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Luke Kawa

Foxconn has good news about Nvidia and not-so-good news about Apple

The release of earnings from Hon Hai, better known as Foxconn, offers some useful perspective on the near-term outlook for some US megacap tech stocks.

The Taiwanese giant has its fingerprints on everything in the electronics space, especially smartphones and the cloud.

Some reassuring news for Nvidia and its ilk: Hon Hai’s AI server business is on track to double year on year, the company said. 2025 estimates don’t really appear to be at the heart of the market’s worries about the AI trade. But given the magnitude of the sell-off in AI-linked semiconductor, server, and data center names, every bit of good news helps.

The better news? When it comes to investment in AI infrastructure, “We will not see the peak this year,” Chairman Young Liu said.

For Apple, there isn’t much in the way of optimistic messaging to point to. While Hon Hai didn’t provide specific guidance, these arrows tell you what management thinks of the relative 2025 outlook for its smart consumer electronics division (where iPhones play a big role) versus its cloud and networking products business (which is geared toward AI servers).

Hon Hai outlook
Source: Hon Hai

Liu even warned of an imminent changing of the guard, saying that cloud and networking products would supplant consumer electronics as its top revenue driver “very soon.”

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Luke Kawa

Nvidia strikes licensing agreement with AI inference specialist Groq

Nvidia reached an agreement to work with AI chip startup Groq to enhance its inference capabilities.

CNBC is calling this a $20-billion acquisition in cash, citing the top investor in Groq’s latest financing round (which valued it at roughly $6.9 billion in September). Groq’s press release on the matter, however, refers to this only as a “non-exclusive licensing agreement” and that “Groq will continue to operate as an independent company,” with no financial details provided. The lack of an official acquisition may be a bid to duck any potential antitrust concerns.

However, this is definitively an acqui-hire, as Groq founder Jonathan Ross and president Sunny Madra, as well as other members of their team, will be joining the chip designer “to help advance and scale the licensed technology.”

Inference is the “thinking” part of AI models (as opposed to training, which is more of the “learning”). Groq’s AI chips are LPUs (language processing units), distinct from GPUs (graphics processing units) or TPUs (tensor processing units). The company boasts that these chips “run Large Language Models (LLMs) and other leading models at substantially faster speeds and, on an architectural level, up to 10x more efficiently from an energy perspective compared to GPUs.” These products don’t need external high-bandwidth memory chips (which are facing a supply crunch), but rather use a different method of on-chip memory (SRAM, or static random-access memory).

Through this deal, Nvidia is likely looking to boost the efficiency of its AI solutions in a power-hungry (and scarce) world. It may also be viewed as a response to the success of Google’s Gemini 3 model, which utilizes TPUs that are also cheaper to operate than Nvidia’s GPUs. (In a fun twist, Ross, the Groq founder, was one of the architects of what would become Google’s first TPU during his time with the search giant).

“We plan to integrate Groq’s low-latency processors into the NVIDIA AI factory architecture, extending the platform to serve an even broader range of AI inference and real-time workloads,” wrote Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in an email to employees, as reported by CNBC.

Good news for Groq is also good news for one of America’s most controversial and outspoken VCs: Chamath Palihapitiya, whose Social Capital fund was an early investor in the company. Chamath’s SPACs have generally tended to go over like a lead zeppelin, but this investment is already a massive winner.

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS - DECEMBER 21: Chicago Bulls mascot Benny the Bull is dressed for Christmas as the Bulls take on the Orlando Magic at the United Center on December 21, 2018 in Chicago, Illinois.

The S&P 500 closes at a record high for the 39th time in 2025

Tasha Matsumoto24h
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Luke Kawa

Micron jumps amid report of memory chip price hikes

Shares of Micron are catching a bid on Wednesday after South Korean media reported that its biggest competitors are raising selling prices for a line of high-bandwidth memory chips even though these will soon no longer be the most cutting-edge offerings available.

“According to industry sources on the 24th, memory semiconductor companies such as Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix have reportedly raised HBM3E supply prices by nearly 20%,” per the report from Chosun Biz. “This is unusual, considering that prices typically drop ahead of next-generation HBM launches. The prevailing view is that this is due to upward adjustments in HBM3E orders for next year from companies like Google and Amazon, which design their own AI accelerators, as well as NVIDIA, the largest HBM3E customer.”

Micron, along with those two companies, make up the triumvirate of high-bandwidth memory chip suppliers. These companies are all moving towards ramping their next-gen HBM4 production next year.

Meanwhile, appetite for HBM3E is being reinforced in part by President Trump’s move to allow Nvidia to sell its H200 chips to China.

markets
Luke Kawa

Opendoor acquires HomeBuyer.com in bid to boost home flipping and mortgage opportunities

Opendoor Technologies has acquired mortgage services platform HomeBuyer.com, according to a post on X from Chief Growth Officer Morgan Brown. Brown did not disclose financial terms of the deal in the post.

There’s an element of an acqui-hire here too, as HomeBuyer.com founder Dan Green will serve as Director of Mortgage Growth for Opendoor.

HomeBuyer.com offers tools for potential home buyers to assess their financing options, and mortgages are a logical avenue for Opendoor to pursue as the online real estate company looks transform the home buying and selling process in the US. At the very least, streamlining the financing process for potential buyers under its own roof should help Opendoor’s quest to pursue higher volumes of homes flipping.

Shares of Opendoor are little changed in premarket trading.

Many Opendoor bulls, including EMJ Capital’s Eric Jackson, have pointed to Opendoor’s potential to bolster its presence in mortgage, title, and other housing services as part of their optimistic view on the stock. In November along with the release of Q3 earnings, CEO Kaz Nejatian announced a new partnership with Roam pertaining to assumable mortgages.

Opendoor certainly hasn’t been idle during the holiday season. Earlier this week, the CEO touted an explosion in the company’s home-buying footprint to include all of the lower 48 US states, and management also announced that Coinbase Canada CEO Lucas Matheson was coming in to serve as its president.

markets
Luke Kawa

Intel drops on report that Nvidia stopped testing the 18A chip production process used by the chip manufacturer

Early on Christmas Eve, shares of Intel are tumbling like Santa off a rooftop after one too many spiked egg nogs.

Reuters reports that Nvidia “recently tested out whether it would manufacture its chips using Intel’s production process known as 18A but stopped moving forward, two people familiar with the matter said.”

Intel, for its part, told Reuters that its 18A processes are “progressing well” while it “continues to see strong interest” for its more advanced 14A production process. Previous reporting from the outlet indicated that in CEO Lip-Bu Tan’s early days leading Intel, he considered shelving the 18A manufacturing process entirely in favor of 14A in a bid to be more competitive with the likes of TSMC.

The $4 trillion chip designer announced a $5 billion investment in the chipmaker back in September as part of a collaboration that would see the two parties co-develop data center and PC products. That news sent shares of Intel up 23% in a single session, their biggest one-day gain since 1987.

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