In the video clip below from a recent episode of The AI Investor Podcast from 24/7 Wall St., the team discusses the biggest pieces of news to come out of the world of AI.
Over the past two weeks, Oracle reported earnings that sent its stock soaring by 12%, a significant move for a multi-hundred-billion-dollar company. Founder Larry Ellison shared some eye-opening insights during the conference call, emphasizing the monumental investments required to build frontier AI models—citing figures as high as $100 billion.
Ellison also revealed that Oracle is in the process of permitting nuclear reactors to power new data centers, highlighting the scale and ambition behind their AI initiatives. He passionately discussed how AI is becoming integral to all aspects of technology and business, particularly in healthcare, where AI is transforming diagnostics, electronic health records, and prescription systems. Ellison’s excitement is palpable as he envisions AI not as a separate entity but as the core of all future applications.
This enthusiasm isn’t limited to Oracle. Other tech luminaries like Satya Nadella of Microsoft, Elon Musk, and Google’s Sergey Brin are equally vocal about AI’s transformative potential. Sergey Brin has reportedly returned to Google to work on AI projects full-time, reflecting the urgency and excitement in the industry.
Elon Musk has been outspoken about AI’s possibilities, and Microsoft under Nadella’s leadership has heavily invested in AI technologies. The collective endorsement from these industry giants underscores a significant shift towards AI as the next frontier in technology.
While some skeptics worry about an AI bubble similar to the dot-com era, the sheer scale of commitment from these tech leaders suggests that AI’s impact will be profound and far-reaching.
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Transcript
[00:00:00] David Hanson: Nothing has happened in the world of AI over the past two weeks. We had Oracle report earnings stock was up. I think 12 percent on earnings. Again, this is like a multi hundred billions of dollar company that’s moving 12%. So we’re just continuing to see these massive moves in huge tech companies. Because there’s so much unknown happening, huge earnings beats revenue growth.
[00:00:20] David Hanson: But I want to talk a little bit about. Some pretty wild quotes that we heard from Larry Ellison, who of course is the founder of Oracle. He was on the conference call. So one of the quotes that jumped out to me was he was talking about, building these frontier models and what it takes to build them.
[00:00:38] David Hanson: And the number you threw out was, you’re basically going to need about a hundred billion dollars to build one of these models when that’s, Just a lot of them. You can buy a lot of sports franchises for a hundred billion dollars. And that’s what’s the build frontier model. So there’s just enormous dollars being thrown away.
[00:00:53] David Hanson: I want to not thrown away, thrown out. I want, I wanted to ask you what else stood out from Ellison’s comments. And just what your takeaway that you’ve got from him, who’s obviously, he’s been in the tech world for so long. He’s a respected voice in this space.
[00:01:06] Eric Bleeker: Yeah. It’s interesting that you have this prior generation of tech companies that dominated things like.
[00:01:12] Eric Bleeker: com you could talk about. One’s that fell behind like Cisco in many ways, or Yahoo, which, is a fraction of its former self and even Intel fading away. And then you have other companies that have managed to reinvent themselves. We were laughing because we were preparing for the show and you were like, Oracle, have they really done well?
[00:01:32] Eric Bleeker: Oracle. Only up 200 percent the past five years, which shows generally how well technology is done. But yeah, Oracle is getting a little bit more into the Microsoft camp of reinventing itself around cloud computing and AI technologies, and they were up 12 percent after these earnings.
[00:01:50] Eric Bleeker: So what struck me from these quotes, Larry Ellison, he, he was just, Jumping out of his skin. He was so excited talking about things. You look at that quote, talking about 100 billion to be able to build frontier models that was extremely interesting. Also, he followed up with the fact that there are in the permitting process for nuclear reactors to be able to power.
[00:02:16] Eric Bleeker: Some of these new data centers that they come out with. But what’s interesting is right after they did the earnings and he had that we’re actually perming nuclear reactors quote. They then came out with a press release about what might be the most powerful data center in the world. It is I’ve got the numbers right here.
[00:02:34] Eric Bleeker: I’m looking at, it’s a system with 131, 000. Blackwell GPUs. I ran the numbers on this. I believe that this one cluster of chips could potentially bring in 5. 5 billion in revenue to Nvidia itself. So it shows the scale of the ambition that’s happening. One more thing, David, I thought was really interesting from this.
[00:02:58] Eric Bleeker: Larry Ellison, he got the quote. Or he got the question that you often see from analysts about how much longer is the spending going to go? Because, we’re not seeing all the breakthrough products in AI that you’d expect. And he gave a really interesting answer that he basically said, Look I’m on the board of several healthcare companies.
[00:03:16] Eric Bleeker: I’m working. In this space with several startups, pretty soon, everything, x rays being able to do ultrasounds, that’s all going to be tied into AI. So I’m I’ll read it. When are we going to start monetizing it? All of Cerner is the monetization. The fact that we can dramatically expand our health business is because it’s based on AI.
[00:03:38] Eric Bleeker: It is AI is just, I don’t know how to describe it. The best way to describe it, it’s not something you sell separately. It is the diagnosis diagnostic system. It is the electronic health record system. It is the pharmacy system, the prescription system, the user authentication, the login system, everything is AI.
[00:03:58] Eric Bleeker: And I know people think it’s a separate thing. Oh my God, I hear a bunch of applications come and say, Oh, now we’ve got AI agents, we’ll charge separately. It’s our applications are going to be primarily AI applications, everything. How would you charge separately? So David, we’re going to talk later about agents as one of the big trends for next year, but I think he really captured that in so many of these industries.
[00:04:24] Eric Bleeker: And what it fundamentally is going to transform into AI. And that’s what he is seeing at the forefront. So again, you have these tech leaders who are positioning these companies well, and you’re wondering what they’re seeing. I thought that was a great quote that encapsulated, what a Larry Ellison is seeing that he is basing the entire future of his company on AI at this point.
[00:04:45] David Hanson: Yeah. You talk about Larry Ellison, he’s not Exactly a spring chicken anymore. I think he’s 80 years old and he’s talking about, I think part of his quote was, this is going to be a battle for tech supremacy over the next five to 10 years, and he’s jumping out of his seat. So it’s going to be 90 years old in 10 years.
[00:04:58] David Hanson: And he’s excited about this. You just start going down the list of these well known people who are excited. And just almost just can’t contain themselves about what are the possibilities here you have Nadella, Microsoft, Google has come out and said the same thing, Elon Musk. I think I saw that what Sergei Brin was saying he’s back in Google every single day now working on AI, because he can’t believe how fast it’s moving.
[00:05:18] David Hanson: So we talked last week about could AI turn into the next. com bubble and the hype just gets so big and there’s not a payoff there it’s always on the table, but you do start to look at the list of people who have staked their reputation on this. Working out and having a return and being something that really does deliver value and it starts to.
[00:05:40] David Hanson: Become pretty hard to disagree with what these people are saying. And maybe if they’re wrong, there’s gonna be a lot of reputations that are tarnished a little bit, but the list just keeps growing of people who are seeing this firsthand and working on the front lines and the enthusiasm doesn’t seem to be slowing down.
[00:05:55] Eric Bleeker: Yeah, I agree with that. And I think when we’re looking at other news, Some of the recent rebound in the price of AI stocks is really reflective of what you were just talking about. That the past two weeks has really seen a cavalcade of some of the biggest experts coming out and issuing bullishness that we haven’t seen recently.
[00:06:15] Eric Bleeker: There’s a fundamental shift in the air right now.
[00:06:18] David Hanson: Yeah. And we mentioned last week, you talk about Blackwell, what were the numbers you threw out? Six times more powerful than we haven’t even had. Yep. So we haven’t even had those, the next generation is not even fully rolled out.
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