By coinnews 
00:00 Speaker A
that idea, Stacy, of opening up the the ecosystem, ecosystem to other chip makers. Why did do you think they made that decision and announcement now, one? And then the partners they announced, Stacy. So, um, Marvel, MediaTek, I’m interested curious to get your take on on those partners but also you take on on who we didn’t hear about.
00:35 Speaker B
Yeah, I know you you bet. And so they sort of kind of announced it a little bit before they announced something with with the MediaTek at GTC that sort of, um, you know, implied some of this. And so this gave us a little more concrete details on what they’re doing. Um, yeah, look, I mean, so they are partnering with other ASIC vendors again, like a Marvel or an All Chip or even a MediaTek that make AI ASICs for other players. Like I think in some sense it probably is an acknowledgement that they that the ASIC, you know, opportunity is real. And look, I figure like if folks are doing ASICs, they’re going to do them anyways. Like you might as well try to extend your ecosystem into that and make them partners as much as you can. So I think that’s fine. You asked like who is not in it though. It is interesting in Intel and AMD and even Broadcom. So they actually have a competing, um, uh, interconnect standard. It’s called UA link. Um, I think it stands for universal accelerator like I think. But it’s like an open source competitor to this this NV link, um, uh, interconnect technology that they’ve been trying to build. And so in some sense, this is encouraging other players not to go down that route but rather to partner with Nvidia on those on on that interconnect technology. I could also imagine that that, you know, those other guys in Intel and Broadcom probably less excited interested potentially in in partnering with Nvidia and they’re they’re clearly not they’re going to go try to do their own thing. But you are sort of setting up a couple of different paths and you already have one. I mean, the the Nvidia ecosystem is already pretty well established. To the extent that Jensen can help to drive that into some of these other areas it puts a lot of pressure potentially on some of the up and coming ecosystems. They’re always it’s always hard to get new ecosystems kind of like traction to get them started anyways. So definitely makes it harder.
04:17 Speaker A
Yeah. Well, one of the other interesting partnerships that they announced that Nvidia talked about, or I guess Qualcomm talked about, is with Qualcomm, uh, because Qualcomm is now going to make custom CPUs that will work with Nvidia’s GPUs, as I understand it. Um, and I was reading a recent note of yours where you talked about that you’re what feels like a lonely bull on Qualcomm. Um, so I was wondering first your reaction to this news and then how it feeds into that thesis on Qualcomm.
05:14 Speaker B
Yeah. Yeah, you bet. You bet. So so last week we there was a lot of announcements that came out of the Middle East and Qualcomm even there had had announced a partnership, um, in the at least, I think with Saudi Arabia to make, um, uh, uh, chips effectively for AI data centers. And I would say as of last week it was a little bit unclear how that was going to work. Like, so they were going to do CPUs and and then what? Like, so at least now we have a better idea of probably what those plans are. They will presumably be data centers with Nvidia GPUs and then you know, the the GPUs have CPUs that go along with them. They will be Qualcomm CPUs and now it’s clearer how those CPUs will actually work with the Nvidia GPUs. So I think it makes that that entire opportunity for Qualcomm at least more credible. I think more broadly, look, people have not Qualcomm’s been tough, you know, it’s it’s it’s it’s been a smartphone story. Investors have been kind of hesitant to play smartphone stories. They have an Apple headwind, which is very well known, but Apple is starting to to do their own chips and designing them out. And so it kind of limits the headline EPS growth for a while. At the same time, there is a real diversification story and Qualcomm’s talked about this pretty extensively across auto and and an IOT and other things, um, that makes them less dependent on handsets over time. And you know, there’s an AI edge story which I think they’re a beneficiary, but this this makes the overall like AI story for Qualcomm better, I think, and it’s clearly not getting any kind of AI multiple. You know, the stock right now is about, oh, 12 times earnings. Even if I took all of Apple out, maybe it’s 14 times earnings. Um, so but it makes that diversification story I think even more credible than it was. So I think it’s good.