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Greetings! In John Mackey's new memoir, the Whole Foods founder and former CEO recalls how in mid-2022, shortly before he left the grocery chain, he took MDMA and psilocybin during a spiritual retreat. While under the influence, Mackey agonized over the ways he had been "disrespected and disempowered" after selling Whole Foods to Amazon five years earlier, he writes, and he fretted about the acquirer's culture creeping into his natural grocery chain. As the MDMA wore off, Mackey said he "let go of my hurt and anger toward Amazon as unnecessary." I can't imagine how he feels now. As I reported this week, Amazon has opened a small grocery store in Chicago in the same building as a Whole Foods, offering the kinds of products Whole Foods has long avoided: those with artificial sweeteners and color additives, such as Coca-Cola and Tide. The store opening follows Amazon's statement earlier this month that it's adding an automated miniwarehouse inside a Whole Foods store in Pennsylvania that would stock items Whole Foods does not. In both situations, Amazon is being careful to maintain a physical barrier around Whole Foods—a spokesperson described the Chicago store as a "stand-alone experience" with a separate checkout, and the Pennsylvania system will operate behind a wall. But it doesn't take a mushroom trip to envision where this could be going. Amazon knows that plenty of Whole Foods shoppers also wind up going to Walmart or Kroger to buy Diet Coke and Fruit Loops. Providing those shoppers a way to consolidate all their buying in one place would likely be popular with at least some customers, offering Amazon a way to boost revenue from its physical stores business, which grew just 4% to $5.2 billion in the second quarter. In other words, the experiments in Chicago and Pennsylvania strike me as steps toward eventually putting those products on Whole Foods shelves, though Amazon has not said it plans to do so. While some health-oriented die-hards might rebel, don't be surprised if in three years' time you suddenly discover a much wider array of products on Whole Foods shelves. Few tech companies hold as pivotal a position in the industry as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. The Taiwanese company makes nearly all of the advanced chips used for artificial intelligence, smartphones and self-driving cars, on behalf of companies such as Apple, Nvidia and Google which design the chips. The explosion of newer technologies, such as AI, has underwritten a sharp pickup in TSMC's revenue growth this year after macroeconomic weakness caused a dip last year. TSMC reported this week that third quarter revenue grew 36% year on year, while CEO C.C. Wei forecast that revenue from AI chips for servers will more than triple this year. The explosion in AI chip demand is not without its challenges. Our chip reporter, Qianer Liu, produced this deep dive into TSMC's complicated relationship with Nvidia this week, centering on tensions that arose over production problems for Nvidia's new Blackwell chip. TSMC also has its share of geopolitical challenges to deal with, most obviously because it is based in Taiwan, but also because some of the products it manufactures are subject to U.S. export rules barring their sale to China. Qianer also broke the news this week that the U.S. was looking into whether TSMC had been making AI or smartphone chips for Chinese tech giant Huawei in what would be a breach of U.S. export rules. We can expect to hear more about that story as it develops. Also this week, we delved more into the soap opera that is OpenAI with an inside look at the role of Greg Brockman, a co-founder of the AI firm who has played a key role in developing its technology—but not without rubbing some people the wrong way. Elsewhere on the AI front, we published a list of 78 AI startups that could be for sale soon, as well as a look at Crusoe Energy's AI data center deal (OpenAI also pops up there). In other news, Amazon is trying to streamline its mix of grocery and pharmacy brands, and we take a look at one of the hottest jobs in crypto: compliance chief. - U.S. regulators are investigating whether Tesla's self-driving software stringently requires motorists to retake the wheel in dangerous driving conditions. This follows a fatal crash involving a Tesla electric vehicle equipped with the technology.
- Netflix stock hit an all-time high of $763.89 on Friday, up 11%, as investors applauded the company's third-quarter earnings report, released Thursday evening.
- The judge hearing Epic Games' antitrust lawsuit against Google has temporarily suspended his order that Google make a range of changes to its app store, Google Play, giving the company more time to seek an injunction that would suspend the ruling while it appeals.
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