Stop the market open. We are looking at U.S. stock futures pulling back now. Tech did lift the Nasdaq to record highs earlier this week. And while some industry analysts await Anthropic as well as OpenAI's market debuts coming down the pike to go along with the expected AI race leadership, a shift to inference, enterprise as well as software and platforms, the focus does remain on physical infrastructure, as well as the power grid that make up the current wave of the investment trade.
And we just saw chipmaker AMD hit $1 trillion valuation. So with companies such as CoreWeave, Qualcomm as well as Meta having key events this week and next, how can investors actually gauge where innovation will lead? Well, joining me to weigh in is Steven Dickens, CEO and principal analyst for Hyperframe Research.
Good morning, Steven. Great to have you on. So first, let's start with a look at CoreWeave. We've now seen CoreWeave just get hit with a sell rating. It announced an offering last week. But the stock rising this week and pushing past some of those financing concerns, at least for now. So the company is set to be on the ground next week's Fully Connected conference.
How should investors view its specialized infrastructure when it comes to AI?
Hey, Remy, so thanks for having me on the show. As you mentioned, CoreWeave's got its first inaugural event next week. I'm heading out to San Francisco to spend some time with the leadership team over there. What I'm going to be looking for for the company is how do they move up the stack? We've obviously heard them so much talk about what they're doing with GPU as a service, but I think it's how can they move up the stack and look to be a platform for those AI applications?
One thing that was encouraging for me from the recent earnings was also talking about the diversity of their customers. They talked about industrial names and non tech names outside of their collaborations with the frontier labs. They talked about how their customer base is expanding, so I'm going to be looking for that from the show.
And as I speak to the leadership team, what are they seeing around? Obviously, great that they've got the partnerships and are providing that infrastructure to the frontier lab companies, the names you mentioned in the intro. But what I want to see from the company and what I'm going to be hopefully talking to some of the customers on the ground about is how they're using CoreWeave as this AI application platform, not just a way to get to GPU.
And Steven, while I have you here, I do want to get your perspective on AMD. So the company became the latest to join the trillion dollar club in terms of market cap earlier this week. But the AI trade leadership is still eventually expected to shift away from pure hardware and enablers as well as physical infrastructure.
So this does come after Anthropic leader called for the industry to pace the frontier. So your take on where semiconductors stand right now.
So, Remy, for me, this is a rising tide raises all boats. I think AMD is proving that it's starting to get into this inference space and starting to get into there at scale. We're starting to see that come through. That's obviously starting to get reflected in the stock price, I think only up from here. And so as I see AMD become more and more the AI conversation, they're already there today, obviously.
But I think up and down the stack, people are looking for DPU alternatives. They're looking for alternatives to Nvidia. This, to me, doesn't have a competitive impact on a direct compete against Nvidia. I think this is just a rising tide raises all boats. We need a strong AMD. We need a strong Intel. We need other players.
And you know I'm going to talk about Qualcomm in a few moments. For on device AI, we need a very robust semiconductor industry across the whole to service this rampant AI demand. And I think AMD's going to ride that wave, and we're still early. I see this as we're sort of probably coming into the third innings of what will be a seven game World Series.
We're in game one. We're still so early. This is a cyclical trend that I expect to see play out over the next 10, 15 years, to make AI part of everything that we do and how modern work is done. So I think for me, we're still early. AMD is going to take its role there, and rightly so. And that's going to be good for enterprises as they look at their AI plans and adoption.
Yeah. And Steve, I do want to get an opportunity to ask you about Qualcomm, Meta as well as Oracle. So starting out with Qualcomm, they launched Snapdragon as its first two nanometer process chips. So what do you make of their move into AI?
So the first wave of generative AI has just been using chatbots, has been using apps, and that being an off device experience that's been connecting back via the web or via mobile to a service that's being hosted in the cloud. The play here from Qualcomm with the Snapdragon Elite Gen 6 is really to bring that capability to run those large language models on device, proven speed, performance, cost, all of those characteristics, whether that's for immersive camera experiences, for things to support, like Meta's announcement and Muse that we'll have all seen if we've logged into any of those Meta social platforms. They've ad bombed us to sort of get us to start to use Muse.
It's those types of applications that we're going to increasingly see on device that we're going to see start to play out. Also, we saw from Snapdragon support for the new Google Book. So Google's pivoting its Chromebook strategy and going more into the enterprise. That's an end to end enterprise play from the device for Google.
And we're going to see Qualcomm chips in those Google Books. So I think this is not just a mobile play. This is also starting to come through into some of those high end pieces that are being architected for AI.
And finally, before I let you go, less than 60 seconds here, what do you make of the move that we're seeing in premarket trade with Oracle falling by as much as 3%?
So I think Oracle's had a rough ride of it year to date. I think they're not getting the credit that they deserve. I think if I look at it, obviously the markets are looking at some of the debt structuring and looking at some of the CapEx that is required. For me, this is investment to bring Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, OCI, to the same level as where we're seeing those big three hyperscalers.
Increasingly, I'm seeing it now before hyperscalers, not three. And that's a testament to the team at Oracle that's really cemented OCI as that fourth hyperscale that requires buildout. It requires short term debt. But I'm long term bullish. I'm spending time with Oracle at the Investor Day in a few weeks' time. I'm expecting that leadership team to tell me about how they're planning to monetize and drive revenue based on that investment.
Well, Steven, always great talking to you. Thank you so much for weighing in on all of these names. And as always, thank you so much for sharing all of your insights.
Thanks, Remy.
