Oracle stock slipped 5% on Tuesday after a report from The Information that raised questions about the company’s plans to buy billions of Nvidia chips to rent as a cloud provider to clients like OpenAI.
Oracle had 14% gross margins on $900 million in sales in its Nvidia cloud business in the three months ending in August, according to the report, which cited internal documents. That’s significantly lower than Oracle’s overall gross margin of around 70%.
The report said that Oracle’s recent transformation into one of the most important cloud and artificial intelligence companies may run into profitability challenges because of how expensive Nvidia chips are and aggressive pricing on its AI chip rentals.
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In September, Oracle said that its backlog of cloud contracts, which it called remaining performance obligations, had jumped 359% in a year. It forecasted $144 billion in cloud infrastructure revenue in 2030, up from just over $10 billion in 2025.
The Motion Picture Association on Monday urged OpenAI to “take immediate and decisive action” against its new video creation model Sora 2, which is being used to produce content that it says is infringing on copyrighted media.
Following the Sora app’s rollout last week, users have been swarming the platform with AI-generated clips featuring characters from popular shows and brands.
“Since Sora 2’s release, videos that infringe our members’ films, shows, and characters have proliferated on OpenAI’s service and across social media,” MPA CEO Charles Rivkin said in a statement.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman clarified in a blog post that the company will give rightsholders “more granular control” over how their characters are used.
But Rivkin said that OpenAI “must acknowledge it remains their responsibility – not rightsholders’ – to prevent infringement on the Sora 2 service,” and that “well-established copyright law safeguards the rights of creators and applies here.”
OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment.
Concerns erupted immediately after Sora videos were created last week featuring everything from James Bond playing poker with Altman to body cam footage of cartoon character Mario evading the police.
Although OpenAI previously held an opt-out system, which placed the burden on studios to request that characters not appear on Sora, Altman’s follow-up blog post said the platform was changing to an opt-in model, suggesting that Sora would not allow the usage of copyrighted characters without permission.
However, Altman noted that the company may not be able to prevent all IP from being misused.
“There may be some edge cases of generations that get through that shouldn’t, and getting our stack to work well will take some iteration,” Altman wrote.
Copyright concerns have emerged as a major issue during the generative AI boom.
Disney and Universal sued AI image creator Midjourney in June, alleging that the company used and distributed AI-generated characters from their films and disregarded requests to stop. Disney also sent a cease-and-desist letter to AI startup Character.AI in September, warning the company to stop using its copyrighted characters without authorization.
Thoma Bravo co-founder Orlando Bravo said that valuations for artificial intelligence companies are “at a bubble,” comparing it to the dotcom era.
But one key difference in the market now, he said, is that large companies with “healthy balance sheets” are financing AI businesses.
Bravo’s private equity firm boasts more than $181 billion in assets under management as of June, and focuses on buying and selling enterprise tech companies, with a significant chunk of its portfolio invested in cybersecurity.
Bravo told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” on Tuesday that investors can’t value a $50 million annual recurring revenue company at $10 billion.
“That company is going to have to produce a billion dollars in free cash flow to double an investor’s money, ultimately,” he said. “Even if the product is right, even if the market’s right, that’s a tall order, managerially.”
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OpenAI recently finalized a secondary share sale that would value the ChatGPT-maker at $500 billion. The company is projected to make $13 billion in revenue for 2025.
Nvidia recently said it would invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI, in part, to help the ChatGPT maker lease its chips and build out supercomputing facilities in the coming years.
Other public companies have soared on AI promises, with Palantir’s market cap climbing to $437 billion, putting it among the 20 most valuable publicly traded companies in the U.S., and AppLovin now worth $213 billion.
Even early-stage valuations are massive in AI, with Thinking Machines Lab notching a $12 billion valuation on a $2 billion seed round.
Despite the inflated numbers, Bravo emphasized that there’s a “big difference” between the dotcom collapse and the current landscape of AI.
“Now you have some really big companies and some big balance sheets and healthy balance sheets financing this activity, which is different than what happened roughly 25 years ago,” he said.
Rivian made a name for itself when it unveiled one of the first electric pickup trucks, the R1T, in 2018. It followed that up with an SUV built off the same platform, the R1S, and has since built a passionate fan base around a brand that celebrates adventure and the outdoors.
Now it’s preparing for its next chapter with the R2, a smaller spin on the R1S SUV, and the R3, a rally-inspired hatchback.
“A lot of people were surprised on R3” Rivian Chief Design Officer Jeff Hammoud told CNBC. “It’s not something that I think a lot of people would have guessed that Rivian would have done … and that was the key thing we were trying to show, we’re not pigeonholed to one form factor.”
The new vehicles, which were unveiled in March of last year, are part of Rivian’s strategy to reach a broader market for its electric vehicles, which currently start upwards of $70,000.
The R2, which the company says will start around $45,000, is expected to go into production by the end of this year at the company’s Normal, Illinois, manufacturing facility.
“While R1 was designed through addition, we had to look at R2 through subtraction,” Hammoud said. “What are the things we can remove or take away, but still keep the ethos of the product and the brand?”
The R2 and R3 are coming on the heels of a tough time for the automaker.
Weak demand, higher costs and the U.S. cancelling the EV credit could spell trouble for Rivian. But that hasn’t stopped the company from breaking ground on a new $5 billion factory in Georgia, where the next generation vehicles will be built.
“We’re first launching R2 at our facility in Illinois, but this is really the site where we’ll scale global production. We’re building this into a 400,000 unit plant,” Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe told CNBC’s Phil LeBeau at the plant’s construction site in September.
CNBC got rare access inside Rivian’s design lab in Irvine, California, to see how the company shapes its distinctive vehicles. We see how the EV maker approaches design for its adventure-driven EV lineup, which includes the backstory on how it conceived its iconic headlights, a choice that provoked mixed reactions when first unveiled.
“They were controversial,” recalls John Voelcker, contributing editor at Car and Driver. “It took a while for people to get over it. I think it was smart in that it’s harder to make your truck distinctive. So a front end that immediately is like no one else is probably a good thing.”
Watch the video to learn about Rivian’s approach to design and its plans to expand its brand of adventure-themed EVs.