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The Qualcomm Incorporated logo is being displayed at their pavilion during the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, on February 28, 2024.

Joan Cros | Nurphoto | Getty Images

Qualcomm wants to get closer to robot makers.

The company said Tuesday that it’s acquiring Arduino, an electronics maker whose inexpensive programmable circuit boards and computers are common in hardware startups and robotics labs for prototyping.

Qualcomm didn’t announce a price for the transaction, but said the Italy-based company would become an independent subsidiary.

The deal gives Qualcomm direct access to the tinkerers, hobbyists and companies at the lowest levels of the robotics industry. Arduino products can’t be used to build commercial products but, with chips preinstalled, they’re popular for testing out a new idea or proving a concept.

Qualcomm hopes that Arduino can help it gain loyalty and legitimacy among startups and builders as robots and other devices increasingly need more powerful chips for artificial intelligence. When some of those experiments become products, Qualcomm wants to sell them its chips commercially.

“You start to move towards prototyping, proof of concepts, and once you’re ready, you can go commercial, which is something we are obviously very familiar with,” said Nakul Duggal, Qualcomm’s general manager for automotive, industrial, and embedded Internet of Things, or IoT, in an interview.

Qualcomm is also seeking to diversify its revenue away from a concentration in mobile chips and modems as the smartphone market stalls and as Apple starts to move to its own modem chips.

Still, in the most recent quarter, Qualcomm’s IoT business, which includes many of its current chips that can be used for industrial or robotics products, and its automotive business accounted for a combined 30% of overall revenue from chip sales.

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To date, it’s been difficult for smaller developers to get access to Qualcomm chips because they typically get sold in large quantities to established enterprises. Rival Nvidia, however, has sold developer kits for its robot chips that can be directly purchased from retailers for as little as $249, and has said that robotics is the company’s biggest growth opportunity after AI.

Duggal said Qualcomm purchased two other companies in the past year, Foundries.io and Edge Impulse, in an effort to become more essential to robotics developers. He added that Qualcomm hopes to eventually help power humanoid robots, which are similar to self-driving cars in how much AI computing power they require.

Tuesday’s announcement said Arduino will, for the first time, release a board with a Qualcomm chip. It’s called the Uno Q and, priced at $45 to $55, comes equipped with a Qualcomm Dragonwing QRB2210 processor.

Qualcomm’s chip can run Linux, along with Arduino software, and can even do computer vision, which deciphers what a camera sees and translates it into software.

Current Arduino boards, which use lighter processors called microcontrollers, aren’t powerful enough to do a lot of cutting-edge AI. Those boards use chips from companies including STMicroelectronics, Renesas Electronics, Microchip and NXP Semiconductors. Qualcomm will continue to sell those chips through Arduino.

That’s part of Qualcomm’s plan to not make any significant changes to Arduino’s operations, management or its developer community.

“My success criteria is that the Arduino ecosystem doesn’t even feel that there is any change in ownership here,” Duggal said.

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Michael Dell says ‘at some point there’ll be too many’ AI data centers, but not yet

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Michael Dell says 'at some point there'll be too many' AI data centers, but not yet

Dell CEO Michael Dell: AI demand is very solid

Dell Technologies CEO Michael Dell said Tuesday that while demand for computing power is “tremendous,” the production of artificial intelligence data centers will eventually top out.

“I’m sure at some point there’ll be too many of these things built, but we don’t see any signs of that,” Dell said on “Closing Bell: Overtime.”

The hardware maker’s server networking business grew 58% last year and was up 69% last quarter, Dell said. As large language models have evolved to more multimodal and multi-agent systems, the demand for AI processing power and capacity has continued to be strong.

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Dell’s AI servers are powered by Nvidia‘s Blackwell Ultra chips. The company then sells its devices to customers like cloud service provider CoreWeave and xAI, Elon Musk’s startup.

Dell shares rose over 3% Tuesday after increasing its expected long-term revenue and profit growth in an analyst meeting.

The computer maker raised its expected annual revenue growth to 7% to 9%, up from its previous target of 3% to 4%, with diluted earnings per share now expected to be 15% higher, up from its previous 8% target.

The company reported strong second-quarter earnings in August, and said it planned to ship $20 billion worth of AI servers in fiscal 2026. That is double what it sold last year.

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OpenAI’s Sora 2 must stop allowing copyright infringement, Motion Picture Association says

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OpenAI's Sora 2 must stop allowing copyright infringement, Motion Picture Association says

Cfoto | Future Publishing | Getty Images

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.

WATCH: OpenAI’s Sora 2 sparks AI ‘slop’ backlash

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Billionaire tech investor Orlando Bravo says ‘valuations in AI are at a bubble’

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Billionaire tech investor Orlando Bravo says 'valuations in AI are at a bubble'

Orlando Bravo: AI valuations are in a bubble

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.

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