best things about being a founder and a CEO and one of the best things about and one of the hardest things about being a founder and CEO is, you know, I try to keep my eye on the parts of the business that are succeeding and growing and expanding. And, you know, we're winning the day, right? We drove down our cost of capital. We expanded our backlog by 40 billion. We did all the things that we needed to do. So I'm thrilled with the quarter. I think it was fantastic. You know, seemingly there's a little bit of trepidation around next quarter's revenue. So how do you, yeah, how do you get next quarter? And indeed, the second half, people are optimistic. You're saying, I'm optimistic that profitability will ramp up in the second half. How does that happen? Oh, so, you know, I mean, look, we, it's almost mathematical at some point, right? Like where, you know, you're building infrastructure. That infrastructure takes time to bring online. We are going through a massive build out across the company right now. It's why the operating margins have compressed is because we're going through this enormous scaling exercise. As you push through that, all of that infrastructure comes on to billing. And once it comes on to billing, you are going to see a sequential expansion of the operating margins until we go from 1% in Q1 all the way up through low double digits by Q4. And that's sort of baked in because of the infrastructure coming online, the software capacity to deliver that infrastructure. We're highly confident we're going to hit those numbers. There was anxiety about another company, a client, not hitting internal numbers. And I'm talking about OpenAI. And look, Sarah Fry has come on and spoken to colleagues here at Bloomberg News and pushed back against that, saying they're seeing a wall of demand. But how confident are you that your clients are seeing that demand and are good for the money for the buildup? Yeah, so one of the things I talked about yesterday during earnings call is that the demand for our paper in the debt markets has been nothing shy of astounding. You know, we did one of our delayed draw facilities closed two days ago. The clients in it were Cohere and OpenAI exclusively. lit. And two things happened. One, it was 5x oversubscribed, which is enormous. It also closed 50 basis points below the marketed range. And that is a clear indication of enormous buying interest for financing the paper. With regards to paying, look, you know, OpenAI is an extraordinary company, right? One in 10 people on the planet use their product every year. But, you know, and we think that they're in a wonderful position, but we've also built an incredibly diversified portfolio of companies that use our infrastructure. This quarter, we announced Anthropic. We announced a massive deal, $21 billion with Meta. We announced a $6 billion deal with Jane Street. The number of clients that are using our infrastructure are expanding. The diversification is expanding. OpenAI is an important client, but one of many. Let's talk about an important partner and in your supply chain, and that's NVIDIA. Look, how confident you are with the strength of your relationship there. NVIDIA has made deals with you, invested in you, but also doing that with, shall I say, even competitors in the space. Is that ever an anxiety? No. I take that as an incredible affirmation of the fact that the world needs more of this infrastructure and the demand for the infrastructure and the product that we deliver is, you know, overwhelming. And, you know, at the end of the day, you know, NVIDIA has got to do what it's got to do for its business. I really focus on my clients and my clients are coming back to us and they are saying again and again, you deliver the best product. The way that your software stack enables our engineers to use it most efficiently, that most cost effectively and most successfully. And therefore we want to buy more. And so the problem that I've got is how do I bring on enough infrastructure to sate and to deliver the infrastructure that my clients are clamoring for? Dig into the problems because there have been delays at times with certain of them coming online and that's to do with a partnership. What is the biggest chokehold for you at the moment? So, you know, CoreWeave is becoming a massive player in the space. And, you know, we are currently approaching 50 data centers that we are delivering infrastructure from. There is no single data center provider that represents more than 17% of our infrastructure. We have a massive effort internal to the company to go through self-builds so that we have greater operational control over the delivery of data center capacity. We're doing all the right things by diversifying to ensure that no single data center can materially impact the trajectory of the company. That is further reinforced by just the size and scale of the installed capacity. So if you have a gigawatt worth of capacity and a data hall represents 50 megawatts, and you're bringing 50 megawatt, the impact of a week delay on 50 megawatts in a gigawatt environment is very different than earlier on when you're bringing on 50 megawatts and you only have 50 megawatts online. A week delay rattles your entire ability to project where you're going, and we no longer have that problem. We have achieved escape velocity, both in terms of our data center capacity as well as our revenue, as well as our ability to provide guidance into the back half of this year. We're super excited about that. We'll wait for the investors maybe to just react to some of your longer-term perspective. Michael Intrator there, the CEO of CoreWeave on the back of their numbers. Now, we're also watching shares of Cloudflare after their own earnings report. Look, they're saying they're going to slash jobs. About a fifth of all jobs are going to go. They're giving a forecast for revenue that fell short of analysts' expectations. This is, again, a lean into AI, but it comes, sadly, at the expense of people and the workforce for them. We currently see the shares off 24% as really the revenue and the forecast is what is concerning people at the moment. Coming up, we'll discuss further that issue of AI, of tech, of jobs, of unemployment, on the back of the jobs report and, indeed, of the likes of Cloudflare. Clara Shai is with us. New Work Foundation. This is Bloomberg Tech. U.S. payrolls beat most expectations. And April was actually the first back-to-back gain for payrolls in a year. But tech jobs have fallen for the 16th straight month. And that's in many ways being blamed on AI. Let's talk about the AI story here. Because learning artificial intelligence is becoming more and more crucial for workers to get hired. 42 of recent grads they still underemployed Tara Shai is with us Founder CEO of New Work Foundation former head of business at Meta Your CV stands out And look you saying you want AI to be profitable not just for businesses, but for everyone, including the millions of 25-year-olds currently underemployed or unemployed. Clara, you've founded this. What's happening with the labor market right now? Thank you, Caroline. Great to see you. Gen Z American workers are graduating in the worst job market in 37 years. As you said, 42% are underemployed. So they're bartending, they're working gig jobs and taking other work that don't require their degree. And it's because traditional pathways are drying up. And today's young Americans are graduating without the skills, tools and information they need to get hired in this AI economy. So the skills, the tools they need, you're bringing that to bear. How? Because there is this sudden anxiety that people need to realign themselves for the future of work. Well, absolutely. And I look at the colleges in America and K-12 education. There is rightful caution around using AI. But many of these young people are actively being discouraged from using AI and learning AI while they're in school. And so they're graduating not knowing how to direct these systems, not knowing how to properly set up context engineering, and how to apply these AI workflows in transformational ways, whether they're applying for a marketing job, software engineering, or accounting. Accounting, I think, of just an industry that is being shaken up significantly by new AI products. This isn't just Gen Z that are suffering. At the moment, we see yet more and more layoffs being announced. Cloudflare today, We've had Block coming out with its numbers and showing the rewards it's gaining from having left almost half of its entire employee base. Coinbase this week, you think. They just keep on building. 33,000 tech jobs have been cut in April. What do you think the tech sector is going to look like in the future, Clara? It's really hard to say, but I think where we're trending right now is really much more usage of AI and specifically AI agents to do a lot of the work that traditionally entry-level workers did. And again, that's why it is so important that we equip our young graduates with the tools and information they need and the experience they need to get hired. Is there a backlash? I mean, I've thought of how you and I have sat down over the years and you've talked about the tools you're using, the way you're leaning into agentic AI or just generative AI writ large. You then see the response to Arise Witherspoon trying to say that maybe people who look like you and me, women in particular, should start using AI a little bit more. The people are worried about the cost to the environment, the cost to creativity and royalties and payouts. How do you navigate that amongst Gen Z who may be coming to AI kicking and screaming? Yes, and as we've done this work with the New Work Foundation, one of my co-founders, Samantha, she is part of Gen Z. And what I've heard from her and her friends is that a lot of young people today do have these moral objections and concerns around AI. And so what I would say is these are the exact people we want being part of building the solutions so that we can capture their concerns and creatively build the right path forward that addresses what they want but also doesn't leave them behind in this new economy. You've got this initial set of free AI tools. Job claw, you've got one of them, field report. I want to go into what they really do. But there is a lot of free tools out there. IBM has them. Amazon has them. If you wanted to lean into understanding and building your own repertoire of AI talent, you can do it. So why did you have to design something different? Well, I think we have to address the legitimate moral questions that Gen Z has, just like we said. But then also beyond that, it's almost overwhelming how much information is out there about AI. There are hundreds of thousands of hours of AI courses, certifications, some of them free, but some of them very expensive. And it's very hard for anyone of any age, actually, to navigate this. And so what we wanted to do is New Work Foundation is going job by job, going across the most common entry-level white-collar roles that young people are applying for. And we're breaking down exactly what it takes to become AI native in doing that job. So whether it's marketing, whether it's software, whether it's investment banking, whether it's legal, whether it's some other role, we're talking to hiring managers that are using AI, asking them to describe in clear terms how what they're looking for has changed in the last 12 months as a result of AI and agents. And we're also interviewing other Gen Z workers who had been struggling to find work, but have recently found a job in that particular role so that they can share their tips and tricks. Arashai, I'm sure music to many a person's ear if they're listening, if they are among that Gen Z cohort. New Work Foundation, we appreciate your time today. Taking a look now at today's big number, $6 billion. That's what SoftBank is now targeting for a loan backed by its OpenAI stake after facing some hesitation from creditors. It's all according to people familiar with the matter. It's down from an initial target of $10 billion that it was originally planning. Part of the investor concerns deal with the difficulty of reaching a valuation for an unlisted company like OpenAI, which has been reported as facing some challenges in meeting some internal targets and internal goals, a point that Sarah Fryer has pushed back on when joining our colleagues on Bloomberg News. Let's talk about SpaceX now. Rival, though. Its rival is AST Space Mobile, and it surged to a roughly $25 billion market cap, despite generating just $71 million in annual revenue. It's fueled in large part by devoted retail investor community known as the Space Mob. For more, here's Bloomberg's Sana Prashanka with today's Big Take. It is one of the most read stories across our platform today, Sarah. So tell us a little bit of what's happening. Who are these people who are loving AST? Yeah, so AST has thousands of retail investors, as you mentioned, the space mob. And, you know, they're a little reminiscent of the crowds that used to rally around meme stocks like GameStop and AMC, except the space mob really believes in AST Space Mobile. They think it's going to become the next trillion dollar company and they're not in it to make a quick hit. They really believe in the technology. AST is pioneering direct-to-device technology, which are satellites that beam cell resection directly to your mobile phone, which is something that satellites traditionally have not done. And so they have rallied around the stock. They fixate on every shred of corporate intel from the company. They track their regulatory filings, you know, the planes that ship the company's satellites. So they're about as devoted as a fan base to a company as you can get. And that devotion means the stock is up nearly 6,000 percent over a 22-month period. We're looking at it on a one-year basis right now. Talk to us about some of the leadership amongst the space mob kook who is kook so the kook is a he's a california-based private investor he wants to remain anonymous but he has just a ton of money in ast space mobile his family's money's in it you know for his kids money everything um and so he really leads the space mob he is one of the most prominent figures around the space mob and you know if you follow his expos. He's very emotionally invested in it. And, you know, you can track his mood based on how the stock is doing. And so he's really a zany character that, you know, a lot of the other space mobbers follow and watch for signs of his emotional mood. And sometimes you can see that reflected in the stock price as well. And his bottom, apparently. Tanner Ottaway. I mean, an extraordinary character. He's shining a light on his life savings into AST stock. Sanna Pashanka, go read this story. Thank you for joining us on it. We appreciate you coming on. Now, Intel shares were largely flat for months after CEO Lit Bhutan took the helm in March of last year, but have since climbed, as you can see, to record highs as he built ties with some of the biggest tech leaders and, of course, President Trump. Still, core challenges persist for the chipmaker. Bloomberg's big tech reporter, Sarah Fryer, joins us now because what's so interesting about this story is we've got this conversation, this sit-down with Lit Bhutan, And what are people making of his leadership style, Sarah? Well, Ian King talked to many current and former employees and got the picture that while Liputan has succeeded in rallying this optimism around Intel's future from from the likes of Donald Trump, Elon Musk. We have that potential customer deal with Apple and others. There still has to be a major change in how the company thinks about its products, how it develops them to be high quality, the quality of its factories. All of the work internally still needs to be done to really deliver on that optimism going forward. And so Intel, we have these record highs. We have Wall Street's backing. now we need Liputan to look inward and rally the company around a vision for that. And he's trying to look in his first interview as CEO telling Inking, you've got the technology, we've got the talent, we've got the scale to lead again, but leadership is earned through execution. Is he on site enough for that execution? That seems to be a bit of a concern amongst those that Ian interviewed. Yes, Ian found that really he's spending or has spent at least a lot more time with customers than he has internally at Intel. And when he does spend time at Intel, he doesn't really go into the details with people. He's not a micromanager by any sense of the imagination. He is much more of a high-level strategy thinker. When he hears somebody's strategy, he sort of quizzes them on the industry from a broad sense. And then if he likes how they think, he backs them and he undoes roadblocks for them and supports them. Sort of like his role as a venture capital investor and board member, right? But at Intel the details really do matter because when you thinking about the efficiency of these chips about the ability for a customer to spend to make a bet on using one of your factories it has to go right It has to be effective Particularly when the yield rates are only about 65 versus 80 over at TSMC Sarah Fryer, brilliant editing on a really crucial story. Thanks for joining on it. Welcome back to Bloomberg Tech. It's another day, another new record high for the NASDAQ 100. We continue to power on maybe the jobless claims, a rosier look on the labor market, even though it's not a rosier look for tech jobs. 16 months of declines for the tech industry in jobless claims. But I mean, not in jobless claims and non-farm payrolls, but consumer sentiment also low. Nevertheless, we're looking at earnings that have been thriving in certain parts of the business. And I want to dial into some of those earnings that we got overnight and in the morning. I'm looking at 3.3 percent gain for Airbnb. be, look, they're dialing up the growth expectations of the investor base right now because they're seeing good growth in the United States. They're even reinvesting, of course, putting money to work to diversify the business. We're seeing Blockwell light up 6% as they just announced 40% more than job cuts. Well, that's already because AI is making such a difference to the coding within the business and the software stack, but then also the ability to serve clients. And we're seeing profitability being guided higher at that particular company. Coinbase, though, they're also announced layoffs earlier this week and revenue sinking clearly the turbulence in the crypto market is still hitting some of coinbase's metrics are off by more than a percentage point draft kings up 2.8 there was some relief in the numbers as they see revenue coming in some 17 higher and some signs of growth when it comes to the predictions market but look let's stick with earnings more broadly and shares a ride-hailing company well lyft we're currently up 2.1 let's quarter profit. Actually, there was some anxiety among Wall Street about the expectations, but it was all being ramped up by spending on international expansion. Maybe that's what was hitting in the near term, the profitability metrics. I'm going to talk to the person who knows all, Lyft CEO David Risher. Look, we've had a volatile trading day for Lyft. There was some pressure as people worried about, well, the amount that you're spending to grow, but you're managing to push back on that. You see to investor base that this is the right use of capital. I really think it is. Yeah. I mean, look, we had a record quarter, which is always wonderful. Almost $5 billion in bookings, EBITDA up 37% year on year, $1.1 billion of free cash flow. So that's great. So when you're in a position like that, that allows you to grow and grow even more. And as you noted, we've done some international acquisitions. Just, in fact, one announced a couple of days ago, Get in the UK. Look, I think it's a great time to be, frankly, in the rideshare business because we're a really important part of a lot of people's lives. and we're, you know, growing like a weed. Growing like a weed. Mandy, Bloomberg in tangent, sort of saying that supply growth for Lyft perhaps is likely to trail some larger peers. I mean, talk to us about the adoption rate, the adoption rate of your offerings, but the adoption rate in particular of autonomous vehicles that you're starting to dabble in. Yeah, so look, I think if you zoom way in, you can always find little things, right? So we delivered about 237 million rides this last quarter. That's a lot of rides, a lot of commuting rides, a lot of rides to the airport and so forth. Now, the quarter started off a little bit slow. There are some really intense storms, particularly in New York City, where you live, as you know, that brought ride share and bag share to sort of zero. So that was an early kind of headwind. But look, Valentine's Day, St. Patrick's Day, Super Bowl, these were all all-time highs. And then we had our highest ride month ever in March. So I think that there's a lot of reason to believe that there's still a huge, huge amount of growth here. And then, as you say, autonomous vehicles, that's a great product, and that's going to be one of the next big kind of growth vectors up. So Mark Mahaney over at Evercore, really liking the fact that you've got, you know, a record six straight quarter in terms of active riders. But I think where he's liking to see is maybe consumer incentives to just moderate a little bit. Are you being able to do that, David? Yeah, we are. We've gotten a lot of, you know, we think of it as sort of leverage off of consumer incentives. And I'll tell you a particular thing that I'm starting to see more. I think of it as rewards maxing. OK, so. Oh, no. We've got a really. Right. There you go. There you go. Be careful about where we're going to go with this one. And so anyway, no, but look, we've got a deal with United, right, which allows people to both earn points and also spend points on Lyft. We have a deal with Hilton. We have an arrangement with Alaska Airlines. We have an arrangement with DoorDash, a super, super important program there that just expanded to Canada. And so what we're seeing people do is they're taking Lyft rides, they're earning points, and they're spending them elsewhere, or they're even spending them back on our platform. And, yeah, I think it's going to be a thing. And I think it's one of the reasons why we're seeing high margins, sort of like black and luxury rides rise, even with some consumer concerns. Still, this rewards maxing thing, I think, is working for people. Rewards maxing, of course, is a play on all the maxing that we have with looks maxing, all the terms of phrase that Gen Z use. Is it Gen Z? Gen Z's like maxing. I mean, how much are you seeing the idea of different age groups responding to your new offerings? Because in many ways, I see the more premium offerings coming to an older cohort, obviously a wealthier cohort, and in many ways a corporate cohort. You know, I think that's something that's changing over time. I think, you know, back when I was, you know, early in my career, you know, you didn't have an Amex, you know, platinum card or Chase Sapphire Reserve card until you were, you know, old like me now. But no, it turns out actually a lot of kids, a lot of sort of Gen Y, Gen Z folks are early in that ecosystem because they realize that there's a lot of value to be unlocked if they kind of play the game. And I think a lot of them think of it a bit of as almost a play in the game. Like, how can I do this rewards-maxing thing to be able to afford a lift black even when I'm in my 20s? Savvy is what they are. And I'm interested, David, in how savvy you are about the landscape for M&A right now. You've made acquisitions. This is where you've been spending your money. Is there more to come? You know, never say never about these things. It's always a fool's game to predict M&A. But I will say that it's a part of our strategy now. We were not a very acquisitive company for a long time. But now that we've got the fastest pickup times, great pricing, great service levels all around, we're really thinking of bringing that abroad. And that's really where our M&A focus has been is overseas. Any worries about the consumer right now? no no and i know that sounds glib of course people are feeling some pain our drivers feel a lot of pain at the pump and so that's why we were the first to get out there with a nice cash back program for at the pump saves about a dollar a gallon so you know there are reasons i think of course for to be concerned but when we look at the data you know we're we're not seeing that play out david it's been a week where i feel that you haven't actually mentioned ai yet much i mean autonomous vehicles is inherently ai how much though are your workforce using it how much your workforce responding to having to use it? And is there any stretch at which point you are able to reduce your headcount or hiring on the back of it? You know, I love this question. And I think it's really important for people to sort of get their arms around this. Absolutely. Something like 86% now of our developers, our software engineers are using actively, like every single day, using AI to write code for them. We're also using it in customer care. We're using it all over the place. But I think there's a way of thinking about it, which is not so much about cost reduction, but about velocity increase and capacity building. You know, our imaginations are huge and we're a customer obsessed company. So we have no shortage of great ideas to innovate on behalf of customers. I think that's really where AI is gonna give us a big edge. Not so much on the sort, I mean, cost sure, we can maybe save a little bit money, but there's so much more value if we can figure out new great ways for riders and drivers to use our platform. Is it a more competitive backdrop right now? Say it one more time. Is it a more competitive backdrop right now? Ah, well, it is, you know, but only in the following sense. You know, remember there are 160 billion rides that people take in their private car every single year. And I think that's ultimately going to be the real competition for us. Look, it's $50,000 to buy a car, 800 bucks a month, plus insurance, plus gas, plus maintenance. Whereas Lyft is, you know, 20 bucks a ride. So in a funny way, I think the competition is going to shift a little away from the other guys and a little bit more towards what are good ways for you to spend your money and how can you live your best life. And rewards max. and rewards max exactly i'm glad you picked up on that uh i shouldn't have done david richard we love having you on the show thank you very much indeed the ceo of lyft coming up we take a look at enhanced it's a peter teal backed elite sports competition and performance products company it's gone public today more next this is bloomberg tech an olympic style sports event that welcomes performance enhancing drugs is set for later this month in las vegas today the company behind that endeavor went public in a merger with the blank check company with enhanced now as you see trading up 8.8 percent following the transaction it's valued at 1.2 billion dollars in the spec and has backing from the likes of peter teal and former Coinbase CTO, Balaji Srinivasan. Now, the company's CEO now joins us, Maximilian Martin, from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. So, gone public, why? Why need that? First of all, hello and thank you to have me on the show today. We're going public because Enhanced is a movement. And we want the people in that movement not just to be part of it by watching the sports or buying enhancement products through a Live Enhanced platform, but by owning a piece of it too. This is why we've decided to go public, and which we're very excited about having done and concluded the transaction today. So is it a retail investment play here more broadly, Maximilian? Is it the people that you want to purchase, not only the products, so-called longevity products, maybe their peptides, but also those who are then going to come and watch the enhanced games? Sorry, can you repeat the question? I didn't catch that fully. Is it a retail investor that you're most focused on? Ah, yes, yes. So I think enhanced as a stock opportunity is really for everyone. but I think particularly exciting for retail too because sports traditionally isn't as investable for retail as it is for, for example, more institutional-like players. This is why we're very excited about retail particularly, getting focused on the opportunity that's ahead of them now with us listed on the exchange here. If you look at past media attention on the games in particular, people have sort of called it Olympics on steroids. Why is it not that from your perspective, Maximilian? Yeah, because steroids is a term that has very many negative associations with it. Many people associated with it to be also illegal and that is not true for the setup that been created at the Enhanced Games What the athletes can actually take at the Enhanced Games are FDA substances under doctor supervision And they also all independent of them enhancing or not need to pass medical screenings that we do with them over time to determine whether they're A, healthy, and B, safe to compete. So steroids is really for people thinking about happening in the garage, in the backdoor locker room of a gym, etc. But that's not it. This is out all in the open with regulation around it that makes enhancements for the athletes, but then also the consumers that we offer it to save. Fascinating. Your aim is to evolve mankind into a new superhumanity. We'll have you back, Maximilian Martin. Thank you very much for joining us today, the CEO of Enhanced. Now, stablecoins, they promise to make cross-border payments cheaper and nearly instantaneous. But it remains a tiny part of the global payment system today. With the Genius Act set to take effect and banks eyeing the space, the Wall Street Week team took a deep dive into whether the use of the blockchain technology is truly starting to scale. So you'll hear in the media the trillions of dollars of stable coin payments today. 99% of that is crypto related, not the sort of payments we think about, which is company to company or even paying remittances person to person. And so we look at this situation today and say, how much real payments volume is there out there? And we think it's probably the order of a billion or two a day, which is tiny. The latest estimates we have are $390 billion in the total year. And that compares with several trillion dollars of regular payments per day. So a small amount right now, how does it compare with last year? And how does it compare with forecasts for next year? The data shows that the volume of real payment transactions using stablecoins probably doubled over the last year. When you look at the volume of stablecoins in circulation, that went from around $150 billion to $300 billion today. It's doubling, which by any measure is substantial in terms of growth. How much of that is cross-border, international essentially? How much of it is domestic? The vast majority is cross-border. It's interesting, we've been looking at the geographic source of those payments with our research partner, Artemis Analytics, what they found is about 60% originates from Asia. And that surprised a little bit because a lot of the talk has been in North America or Europe about the potential of stablecoins. Watch the full Wall Street Week episode later today at 6pm Eastern, 3pm Pacific Time. Now, cybersecurity fears are sweeping through global campuses after hackers disrupted a portal used by thousands of colleges, including Harvard and Princeton. Look, infrastructure, which runs the Canvas service used by students, was forced to suspend the system, sparking warnings that sensitive student data and messages may have been stolen for extortion. Earlier this hour, we understood that Cornell University said its own Canvas access has been fully restored. Three Mile Island, the site of the most famous US nuclear accident, is coming back online as soon as mid-2027. That's powered by a long-term deal by Microsoft and Constellation Energy to power, yes, you guessed it, AI applications, chatbots, much more. Bloomberg's Will Wade is here with an extraordinary deep dive into what has now been rebranded, unsurprisingly. But remind those what Three Mile Island means to many and why it's so important that it comes back online. Okay, to many, it means nuclear disaster. 1979, it was the site of the worst nuclear accident in US history. But let's keep in mind, 1979 was like a long time ago. No. Last night, I actually told my son, hey, I have this big story coming out on Three Mile Island. He's like, what's that? So for a lot of us, it has a lot of meaning. But for younger people, it has no meaning at all. Will, you don't talk about your job nearly enough at home, quite clearly. Because as a nuclear reporter reporting on the sector since 2019, when initially it was all about closures, you're now into this area where it's about reopenings, this nuclear renaissance. What did you learn by going into what is the rebranded Crane Clean Energy Center? You know what's really fascinating? And if you see the pictures on the story, it looks old. It does. It looks really old school because it is because it was like designed and built in like the 60s and 70s. And so much of the U.S. nuclear power plants date back to the last century because we really haven't built very many of them at all. But right now, there's just this insatiable demand for electricity from the big tech companies. It's for AI. It's all for AI. You know, a while ago, they're like, we want nuclear because it's clean. It's going to help us save the world from climate change. And that sort of was a little bit of a motivation. But really, the motivation now, it's from tech, it's from AI. It's because there's money involved. A lot of money. I think $30 billion has been invested in nuclear since 2020. But what about the waste? How has that changed since 1979? Well, that hasn't changed at all. So what are they going to do with it? They're going to do what they've always done with it. Clean energy crane. If you go to any nuclear power plant, if you go out back, there's these giant casks where they store the waste. They've always been there. And there's been talk of creating a central repository in the U.S. It's been stalled for political reasons. So that's just not happening. So isn't it funny that the very edge of innovation is sort of being fueled by something that doesn't seem to be innovating very much at all? We're relying on a 1979 building. But how is it innovating? How are we seeing SMRs come into play? Will we get a new type of nuclear offering? Yeah, see, that's a good question. There is a lot of innovation in the nuclear space. There's companies developing all kinds of new reactor designs. There's new big ones. There's new small ones. There's new really, really small ones. They want to put them on a shipping container and deliver them to military bases in the middle of nowhere. There's a lot of innovation. It's not here yet. I really do think it's coming. There's just so much motivation to make this happen. So what are we, 2026, 2030, 2030, mid-2030s? I think we'll see some, but not for the next several years. It's a whole new world of uranium enrichment, and you've got so many amazing stories to tell about it. Will Wade here with us on the latest. You've got to go and read it, the big take today. Now, we're going to move on and talk about a key company behind Thailand's national AI effort now called Obon Corp. It's suspected, though, of helping to smuggle servers containing advanced NVIDIA chips to China. That's according to sources who say some of the $2.5 billion worth of servers sold by Obon, or OBON, allegedly went to Chinese AI leader Alibaba. This comes as U.S. officials are walking a pretty delicate line when it comes to the Trump administration's approach to Beijing. Earlier this year, the Pentagon added Alibaba and Baidu to a list of companies that aid the Chinese military and then promptly declared the list unpublished. So Bloomberg's tech editor in D.C., Michael Shepard, joins us now with this previously unreported details of what is happening with this so-called blacklist. Well, Carol, let's turn the clock back to that day in February. It was Friday the 13th, and you, Ed, and I on this program were trying to pick our jaws up off the floor, figuring out not only the import of this list being published, but the mystery behind why it was abruptly withdrawn minutes later. What was going on, and what would that say about China policy? Well, our colleague Cato Keefe here in Washington set out to find out the back story, and it's revealing. It turns out that the Pentagon had withdrawn two names from the list, dropped two names from the list. Chinese chip makers, YMTC and CXMT, they're producers of memory products that are really in demand these days, of course, as we know. And the White House have wanted them kept on. When the list was published, the names weren't there. The White House was furious. The Pentagon quickly moved to pull it back in. Since then, we have not seen this list republished, and in part because we are in such a delicate moment in this trade truce between Washington in Beijing. That's the one that President Donald Trump announced with Xi Jinping in late October after their meeting. And of course, they have a meeting coming up next week. And this is just the kind of misstep that really can upset the apple cart heading into such a high stakes encounter between leaders of the world's two largest economies. So let's think about next week, because there is talk that maybe even future rules of generative AI and the latest, greatest LLM might be something discussed by Treasury Secretary Besson and others. There's reporting around that, Mike. I'm interested as to what you think will be achieved and what names will be announced or working together or working apart from each other. Well, it's a great question, Carol. And the war in Iran really has overshadowed any of the other initiatives that might be put on the table between President Xi and Trump as they sit down to talk. You know, absent the war, we You might have seen more talk about access to American-designed chips, like from NVIDIA and AMD. The president and his team have cleared the release of the H200s from NVIDIA and comparable products from AMD for sales to China. But the big asterisk is that Beijing so far is really not letting too many of those products in. And we haven't seen very many licenses issued from the U.S. side either. So there is clearly some sort of a logjam, and perhaps they could get to the bottom of that. Iran, of course, could stand in the way. And then there are the complaints from American AI developers, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, that Chinese rivals have been distilling unfairly the results of their models to produce rival chatbots at a fraction of the cost. And this has prompted an outcry on Capitol Hill and also steps from the White House to try to rein in and address that practice. So we could also see that come up as well. And then, of course, there is the question of rare earths, Carol, which really lies at the heart of the conflict between the U.S. and China. Well said, Bloomberg's Mike Shepard. I have a feeling we might be retracing some of those talks as we look ahead to next week, too, with you. That does it for this edition of Bloomberg Tech. Don't forget to check out our podcast. You can find it on the terminal as well as online. Apple, Spotify, iHeart. Wishing you all a very wonderful weekend. See you Monday. This is Bloomberg Tech.
