Cautious Optimism

Cautious Optimism

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Cautious Optimism
Here come the (humanoid) robots
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Here come the (humanoid) robots

Alex Wilhelm
Aug 26, 2024
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Cautious Optimism
Cautious Optimism
Here come the (humanoid) robots
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Welcome to Cautious Optimism, a newsletter on tech, business, and power. Modestly upbeat.

A small programming note: Alex’s second kid is due in about a week. When she arrives, CO will be off for a little while. Then it will come back!

  • 📈 Trending Up: Infra-based cyberattacks … sanctions … attacks on Ukrainian infra …. private equity take-private deals … San Francisco … philosophy? …

  • 📉 Trending Down: Uber’s checking account (BG) … Telegram founder Pavel Durov’s ability to move around after his arrest … more on Durov here (BBC), and here (Le Monde) …

Upcoming economic data:

  • Monday: Durable goods, PDD earnings

  • Tuesday: Consumer confidence, earnings from Box and nCino,

  • Wednesday: Earnings from NVIDIA, Salesforce, CrowdStrike, HP, Veeva, NetApp, Li Auto, Pure Storage, Okta, Nutanix, Chewy, Affirm,

  • Thursday: Initial jobless claims, second GDP revision, earnings from Dell, Autodesk, MongoDB, Elastic, HashiCorp,

  • Friday: Personal spending, PCE index

Can’t help but mention:

  • Big secondary funds (FT): The liquidity market is so bad — pick your enemy: the FTC, IPO regs, etc — that G Squared just raised $1.1 billion more to buy secondary startup shares. That means its going to go out and buy existing stakes in tech companies from people willing to sell at a discount in exchange for cash. Oof. Go public, folks.

  • IBM pulls R&D from China: IBM is closing down about 1,000 jobs worth of work in China. It would be simple to place the move under general China-U.S. decoupling but there’s more afoot here. The WSJ points out that IBM’s China sale fell after the nation pushed domestic companies to buy local. Down went IBM’s sales in the country, and now out goes IBM.

Via Mathew Schwartz

Are humanoid robots really about to pop off?

Reuters and CNBC have notes from the World Robot Conference in Beijing, reporting that makes it clear that as the world sorts out what to do with a production glut in electric cars, humanoid robots could be next.

That is, if the tech shapes up as expected.

There’s a huge amount of funding on both sides of the Pacific piling into the trend. To wit:

  • CNBC: “Total investment into China’s robotics industry in the last decade has exceeded 100 billion yuan ($14.01 billion), said Wei Cao, partner at Lanchi Ventures.”

  • Reuters: “The city of Beijing launched a $1.4 billion state-backed fund for robotics in January, while Shanghai announced in July plans to set up a $1.4 billion humanoid industry fund.”

And here in the United States, there are a host of well-funded names taking on the same challenge set. Pulling mostly from the TWiST500, a few names:

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