SHANGHAI, CHINA – SEPTEMBER 06: Aerial view of Tesla vehicles waiting to be loaded on board a roll-on-roll-off cargo vessel at Nangang port on September 6, 2023 in Shanghai, China. (Photo by VCG/VCG via Getty Images)
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Tesla shares rose more than 10% Monday after a Morgan Stanley upgrade, and optimistic note that envisioned Tesla selling AI technology to other automakers, and saving money by using its own GPUs as much as possible, rather than paying for chip supply from Nvidia.
Morgan Stanley analysts argued that Tesla should be viewed as a tech company as much as an electric car maker. The firm set its new price target at $400 for shares of Tesla, up from a previous price target of $250, as of Monday emphasizing the potential of Tesla’s Dojo supercomputer project and custom silicon. Morgan Stanley believes Dojo could theoretically add up to $500 billion to the company’s value long-term.
CEO Elon Musk said in July this year said Tesla planned to spend more than $1 billion on Dojo by the end of 2024. Tesla is developing Dojo to help with AI machine learning and computer vision training purposes for its cars and nascent robotics effort. Among other things, Tesla uses video clips and data from its customers’ vehicles to improve existing software, and develop new features.
Highly bullish Tesla analyst Adam Jonas wrote in his note on Monday, “Although Dojo is still early in its development, we believe that its applications long-term can extend beyond the auto industry. Dojo is designed to process visual data which can lay the foundation for vision-based AI models such as robotics, healthcare and security. In our view, once Tesla makes headway on autonomy and software, third party Dojo services can offer investors the next leg of Tesla’s growth story.”
Morgan Stanley also expects Tesla to be able to generate $2,160 in recurring revenue every month from its vehicle owners in 2030, from services enabled by Dojo and subscription software in cars like self-driving systems, which Tesla does not offer today, vehicle charging services, maintenance, software upgrades, content and others to be developed in the future.
Elon Musk promised a Tesla would complete a self driving cross-country demo without any human intervention by the end of 2017. Tesla vehicles still only offer advanced driver assistance systems, which require a human behind the wheel, ready to steer or brake at any second.
By contrast, another firm that is bullish on Tesla, Deutsche Bank, noted risks to the EV maker in Q3 from “planned summer production shutdowns which will push both production and deliveries down QoQ, discounts on inventories, and limited positive costs offsets in the quarter,” and set a price target at $300 in a note out September 6.
Earlier this quarter, Tesla slashed the prices of its electric vehicles after executives cautioned investors on the company’s last earnings call that production and delivery volumes would likely decline this period versus the second quarter due to planned factory closures.
Tesla also cut the price to purchase its premium driver assistance system, marketed in the U.S. under the Full Self-Driving or FSD brand name, from $15,000 to $12,000. Those price cuts, among other things, had weighed on Tesla’s share price in recent weeks. But after the Morgan Stanley note on Monday, Tesla shares spiked above $272 mid-day.
Uber said Monday that Pierre-Dimitri Gore-Coty, one of the company’s longest-tenured top executives and the head of is delivery business is leaving after almost 13 years.
Gore-Coty joined Uber as a general manager in France in 2012, and worked his way up to become vice president of mobility for the Europe and Middle East region four years later, according to his LinkedIn profile. He was named senior vice president of delivery in 2021.
“It’s hard to imagine Uber without Pierre, because there hasn’t been much Uber without Pierre,” CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said in a statement that was part of a regulatory filing. “As one of our first employees, he was a driving force behind our global Mobility expansion and stepped up to run Uber Eats just weeks before the first Covid lockdowns.”
The company didn’t say what Gore-Coty plans to do next.
Uber also said that Andrew Macdonald, the company’s senior vice president of mobility and business operations, will become chief operating officer, reporting to Khosrowshahi. Macdonald, 41, will oversee the company’s global mobility, delivery and autonomous businesses in addition to “key cross-platform functions like membership, customer support, safety, and more,” the filing said.
Gore-Coty is one of 11 people listed on Uber’s executive team page. Macdonald is the only one who has worked at the company longer. He joined in May 2012, four months before Gore-Coty, according to LinkedIn.
“These last nearly 13 years have been the ride of a lifetime,” Gore-Coty said in the statement. “It was a true team effort, and I’m so proud of what we’ve built and the impact we’ve had on daily life in cities around the world.”
Uber shares were little changed in extended trading after closing on Monday at $83.64. The stock is up 39% this year, while the Nasdaq is about flat.
Last month, the company reported first-quarter results that beat on earnings but missed on revenue. A month earlier, the Federal Trade Commission sued Uber, alleging that the company engaged in “deceptive billing and cancellation practices” related to its Uber One subscription service.
In an interview with CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” Khosrowshahi characterized the lawsuit as “a bit of a head-scratcher for us.”
Nvidia-backed CoreWeave climbed more than 7% following the announcement.
Financial terms of the two agreements were not provided, but Applied Digital said it expects $7 billion in total revenue during the approximately 15-year period.
“Through these newly signed long-term leases with CoreWeave, we are taking a step forward in our strategic expansion into advanced compute infrastructure,” said Applied Digital CEO Wes Cummins in a release announcing the news.
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CoreWeave will provide AI and high-performance computing infrastructure for the Applied Digital data center campus in Ellendale, North Dakota, according to the release.
Applied Digital will provide 250 megawatts of critical IT load for CoreWeave. The campus is designed to host 400 MW of load.
CoreWeave shares have been on a tear over the past couple of weeks, setting a record high of $130.76 on May 29. The company, which rents AI servers powered by Nvidia chips, started trading at $39 on March 28.
Packages with the logo of Amazon are transported at a packing station of a redistribution center of Amazon in Horn-Bad Meinberg, western Germany, on Dec. 9, 2024.
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German antitrust regulators warned Amazon on Monday that the company’s pricing mechanisms for third-party sellers could run afoul of competition laws.
The Federal Cartel Office said in its preliminary assessment that Amazon’s pricing controls limit the visibility of merchants’ products and, “based on non-transparent marketplace rules,” interfere with their freedom to set prices.
Amazon uses algorithms and statistical models to calculate certain price caps for products, the Cartel Office said. Products that are flagged as having “prices that are too high” or “prices that are not competitive” can then be demoted in search results, excluded from advertising or removed from the buy box, they added.
The buy box is the listing that pops up first when a visitor clicks on a particular product, and the one that gets purchased when a shopper taps “Add to Cart.”
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“Competition in online retail in Germany is largely determined by Amazon’s rules for the trading platform,” Federal Cartel Office President Andreas Mundt said in a statement. “Since Amazon competes directly with other marketplace retailers on its platform, influencing competitors’ pricing, even in the form of price caps, is fundamentally questionable from a competition perspective.”
Amazon’s pricing practices not only threaten sellers’ businesses, but could also harm other retailers by deterring them from offering lower prices, the Cartel Office said.
An Amazon spokesperson said the company strongly disagrees with the Cartel Office’s preliminary findings. They added that any changes to Amazon’s pricing mechanisms would be “bad for customers and selling partners.”
“If Amazon is prevented from helping people find competitively priced offers, it will lead to a bad shopping experience for them, as we’d need to promote uncompetitive or even abusive pricing in our store,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “This would mislead customers into thinking they’re getting good value when, in reality, they’re not.”
Amazon can provide feedback to the Cartel Office on its preliminary assessment before it reaches a final decision.
Amazon in 2022 reached a deal with European Union antitrust regulators who were investigating its use of seller data and buy box practices. As part of the settlement, Amazon agreed to display a second buy box on products sold in Europe when there is a second competing offer that’s different on price or delivery.
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission is also probing Amazon’s use of pricing algorithms on its sprawling third-party marketplace as part of a wide-ranging antitrust lawsuit filed in 2023. Amazon has said the FTC’s complaint is “wrong on the facts and the law.”