Advanced Micro Devices needs India to keep up with the growing demand for its products, its executive vice president and chief technology officer told CNBC in an exclusive interview.
“We have a global workforce. Our design efforts are global and doubling down on those investments, continuing our growth in India, are all part of what we need to stay pace with the growing demand for our products,” Mark Papermaster said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box Asia” on Thursday.
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On Friday, AMD announced its plans to invest approximately $400 million to continue its growth in India. The investment will go toward building the firm’s largest design center, which is expected to open before the end of 2023, as well as the addition of about 3,000 engineering roles by the end of 2028.
“We started with a small number of employees in Delhi in 2001. Today, we have over 6,500 full-time employees, and over 3,500 service contractors. So it’s with a population of about 10,000 people. And we’re really pleased to be growing our investment in India — a huge part of our portfolio and product development,” said Papermaster.
AMD is one of the few firms that produces the high-end graphics processing units needed for artificial intelligence. AMD processors can be found in a wide range of devices including computers, servers and gaming consoles.
“We’re really excited about MI300, our next generation AI chip. It’s going to take on the most powerful AI chip in the industry. And it couldn’t come at a more needed time because the industry needs more AI computing power,” said Papermaster.
“And we have a design aspect of that being done in India. We now have the India design team touching almost every product that we develop in AMD,” said Papermaster.
Ruben Roy, managing director of equity research at financial services firm Stifel, said that AMD is the “only viable alternative” to Nvidia’s high-performance H100 and A100 GPUs.
“They’re pushing very hard. R&D is going up. They are investing quite aggressively in AI,” Roy said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box Asia” on Wednesday.
Papermaster told CNBC, “What we focus on is leveraging the latest cutting-edge semiconductor nodes. And we bring our design prowess to really differentiate our products.”
“That’s where India is so huge for us. Because if you look at our global population, about 25% of it is in India, and we are an engineering dominated workforce,” he said.
Papermaster said AMD is looking into further diversifying its supply chains. This comes amid U.S.-China tensions that have impacted firms doing business in both countries.
“In terms of de-risking our manufacturing, we do have a diversified supply base. And we will continue to look at options in terms of adding more diversity to our supply base,” he said.
“As a semiconductor design company that has a strong base in India, we believe getting that diversity of the supply chain, and getting key elements of that in India, will be helpful to us.”
He further added that India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi has a “strong program” called “Make in India” which offers incentives for semiconductor companies to develop, manufacture and assemble products in India.
In an earnings call Tuesday, Lisa Su, CEO of AMD, said that China is an important market for the firm.
She also said that there is an opportunity to develop a China-specific AI chip in order to comply with U.S. export curbs, in a move that will follow rivals Nvidia and Intel.
Corporate treasuries have surpassed ETFs in bitcoin buying for a third consecutive quarter as more companies try to benefit from the MicroStrategy playbook in a more crypto-friendly regulatory environment.
Public companies acquired about 131,000 coins in the second quarter, growing their bitcoin balance 18%, according to data provider Bitcoin Treasuries. ETFs showed an 8% increase or about 111,000 BTC in the same period.
“The institutional buyer who is getting exposure to bitcoin through the ETFs are not buying for the same reason as those public companies who are basically trying to accumulate bitcoin to increase shareholder value at the end of the day,” said Nick Marie, head of research at Ecoinometrics.
Public company bitcoin holdings increased 4% in April, a tumultuous month after the market was rocked by President Donald Trump’s initial tariffs announcement, versus 2% for ETFs, he pointed out.
“They don’t really care if the price is high or low, they care about growing their bitcoin treasury so they look more attractive to the proxy buyers,” Marie added. “It’s not so much driven by the macro trend or the sentiment, it’s for different reasons. So it becomes a different kind of mechanism that can push bitcoin forward.”
Bitcoin ETFs, whose collective U.S. launch in January 2024 was one of the most successful ETF debuts in history, still represent the largest holders of bitcoin by entity with more than 1.4 million coins held today, representing about 6.8% of the fixed supply cap of 21 million. Public companies hold about 855,000 coins, or about 4%.
Regulatory relief
The trend reflects the significant regulatory relief the crypto industry broadly is benefiting from under the Trump administration. In March, Trump signed an executive order for a U.S. bitcoin reserve, sending a strong message that the flagship cryptocurrency, which has long been a source of reputation risk among many investors, is here to stay. The last time ETFs outpaced public companies in bitcoin buying was in the third quarter of 2024, before Trump was re-elected.
In the second quarter, GameStop began buying bitcoin, after its board approved it as a treasury reserve asset in March; health-care company KindlyMD merged with Nakamoto, a bitcoin investment company founded by crypto entrepreneur David Bailey; and investor Anthony Pompliano’s ProCap, kicked off its own bitcoin purchasing program and is going public through a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC.
Strategy, recently rebranded from MicroStrategy, is still the main behemoth in the bitcoin treasury game. The company pioneered the strategy that more than 140 public companies globally are now emulating. It holds about 597,000 BTC, and is followed by the bitcoin miner Mara Holdings, which has almost 50,000 coins.
“It’s going to be very hard to catch Strategy’s scale,” said Ben Werkman, chief investment officer at Swan Bitcoin. “They’re going to be the preferred landing spot for institutional capital because of the deep liquidity around their equity, while these smaller equities are going to be really good risk returns for retail investors and smaller institutions that want more of that upside – that initial growth that comes in kicking off the strategy – because a lot of people missed it with MicroStrategy.”
A long-term case?
Marie suggested that 10 years from now, there probably won’t be so many companies committed to the bitcoin treasury strategy. Firstly, he said, the more that enter the category, the more diluted the activity at each firm becomes. Plus, bitcoin may be so normalized by then that proxy buyers are no longer constrained by rules and mandates around direct exposure to bitcoin.
“You can think about this wave as a bunch of companies that are trying to benefit from this arbitrage,” Marie said.
Werkman pointed out that most investors that are attracted to bitcoin treasury companies today already have a thesis around bitcoin. For them, leveraged bitcoin equities are likely how they try to outperform bitcoin itself, the foundational component of their investments.
“What people really like about these companies, and why they like to get into these smaller companies, is because they can do something that the investors holding spot bitcoin can’t do: go and accumulate more bitcoin on your behalf because they have access to the capital markets and can issue securities,” Werkman said.
There’s also likely to be a fair number of companies that convert their existing treasury holdings to bitcoin without pursuing leverage the way Strategy does, Werkman noted.
“They’ve got that ability to generate more and more value behind their shares, backed by bitcoin, plus whatever the operations of the company are generating. It’s a unique value proposition,” he said.
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An image of a Quantix drone made by AeroVironment.
David Mcnew | Getty Images News | Getty Images
AeroVironment shares fell 7% Tuesday after the defense contractor said it plans to offer $750 million in common stock and $600 million in convertible senior notes due in 2030 to repay debt.
The drone maker said it would use leftover funding for general purposes such as boosting manufacturing capacity.
AeroVironment shares have soared 85% this year, ballooning its market value to about $13 billion.
Last week, shares of the Arlington, Virginia-based company rallied on strong fourth-quarter results, lifting higher as CNBC’s Jim Cramer called it the “next Palantir of hardware.”
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Last month, the company also closed its $4.1 billion acquisition of space-related defense tech company Blue Halo.
Earlier this month, President Donald Trump signed an executive order intended to boost drone production in the U.S. and crack down on unauthorized uses.
The company also has a high short interest level, which may have contributed to some of the recent gains, creating a short squeeze. This phenomenon occurs when a stock price surges, forcing those shorting the stock to purchase shares to cover their positions and prevent losses.
Internet firm Cloudflare will start blocking artificial intelligence crawlers from accessing content without website owners’ permission or compensation by default, in a move that could significantly impact AI developers’ ability to train their models.
Starting Tuesday, every new web domain that signs up to Cloudflare will be asked if they want to allow AI crawlers, effectively giving them the ability to prevent bots from scraping data from their websites.
Cloudflare is what’s called a content delivery network, or CDN. It helps businesses deliver online content and applications faster by caching the data closer to end-users. They play a significant role in making sure people can access web content seamlessly every day.
Roughly 16% of global internet traffic goes directly through Cloudflare’s CDN, the firm estimated in a 2023 report.
“AI crawlers have been scraping content without limits. Our goal is to put the power back in the hands of creators, while still helping AI companies innovate,” said Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare, in a statement Tuesday.
“This is about safeguarding the future of a free and vibrant Internet with a new model that works for everyone,” he added.
What are AI crawlers?
AI crawlers are automated bots designed to extract large quantities of data from websites, databases and other sources of information to train large language models from the likes of OpenAI and Google.
Whereas the internet previously rewarded creators by directing users to original websites, according to Cloudflare, today AI crawlers are breaking that model by collecting text, articles and images to generate responses to queries in a way that users don’t need to visit the original source.
This, the company adds, is depriving publishers of vital traffic and, in turn, revenue from online advertising.
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Tuesday’s move builds on a tool Cloudflare launched in September last year that gave publishers the ability to block AI crawlers with a single click. Now, the company is going a step further by making this the default for all websites it provides services for.
OpenAI says it declined to participate when Cloudflare previewed its plan to block AI crawlers by default on the grounds that the content delivery network is adding a middleman to the system.
The Microsoft-backed AI lab stressed its role as a pioneer of using robots.txt, a set of code that prevents automated scraping of web data, and said its crawlers respect publisher preferences.
“AI crawlers are typically seen as more invasive and selective when it comes to the data they consumer. They have been accused of overwhelming websites and significantly impacting user experience,” Matthew Holman, a partner at U.K. law firm Cripps, told CNBC.
“If effective, the development would hinder AI chatbots’ ability to harvest data for training and search purposes,” he added. “This is likely to lead to a short term impact on AI model training and could, over the long term, affect the viability of models.”