By coinnews 
00:00 Speaker A
The Nasdaq 100 is set to enter a bear market today as the tech sell-off continues its slide amid the trade war. Our next guest has been talking with CEOs in the tech space about how the tariffs could impact their businesses and what they’re expecting from the administration going forward. I want to bring in Dan Newman. He is Futurum Group’s CEO. Dan, great to have you here. Tell me what executives are telling you in the tech space.
00:32 Dan Newman
One of the fun parts of my job, but not so fun this week is having the opportunity to spend a lot of time providing feedback and also listening to the CEOs. I spoke to half a dozen large cap and a few small cap tech CEOs. And one of the things that every one of them was going into the week was really hoping to get some certainty this week. And that was one of the biggest surprises was instead of coming out with more certainty, we actually have entered a period where all of them feel we are less certain. A lot of them feel that what Trump and Lightnicker, the administration did was more of an opening salvo, and they really think it’s going to come down to 10, 15 of our world’s largest trading partners. There’s a lot of noise about all these smaller nations, but they basically feel that there is going to be more negotiation. We’re seeing the back and forth today with China. Um, spoke to Bill McDermott at, um, at ServiceNow and it was interesting to hear his perspective. You know, he actually said, he’s zeroing in on what he can control right now. And if you’re a hardware company like Apple, you don’t have as much you can control. But for someone like them, he’s looking at the situation and saying, AI is actually going to be this great deflationary enabler right now. So, as companies are kind of tightening their belts, they maybe look to start slowing spending down. He sees a company like theirs is one of the biggest opportunists because companies are going to start spending on AI because it could basically maybe cap or slow down OPEX, start to automate more processes and prepare companies for a time of uncertainty that we are certainly going to get for at least the next few weeks.
03:05 Speaker B
Dan, the primary theme in markets has been AI. In the last month or so, we’ve seen Microsoft seem to go back and forth on their CAPEX spending tensions. When we look at the earning transcripts for the data center theme, we see backlogs and continuing investment. Has that changed and what is the outlook for data center spend?
03:36 Dan Newman
Yeah, that’s actually a really good one. I spoke to one of the CEOs involved in Stargate. Um, and one of the things he actually said to me is that he believes the enterprise AI trade is somewhat tariff proof. Now that’s really interesting to me, because, of course, you could look at all of the we heard some of this. We don’t know all the certainties on semiconductor tariffs. But effectively, the build out, you know, his perspective from the conversations he’s had and my conversations with CEOs have been very similar is that these companies that have massive operating leverage, the MAG 7, some of the largest software companies, they actually have the opportunity to look at this drawdown as a moment to double down on R&D and position themselves knowing that AI is going to be the product that will accelerate coming out of this. They’re not certain of when they’re going to come out of this, but they basically told me the CAPEX is locked in. And so, the near term on sort of these CAPEX plays for big AI build outs seems to be pretty secure. I’m much more confident, and from all the conversations I had, I remain much more confident in the enterprise side of the trade. The consumer stuff, though, is very opaque right now.