Latest news with #Wallenberg
The Guardian
7 days ago
- Business
- The Guardian
China haunts Bilderberg talks as usual suspects plot world domination
Deep within the glittering bowels of Stockholm's fanciest hotel, grave ruminations on the future of the world are taking place. A heady throng of tech billionaires, ministers, corporate titans and the king of the Netherlands have convened in Sweden for the 71st Bilderberg meeting – the publicity-shy annual policy conference that has long sustained conspiracy theorists – hosted this year by the fabulously wealthy Wallenberg family. The four days of transatlantic talks are taking place at the swanky Grand hotel, which is owned, like so much else in Sweden, by the Wallenbergs. The Swedish PM, Ulf Kristersson, turned up for welcome dinner on Thursday evening, and would have been about halfway through his second plate of meatballs when the first of Israel's rockets dropped on Tehran. What better time for the prospects of world war three to go up a gear than in the middle of a Bilderberg conflab, with nuclear proliferation slated for discussion, and the heads of Nato and MI6, and two of America's most senior military officers in the room. They're joined in Stockholm by the CEOs of several major defence suppliers such as Palantir, Thales and Anduril. Even the quietly spoken host of the conference, Marcus Wallenberg, happens to run an arms company. He's chair of Sweden's largest defence contractor, Saab. The Tehran attacks slot happily into the conference agenda, which includes the topics 'Middle East' and the rise of an 'authoritarian axis' – what Bilderberg insider Nadia Schadlow, a former deputy US national security adviser, describes as 'the growing collusion among revisionist powers'. According to Schadlow: 'An authoritarian axis is rapidly coalescing around China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, disrupting the belief that an international community has taken shape in the aftermath of the cold war.' Earlier this year, the Economist magazine, whose editor sits alongside Schadlow on Bilderberg's steering committee, struck a similar note, declaring: 'The rupture of the post-1945 order is gaining pace.' But the Economist handed Donald Trump a fair chunk of the blame for 'junking the transatlantic alliance'. What this means for Bilderberg is that seven decades of hard work nurturing the postwar international order are in danger of going up in – literal – smoke. Trump's vice-president, JD Vance, has taken every opportunity to lever the US and Europe apart. 'Europe being more independent', he said recently, 'is good for the United States.' Back last summer, before the election, he said: 'The United States has to focus more on east Asia. That is going to be the future of US foreign policy for the next 40 years, and Europe has to wake up to that fact.' The presence in Stockholm of Samuel Paparo, the head of the US Indo-Pacific Command, is a sign that Bilderberg has taken this to heart. Also, there's another member of the 'authoritarian axis' which looms far larger than Iran over this conference: China. Though the name 'China' doesn't actually appear on this year's agenda, the heightening struggle between America and China is a spectre which haunts at least half of the topics being discussed – from the 'geopolitics of energy and critical minerals' to 'defence innovation and resilience'. Just a couple of months ago, Eric Schmidt, the former Google boss and longtime Bilderberg board member, warned that 'China is at parity or pulling ahead of the United States in a variety of technologies, notably at the AI frontier'. Schmidt suspects that it will be only a matter of 'three to five years' before some form of super-intelligent AI is achieved. 'The geopolitical stakes, especially in the race with China, are enormous,' he says, because attaining super-intelligent AI would mean total and unassailable military domination. In short, it would give the winner 'the keys to control the entire world'. But here's the problem – 'due to the immense power requirements of large-scale AI', beating China to the super-intelligent punch would require 'potentially 100 times more energy' than is currently available. The head of the International Energy Agency, Fatih Birol, who is conferencing this year at Bilderberg, recently posted on X that 'global electricity demand from data centres powering AI is set to soar in the next decade'. In this desperate winner-takes-all race for the keys to the world, in which the 'geopolitics of energy' becomes ever more important, power stations – along with the data centers they feed – are going to become the No 1 military targets. Cue the AI drones. For the time being, before AI invents completely new and unimagined ways for us all to kill each other, drones are perhaps the biggest practical application of AI in warfare. There's a healthy swarm of drone manufacturers at this year's Stockholm summit, sharing their hopes and fears about 'defence innovation'. Hovering alongside Eric Schmidt there's the chairman of Thales – 'a leader in the fast growing market of unmanned aircraft systems'. Buzzing nearby is Gundbert Scherf, co-founder of German drone and AI company Helsing. One of the early investors in Helsing is also present: the CEO of Spotify, Daniel Ek, which presumably means that the Helsing drones will have the best playlists, booming out suggested songs as they swoop down to attack. The investment interlinking of Bilderberg participants is particularly intense around autonomous drone tech. Saab is an investor in Helsing. Helsing is collaborating with leading AI company Mistral, whose CEO is attending the conference. Mistral was funded by Schmidt, who's a huge fan of military UAVs. Schmidt's recent AI/drone expo, which took place last month in Washington, was co-sponsored by Palantir, which was set up by Bilderberg insider Peter Thiel, who is a major funder of Anduril, whose CEO, Brian Schimpf, is also in Stockholm. Schimpf is a former employee of Palantir, whose CEO, Alex Karp, is also on board of Bilderberg, having been ushered on to it by Thiel. And so it goes. Thiel's fingers can be found wriggling around in an awful lot of pies, not least the juiciest pie of all: the White House. The two senior White House officials at the Stockholm conference, Kevin Harrington and Michael Kratsios, both used to work for Thiel Capital. And Thiel's famously long list of influential acolytes includes none other than Vance. Only a few days ago, Vance was on a podcast defending Trump's proposed Palantir-powered database on every citizen, which was described by MSNBC as 'an unprecedented spy machine that could track Americans'. Vance waved away any such concerns: 'I don't believe that Palantir is collecting any information.' Thank heavens for everyone's freedoms, Palantir is run by self-confessed 'classic liberal' Alex Karp. In a recent earnings call, the idiosyncratic CEO said his company was busy 'building really great things', in order 'to power the west to its obvious innate superiority'. Karp throbs with what he calls 'productive narcissism' – at Palantir, he insists: 'We're proud of our moral stance'. His philosophy, as he sums it up, is this: 'If you've done something big and important, you're probably a good person.' Palantir is successful, ipso facto, it's doing good. As the Economist put it: 'Fast approaching is a might-is-right world.' It's a kind of Gordon Gekko morality that would be heartily approved of by Wall Street legend and Bilderberg faithful Henry Kravis of KKR, on whom Gekko was actually based. Of course, not all the tech luminaries at this year's Bilderberg are thinking in terms of world domination. Demis Hassabis, the co-founder of DeepMind, turned up in Stockholm with the 2024 Nobel prize for Chemistry in his back pocket and some rather more optimistic rhetoric about AI, which he thinks will usher in an era of 'radical abundance'. He thinks of AI as 'the cavalry' arriving to save us from ourselves. He says: 'I'd be very worried about society today if I didn't know that something as transformative as AI was coming down the line.' And Jack Clark, the co-founder of Anthropic, likes to think AI replace us in every last will help us find new ways of living fulfilling lives. His vision is of a world in which, freed up from our jobs, we'll engage in 'creative, fun exercises in getting AIs to build things, or make things, or carry out competitions and games where people can play them with one another'. Pulling back for a moment from the AI endgame to the world in 2025, there's one rather less jazzy item on the conference agenda worth mentioning – 'US economy'. But even this has everything to do with China. Taking part in the Stockholm summit is Republican congressman Jason Smith, a vocal fan of Trump's 'America first' trade policy. Smith has pledged to 'continue fighting to combat the economic and national security threat China poses to our great nation'. He's fully aligned with fellow conference goer Robert Lighthizer, an influential economic adviser close to Trump, who told CBS News earlier this year that 'China to me is an existential threat to the United States'. Lighthizer is urging a 'strategic decoupling' from Chinese trade, and most importantly, he says: 'We should disentangle our technology.' Here's where Trump's trade vision intersects with not just the long view of Silicon Valley's bullish billionaires, but with the longstanding transatlantic vision of Bilderberg. Thiel recently called for 'a very drastic reset with China' and urged other nations to do likewise. In other words, look at our success, and join us. Of course, the only thing wrong with this self-fulfilling meritocratic version of western civilization is that if the Chinese succeed in beating the west to the keys of the world, it will mean that they were the good guys after all.
Globe and Mail
29-05-2025
- Business
- Globe and Mail
AI Analyst Flags Key Risks and Upside for Nvidia Ahead of Earnings
Nvidia (NVDA) is heading into its Q1 2026 earnings scheduled later today with major momentum, a wave of new projects, and a few global challenges. But is the stock still a buy after such a massive run? According to 'Spark,' TipRanks' AI analyst, the answer is yes, though with a bit of caution. Confident Investing Starts Here: 'Spark' Weighs In on Nvidia 'Spark', our AI analyst, gives Nvidia a stock score of 80 and an 'Outperform' rating, pointing to strong fundamentals and future growth drivers. The company's financials remain exceptional. Revenue in fiscal 2025 surged 114% to $130.5 billion, while earnings per share grew 146%. Free cash flow more than doubled, and return on equity stands at an impressive 91.8%. The key engine remains Nvidia's data center business, which generated $115.2 billion in revenue last year—nearly triple the previous year—thanks largely to the Blackwell GPU architecture. The short-term outlook is also strong. Nvidia expects $43 billion in revenue for the current quarter. But 'Spark' warns that valuation is a concern. With a P/E ratio of 44.7 and rising expectations baked into the price, any earnings miss or guidance downgrade could hit the stock hard. NVDA Expands Its Reach Beyond the numbers, Nvidia continues to build the world's AI infrastructure. In Europe, it's working with AstraZeneca (AZN), Ericsson (ERIC), Saab (SAABF), and SEB to launch Sweden's largest enterprise AI supercomputer. This project, backed by the powerful Wallenberg family, includes Nvidia's first AI technology center in the country. It's a strategic move to embed Nvidia into Europe's industrial base and reduce its dependence on China. Speaking of China, Nvidia is adjusting to U.S. export restrictions that ban the sale of its H20 chips. This resulted in a $5.5 billion inventory write-down. Still, Nvidia is now offering a new lower-spec chip—the RTX Pro 6000D—aimed at staying relevant in China's $50 billion data center market. However, its market share in China has dropped from 95% to 50%, and local rival Huawei is gaining ground. Looking further ahead, Nvidia is quietly laying the groundwork in quantum computing. It's backing PsiQuantum, a photonics startup, and promoting CUDA-Q, its hybrid quantum-classical software platform. The goal is not to build quantum machines, but to ensure Nvidia powers whatever platform emerges. For investors, the takeaway is straightforward: Nvidia continues to dominate in AI while laying the groundwork for quantum. The risks are real, but according to 'Spark,' so is the upside. Is NVDA stock a Good Buy? According to The Street's analysts, Nvidia has a Strong Buy rating and an average NVDA stock price target of $164.21. This implies a 21.19% upside. See more NVDA analyst ratings Disclaimer & Disclosure Report an Issue
Yahoo
26-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Nvidia (NVDA) to Help Build Sweden's First AI Infrastructure
Bloomberg reported on May 23 that Nvidia Corp. (NASDAQ:NVDA) is partnering with a group of Swedish companies, including AstraZeneca Plc, Ericsson AB, Saab AB, and SEB AB, to create the country's first artificial intelligence infrastructure. Wallenberg Investments AB, the investment vehicle of Sweden's influential Wallenberg family, will also be a significant shareholder in the venture. The project's first phase will establish Sweden's largest enterprise AI supercomputer by deploying two Nvidia DGX SuperPODs featuring NVIDIA's latest-generation Grace Blackwell GB300 systems. Nvidia will also open its first AI Technology Center in Sweden and lead AI research with partners. The venture is expected to be operated by a joint company. A scientist at a computer station, surrounded by a neural network of artificial intelligence code. While welcoming the initiative, Marcus Wallenberg, Chair of Wallenberg Investments AB, emphasized that it will accelerate the development and adoption of AI across Swedish industries, provide opportunities for upskilling, and strengthen the country's AI ecosystem. Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, described the venture as a catalyst for breakthroughs. He noted: 'As electricity powered the industrial age and the Internet fueled the digital age, AI is the engine of the next industrial revolution. Through the visionary initiative of Wallenberg Investments and Sweden's industry leaders, the country is building its first AI infrastructure—laying the foundation for breakthroughs across science, industry, and society, and securing Sweden's place at the forefront of the AI era.' With the support of high computing power, the four partner companies, Ericsson, AstraZeneca, Saab, and SEB, will collaborate with Nvidia to apply AI in their respective domains: enhancing telecom services, accelerating drug discovery, advancing defense technologies, and driving innovation and productivity in banking. Nvidia Corp. (NASDAQ:NVDA) designs and manufactures graphics processing units (GPUs), system on a chip units (SoCs), and AI hardware and software. Over the years, the company has expanded its offerings from gaming GPUs to include data center solutions, AI computing, and deep learning technologies. The company's GPUs are widely used in data centers for high-performance computing, AI training, and inference, making it a critical player in the data center ecosystem. While we acknowledge the potential of NVDA as an investment, our conviction lies in the belief that some AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns and have limited downside risk. If you are looking for an AI stock that is more promising than NVDA and that has 100x upside potential, check out our report about the cheapest AI stock. READ NEXT: The Best and Worst Dow Stocks for the Next 12 Months and 10 Unstoppable Stocks That Could Double Your Money. Disclosure: None. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Business Insider
25-05-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
Nvidia's AI Bet on Europe Grows as China Revenue Falters
Nvidia (NVDA) isn't taking its foot off the gas lately, playing both offense and defense in the global AI race. On one front, the chip giant is teaming up with Swedish industrial powerhouses — including AstraZeneca (AZN), Ericsson (ERIC), Saab (SAABF), and SEB, a leading Nordic financial services group, to build the largest enterprise AI supercomputer in Sweden. Backed by the influential Wallenberg family, this project will also see Nvidia set up its first AI technology center in the country. Confident Investing Starts Here: CEO Jensen Huang says this is about building 'the country's first AI infrastructure,' setting the stage for scientific and industrial breakthroughs. Saab plans to use the tech to boost defense capabilities, while other partners will tap AI for everything from drug discovery to 5G networks. What Is Nvidia's Strategy? This is a long-term bet. By embedding itself into Europe's industrial base, Nvidia secures deep roots in stable, high-value markets. It's also a clear move to diversify away from regions like China, where the rules are shifting fast. And that brings us to Nvidia's second major play: launching a new, lower-spec AI chip for China. After U.S. export controls effectively banned Nvidia's high-performance H20 chip, the company had to scrap $5.5 billion in inventory and walk away from $15 billion in potential sales. Now, Nvidia is rolling out a toned-down chip based on its latest Blackwell architecture. It's expected to be called the RTX Pro 6000D or B40, priced between $6,500 and $8,000 — much cheaper than the H20's $10K+ price tag. It'll use standard memory and avoid the advanced packaging tech that triggered U.S. restrictions. The goal is clear: Stay in China's $50 billion data center market without crossing red lines. But it's not all good news. Nvidia's China market share has dropped from 95% to 50%, and Huawei's homegrown AI chips are gaining steam quickly. However, the bottom line is that Nvidia is adapting quickly. In Europe, it's building lasting AI infrastructure. In China, it's squeezing value from what's left. For investors, this shows Nvidia's global reach and agility, even under intense political and regulatory pressure. Is NVDA stock a Good Buy? According to The Street's analysts, Nvidia has a Strong Buy rating and an average NVDA stock price target of $164.51. This implies a 25.30% upside.
Bloomberg
24-05-2025
- Business
- Bloomberg
Nvidia and Wallenberg Businesses Starting AI Venture in Sweden
Nvidia Corp. and a cluster of businesses backed by Sweden's influential Wallenberg family are starting a venture to build out artificial intelligence infrastructure in the Nordic nation. The group of companies — including AstraZeneca Plc, Ericsson AB, Saab AB, SEB AB and the Wallenberg's investment vehicle — will develop what it calls the largest enterprise AI supercomputer in Sweden, according to a statement on Saturday. Nvidia will also establish its first AI technology center in the country to advance research with industrial partners, it said.
