Intel is one of the latest companies to invest in Arm, joining the ranks of Samsung, Alphabet, Nvidia and more, Tom's Hardware reports. The move comes as Softbank preps Arm for its IPO, with plans to offer 95.5 million shares at $47 to $51 each. The company is valued at $52 billion — more than the almost deal selling Arm to Nvidia for $40 billion that fell off in 2022 (barriers included the Federal Trade Commission suing to block it).

Investing in what is, essentially, its competitor allows Intel to expand beyond its x86 chips — which are not nearly as efficient as those Arm is currently manufacturing. Stuart Pann, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Intel Foundry Services, confirmed the investment during the Goldman Sachs Communacopia & Technology Conference Call. "80 percent of TSMC's wafers have an ARM processor in them," Pann said. "The fact that our organization, the IFS organization, is embracing ARM at this level, investing in ARM, doing partnerships with ARM, should give you a signpost that we're absolutely serious about playing in this business because if you're not working with ARM, you can't be a foundries provider." As an “anchor investor,” Intel should have better access to Arm’s future chip design IP which it can then produce via its burgeoning contract factory plans.

As part of this expansion, Pann added that the company would be focusing more on other low-power chipsets, including RISC-V, which he said is where the “volumes” are at in the new world of mobile-first computing. After all, the point of Intel opening up its factories to third parties in the first place was to admit that its own efforts in this space hadn’t been as successful as its much-smaller rival.

Intel's decision to invest in Arm comes at a time of tremendous growth in (and incentives to grow) the chip manufacturing industry. Earlier this year, the Biden administration released funding applications for companies to get a piece of $39 billion devoted to semiconductor manufacturing. More recently, Apple extended its licensing deal with Arm until 2040. The iPhone maker was a founding backer of the company, first using its technology in its (ultimately doomed) Newton and now, more recently, as the backbone of its entire lineup.

Just over a month after it declared bankruptcy, e-bike maker VanMoof has found a new home. Lavoie, the electric scooter division of McLaren Applied, has agreed to buy VanMoof and make investments in it to grow the business. According to a press release, Lavoie and its parent plan to "inject stability into the VanMoof operations" before bringing together their "capabilities to create a next-generation e-mobility business and establish a world-leading premium e-mobility offering."

Terms of the acquisition haven't been disclosed, but Lavoie and McLaren Applied appear to have a reasonable understanding of the challenge that lies ahead to get VanMoof back on track. McLaren Applied Chairman Nick Fry told Reuters that VanMoof is "a company with a brilliant product" that offers his team an opportunity in a new market, "but this is not going to be a walk in the park. This also is a company that got itself into a difficult financial situation." Fry noted that McLaren Applied would need to invest "tens of millions" of pounds "in the short term" to stabilize VanMoof.

Lavoie CEO Eliott Wertheimer pointed out that VanMoof has more than 190,000 e-bike customers, some of whom have been struggling to obtain parts for repairs after production was suspended. Lavoie's goal is to "continue to keep those riders on the road whilst we stabilize and efficiently grow the VanMoof business and continue to develop its world-class products.” However, there will be layoffs as part of the acquisition. VanMoof will also shift away from an in-house retail store model to instead sell and service bikes via third-party partners. Peloton has made a similar shift in its business model over the last year or so.

If you've been wondering who's making the most money from the AI boom, NVIDIA may have the answer in it's latest earnings report. The company announced revenue of $13.51 billion in the second quarter, more than doubling the $6.7 billion it made last year and crushing market expectations. On top of that, it earned $6.18 billion in GAAP net income, nine times the $656 million it made in Q2 2022. 

NVIDIA's gaming segment did pretty well too, thanks to $2.49 billion in Q2 revenue, up 22 percent from last year. During the quarter, it started shipping the budget-oriented GeForce RTX 4060 GPU, announced the Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE) for games and saw the addition of 35 DLSS games including Diablo IV. (Earlier this week, it unveiled DLSS 3.5 designed to use AI to make ray-traced games look better.)

But it was very much the AI and data center segments that pushed NVIDIA to new heights. It saw a record $10.32 billion in revenue in that sector alone, up 141 percent from Q1 2023 and 171 percent from a year ago. 

Earlier this year, CEO Jensen Huang said that back in 2018, NVIDIA had a "bet the company" moment when it started using AI to power DLSS, "and while we were reinventing CG with AI, we were reinventing the GPU for AI." He later added that "the future is a large language model (LLM) at the front of just about everything," from VFX to heavy industry. 

NVIDIA's prescience is now paying off with the company's flagship H100 Tensor Core GPU. It's also been building more complex systems like the HGX box, which puts eight H100 GPUs into a single computer. All of that helped it create immense cashflows with top customers spending heavily on NVIDIA GPU tech to build complex AI models — like Microsoft with its Azure segment. 

In addition, the company's use of custom software and apps makes it difficult for customers to switch rivals like AMD. "Our Data Center products include a significant amount of software and complexity which is also helping for gross margins," said NVIDIA finance chief Colette Kress in an analyst call.

All that led to a perfect storm of profit. "During the quarter, major cloud service providers announced massive NVIDIA H100 AI infrastructures. Leading enterprise IT system and software providers announced partnerships to bring NVIDIA AI to every industry. The race is on to adopt generative AI," Huang said in a statement. "Companies worldwide are transitioning from general-purpose to accelerated computing and generative AI." The company expects more to come, forecasting around $16 billion in revenue for Q3. 

After announcing the deal last year, Intel will no longer acquire Tower Semiconductor for $5.4 billion, the company announced in a press release. It was unable to "obtain in a timely manner the regulatory approvals required under the merger agreement" it wrote — specifically in China, according to Bloomberg. Tower produces various types of chips for clients across multiple industries, and Intel made the acquisition to expand its foundry business and better compete with rivals like Taiwanese giant TSMC. 

Tower has seven fabrication facilities (located in Israel, Italy, the US and Japan) that build 6-inch, 8-inch and 12-inch chip wafers. While the company doesn't manufacture cutting edge mobile and other process, its clients don't necessarily need the latest technology. Instead, Tower focuses on reliably manufacturing large volumes of chips for automakers, equipment manufacturers, medical industries and others. 

Before announcing its Tower acquisition, Intel was reported to be in talks to purchase the much larger chip manufacturer and AMD spinoff GlobalFoundries for around $30 billion. Intel launched its foundry services as a separate business unit back in 2021, committing $20 billion to build two Arizona factories. It also revealed plans to build a massive semiconductor facility in Ohio designed to become "the largest silicon manufacturing location on the planet."

Intel said its still executing its roadmap "to retain transistor performance and power performance leadership by 2025," with the aim of becoming the second-largest global external foundry by 2030. "Our respect for Tower has only grown through this process, and we will continue to look for opportunities to work together in the future." As part of its merger agreement, Intel will pay a termination fee of $353 million to Tower. 

Sony has published its earnings report for the first quarter of the year (PDF) ending on June 30th and an adjusted forecast for the fiscal year, and they paint a picture of mixed results for the company. Its overall operating profit for the period was down 31 percent year-over-year, from 364.9 billion yen ($2.54 billion) to 253 billion ($1.76 billion). The company's revenue was up 33 percent, however, thanks to significant increase in sales by its game and network services, music, imaging and financial services businesses.

Sony believes its game and music segments will continue to do well and has raised (PDF) its sales and revenue forecast for the fiscal year ending on March 31st, 2024 by 6.1 percent due to higher-than-expected sales for those businesses. It also expects its net income to be 2.4 percent higher than its previous forecast, from 840 billion yen ($5.86 billion) to 860 billion ($6 billion).

For its game division, in particular, Sony has tweaked its forecast, because it's anticipating an increase in sales for non-first-party PlayStation titles, including add-on content. Several much-awaited games are coming out for PlayStation gamers this year, such as Spider-Man 2, Assassin's Creed Mirage, Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty Expansion, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora and EA Sports FC. 

This expected increase in sales for non-first-party titles will be aided by a decrease in costs and expenses. That said, they will also offset by a "deterioration in profitability of PlayStation 5 hardware." Sony has dropped the PS5's pricing in several regions around the world recently. While that translates to lower overall earnings from the console, it could also get people on the fence to finally purchase the PS5, which in turn could lead to more game purchases. 

To note, Sony has shipped 3.3 million PS5 units in the first quarter of the year. That's almost half of the previous quarter's sales of 6.3 million units, though that figure was for the holiday season, when businesses typically do better than usual. This is Sony's best-performing first quarter for PS5 sales so far, bringing the total number of units sold to 41.7 million. 

Despite adjusting its outlook with better numbers for the year overall, Sony has lowered its expectations for the sales of mobile sensors due to the continuing downward trend in smartphone sales. Sony Pictures' earnings was also down year-on-year despite the success of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. The company doesn't foresee a recovery for the business, as well, and believes it will perform worse than what was predicted last April due to the impact of strikes by the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild. 

Almost three years after PayPal started supporting cryptocurrency for all US accounts, the fintech company has launched its own stablecoin that's pegged to the US dollar. PayPal USD, the payment processor said, is "100 percent backed by US dollar deposits, short-term US Treasuries and similar cash equivalents." The company first confirmed that it was "exploring a stablecoin" back in January last year after a developer found code and images for a "PayPal Coin" in its app. It said back then that it will work with relevant regulators "if and when [it] seek[s] to move forward."

In its announcement, PayPal explained that its coin is a token issued on the Ethereum blockchain by the Paxos Trust Company, which is subject to the regulatory oversight of the New York State Department of Financial Services. The company also obtained a BitLicense, or a business license of virtual currency activities, from the NYDFS in June 2022. 

Users can buy and sell PayPal USD coins for $1 each. They can send the coins to other users as payment or use them to purchase goods and services by selecting the option during the checkout process. They can also transfer PayPal USD to compatible external wallets or convert other cryptocurrencies in their account to and from the stablecoin. 

As Reuters notes, authorities previously thwarted attempts by major companies to introduce stablecoins of their own. Meta, for instance, spent two years trying to launch a stablecoin, but the project collapsed after repeated delays due to regulators' concerns that it could be used for money laundering and other nefarious purposes. Ian Katz, managing director of Capital Alpha Partners, told Reuters that PayPal USD could soon attract the attention of the Federal Reserve and the Securities and Exchange Commission. For now, PayPal is focusing on rolling out the new currency and all the things people can do with it in the US.

Apple's financials continue to be in an ever-so-slight slump. Just as we saw the last two quarters, the company suffered minor declines in revenue in its fiscal Q3 2023 — but these are minor blips for a company that is still raking in absurd amounts of money every quarter. 

As has often been the case, revenue that Apple made from its Services segment (things like paid iCloud plans, Apple Music, AppleCare, the App Store and numerous other offerings) hit an all-time high of $21.2 billion. That's the company's second-largest product category behind the iPhone, and it grew eight percent year-over-year. But iPhone, Mac and iPad revenue all declined compared to a year ago, the same as it did last quarter.

In the case of the iPhone, that decline was slight: revenue of $39.7 billion in the quarter was down about two percent compared to a year ago. iPad (down 19.8 percent) and Mac (down 7.3 percent) sales declined more significantly. But given the fact that Apple hasn't refreshed any iPad hardware since last fall, it's not too surprising to see a drop there. Wearables (like the Apple Watch and AirPods) and accessories were another bright spot, as revenues grew a little over two percent, the only product category besides Services to do so. 

Overall, revenues of $81.8 billion represented a less than two percent drop year over year, while profits actually increased about two percent to $19.9 billion. 

As usual, Apple is holding a call with CEO Tim Cook at 5PM ET, and there's more to discuss this quarter than usual. Beyond Apple's normal product categories, this is the first earnings since the ambitious Vision Pro headset was announced, so it's likely investors may want to hear about how that new product is progressing. And there's the ever-present talk of potential AI-related projects hanging out in the background, too. We'll be updating this post with any details Cook shares on the call. 

Most taxpayers will have the option of going entirely paperless starting with the 2024 filing season. The IRS said today that it aims to “achieve paperless processing for all tax returns” by 2025. The agency says the IRS Paperless Processing Initiative will “eliminate up to 200 million pieces of paper annually, cut processing times in half and expedite refunds by several weeks.” The project is funded by President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.

The IRS expects the changes will solve the annoyance of transmitting digital documents in some cases but still having to mail paper ones in others. “For decades, taxpayers had to respond to notices for things like document verification through the mail, and IRS employees had to manually enter numbers from paper returns into computers one digit at a time, creating significant delays for taxpayers and challenges for IRS staff,” the US Treasury Department wrote today.

Starting next year (2024 filling season), taxpayers can digitally submit all correspondence — including many non-tax forms. The IRS says at least 20 additional e-File tax forms will be available digitally starting then. It estimates that over 94 percent of individual filers will never have to mail another tax form or document. The initiative will spare taxpayers from sending approximately 125 million paper documents annually.

By the 2025 filling season, “an additional 150 of the most used non-tax forms will be available in digital, mobile-friendly formats.” (The IRS cites research showing that around 15 percent of Americans rely solely on their phones for internet access.) It says all paper-filed tax and information returns — an estimated 76 million paper documents per year — will be processed digitally as soon as it receives them. Similarly, half of paper-submitted correspondence, non-tax forms and notice responses (another 60 million paper docs) will be recorded digitally. Finally, the IRS also plans to digitize up to one billion historical documents, making accessing older filing data easier for customer service agents and taxpayers.

The IRS says its Paperless Processing Initiative will help eliminate errors from manual data entry, speed up processing and let the agency pour more resources into taxpayer support. “Customer service employees do not currently have easy access to the information from paper returns and other correspondence submitted by mail,” the Treasury Department wrote. “Digitization and data extraction will give them access to that information they need to better serve taxpayers.”

The agency also expects digitization will help them to hold billionaires and corporations accountable. “When combined with an improved data platform, digitization and data extraction will enable data scientists to implement advanced analytics and pattern recognition methods to pursue cases that can help address the tax gap, including wealthy individuals and large corporations using complex structures to evade taxes they owe.”

Meta just had its best quarter since 2021, even as it continues to lose massive amounts of money on the metaverse. In fact, the company said it expects to lose even more money on its efforts in the year to come.

Reality Labs, the Meta division overseeing its virtual and augmented reality projects, lost $3.7 billion during the second quarter of 2023 and generated just $276 million in revenue, according to the company’s latest earnings report. And the company, once again, said it expects its metaverse spending to accelerate. CFO Susan Li said that Meta is expecting Reality Labs’ losses to “increase meaningfully” compared with last year, when it lost more than $13 billion on the efforts.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg tried to downplay the significance of the losses. “We remain fully committed to the metaverse vision,” he said during the company's earnings call. When pressed for more details on the company’s metaverse spending, he pointed to the upcoming Quest 3 headset, which he said would launch at Meta’s Connect event in September. “This is going to be the biggest headset that we've released since 2020,” he said. “There are just a lot of expenses related to bring that to market.”

Aside from the metaverse, it was an otherwise a strong quarter for Meta, which reported $32 billion in revenue, an 11 percent increase from last year. Zuckerberg touted Reels, which are now drawing 200 billion views a day across Facebook and Instagram, thanks to the company’s renewed emphasis on AI-driven recommendations. He also highlighted the recent launch of Threads and the company’s Llama 2 large language model.

Though early analytics data has suggested Threads engagement has declined substantially since its launch, Zuckerberg said the company is “seeing more people coming back daily than I'd expected” and that he sees a path for the app to eventually reach “hundreds of millions” of users.

Meta also confirmed that the bulk of its layoffs, which resulted in the company shedding more than 20,000 jobs since last fall, have been “substantially completed.” Zuckerberg previously dubbed 2023 as Meta’s “year of efficiency” as he cut staff and attempted to streamline the company’s management structure. Zuckerberg pointed to Threads’ launch, which he said was overseen by a relatively small team, as proof that “cultural changes” at Meta are working.

Zuckerberg didn’t, however, offer a timeline of when he thought the company’s metaverse spending might start to pay off. “This is a very long term bet,” he said, “You know, on a deep level, I understand the discomfort that a lot of investors have with it. And look, I mean, I can't guarantee you that I'm gonna be right about this bet —I do think that this is the direction that the world is going in.”

In the second quarter of 2023, Spotify saw its million monthly active users (MAU) climb to 551 million after welcoming 36 million new listeners. That represents a 27 percent increase in MAUs and is an all-time high for the streaming giant, which has just published its earnings report. While not all new users signed up for a Premium account, Spotify also had a record-breaking second quarter when it comes to Premium subscriber numbers. It welcomed 10 million paying users — 3 million larger than guidance — and grew its subscriber base by 17 percent year over year. That's not an all-time high, but it's also apparently the best Q2 Spotify has ever had in that regard. 

Despite the massive influx of new users, Spotify still lost a significant amount of money. Its total revenue for the period is $3.5 billion (€3.2 billion), 11 percent larger than last year's. However, it also posted an adjusted operating loss of $123.7 million (€112 million). Spotify blamed those losses on the shutdown of its podcast shows, as well as on excess real estate and severance for employees laid off due to company restructuring. If you'll recall, the audio streaming giant recently made big changes to its podcast strategy and axed several original productions. 

According to The Wall Street Journal, Spotify previously told investors that it would be raising prices in order to turn a profit. Indeed, the company just added $1 on top of the old subscription rate, meaning users in the US now have to pay at least $11 a month. Spotify also plans to implement price hikes across markets, including the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Hong Kong. The company anticipates a slowdown in premium subscription signups due to its higher prices for the third quarter of the year. From having 10 million new paying users in the second quarter, it expects to add 4 million Premium subscribers in Q3. Even so, it believes the price increases will "have a minimal impact on total revenue" and is still expecting to earn $3.65 billion (€3.3 billion) this quarter.