Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante

We attended both Nvidia Corp.’s GTC conference and Broadcom Inc.’s investor day this week where the artificial intelligence platform shift was on full display.

In our view, GTC24 was the most important event in the history of the technology industry, surpassing Steve Jobs’ iPod and iPhone launches. The event was not the largest but, in our opinion, it was the most significant in terms of its reach, vision, ecosystem impact and broad-based recognition that the AI era will permanently change the world.

Meanwhile, Broadcom’s first investor day underscored both the importance of the AI era and the highly differentiated strategies and paths that Nvidia and Broadcom are each taking. We believe Nvidia and Broadcom are currently the two best-positioned companies to capitalize on the AI wave and will each dominate their respective markets for the better part of a decade. But importantly, we see them each as enablers of a broader ecosystem that collectively will create more value than either of these firms will in and of themselves.

Heading into the second half of 2023, some investors felt that the semiconductor run up last summer was a harbinger for a broader tech rally. That thesis proved prescient and rewarded managers who took on risk at the time with leading firms in semiconductors, security and enterprise software. The question is, where do we go from here?

In this Breaking Analysis we welcome back Ivana Delevska, the founder and chief investment officer at Spear Invest, Nasdaq SPRX. Some have compared SPRX to a miniature version of Cathie Wood’s ARKK fund. However SPRX is more sector agnostic where Delevska focuses more broadly on growth themes such as her current emphasis on cybersecurity, semiconductors, and enterprise software.

It’s been an interesting month in the cybersecurity space. The sector has been somewhat less affected by budget tightening these past twenty-four months and at the same time has benefitted from AI tailwinds. But in the past several weeks we’ve seen some separation in key highflying cybersecurity names. Specifically, Palo Alto shocked the street last month with a $600M billings forecast surprise and sounded the alarm that there were cracks in its consolidation execution. This dragged down other consolidation players in sympathy, namely CrowdStrike and Zscaler. But our research shows that the dynamics facing these three companies are quite different. Of particular note, CrowdStrike’s earnings print highlights the company’s impressive momentum while recent negativity around Zscaler is a bit of a head scratcher for us, which we’ll try to explain.

In this Breaking Analysis we take a more narrow look at the information security space and dig deeper into the continued success of CrowdStrike. With recent survey data from ETR, we continue to advance our premise that platforms beat products and we identify several levers that are powering CrowdStrike’s path to $5B by FY 2026 and to $10B by the end of the decade.

Broadcom is perhaps the most unique company in the technology business. It doesn’t simply chase markets that are on steep growth curves and can deliver short term ROI. Rather it goes after established markets with durable franchises. Broadcom focuses its R&D on serving customers in these markets with major engineering investments to achieve a dominant position in each of its target sectors. And sometimes, the company lucks out with this strategy and catches a wave accidentally by design.

In this Breaking Analysis we extract key nuggets from our sit down at MWC this week with Charlie Kawwas, president of Broadcom’s Semiconductor Solutions Group, and we unpack the contrarian business technology model of Broadcom.

Many people question whether the current artificial intelligence boom will end in the same way that the dotcom bubble burst.

It’s understandable, as there are many similarities, especially with the exuberance seen this past week in the stock market following Nvidia Corp.’s earnings print. Although it’s easy to dismiss AI as a completely different era, there are some stark similarities that are worth remembering.

Like all waves, there are also major differences. Two of the most evident are the speed of innovation and the quality of today’s companies leading the AI charge. Like the internet, AI will be ubiquitous and available for virtually all organizations to leverage, not just traditional tech firms. As well, many patterns of the dotcom era are repeating and worth examining in more detail.

In this Breaking Analysis, we look back at the events leading up to the dotcom and AI booms and analyze the similarities and differences between these two transformative eras.

The past twenty-four months have seen cloud spending face dual headwinds of macroeconomics and the ability to dial down resources as needed – i.e. cloud optimization. Nonetheless, the big four hyperscalers clocked in between $170 – $190B in IaaS and PaaS revenue last year depending on how you factor the leaked court documents suggesting Azure is much smaller than previously believed. Regardless, hyperscaler growth continued to outpace almost all markets, accelerating between 18-19% in revenue terms last year, despite their enormous size.

As we progress into 2024, IT decision makers are cautiously optimistic about spending levels, especially for the second half. All hyperscalers report that cloud optimization is slowing although pockets of cloud cost cutting remain. While AI gets all the headlines, its contribution to revenue is still a small fraction of the overall spending pie. For example, we estimate that Microsoft’s AI services accounted for around $800M this past quarter. But the trajectory for AI services and the potential uplift looks promising for all four hyperscalers. We think collectively the generative AI uplift in cloud will surpass $10B this year.

In this Breaking Analysis we update you on our latest hyperscale cloud spending and marketshare data. We’ll analyze the ETR survey data on cloud optimization, assess the Gen AI updraft for the big 3 US cloud players and look at some of the industry trend data on cloud spend by platform.

As an American, you can’t help but root for Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger to succeed. His vision to bring semiconductor manufacturing leadership back to the United States is more than just a quaint nationalistic sentiment. Rather it’s a strategic imperative for the country, its military, global competitiveness and access to future technological innovations in the AI era. But his strategy is dependent upon the success of Intel both as a designer and a leading manufacturer of advanced chips.

As such this choice puts Intel in a multi-front war with highly capable leaders in several markets, including names like AMD, NVIDIA, AWS, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Tesla and other chip designers…even perhaps OpenAI. As well Intel competes with with established manufacturers like Taiwan Semiconductor and Samsung. Moreover, Intel’s business model has been disrupted by Arm which has created a volume standard powered by the iPhone and mobile technologies. Finally, China, Inc. looms as a long-term competitor further underscoring the imperative.

But the trillion dollar questions are: 1) What are the odds that Intel’s strategy succeeds; and 2) Are there more viable alternative strategies for both Intel and the United States?

In this Breaking Analysis we try to address these uncertainties and to do so we welcome Ben Bajarin, CEO and Principal Analyst at Creative Strategies.

In this Breaking Analysis, theCUBE Research analyst Dave Vellante unpacks the Enterprise Technology Research January spending data and digs into those areas that are expected to show above average performance and those that are likely to lag.

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