00:00 Speaker A
That time for some of today’s trending tickers. We’re watching Oracle, Eli Lily, and Terawulf. Still with me, of course, Caleb Silver, Investopedia editor in chief, and start with Oracle. Plans to cut jobs in its cloud division as the company works to control costs as they spend more, of course, on artificial intelligence. This is according to reports. Caleb, Oracle here, Bloomberg noting cutting jobs in the cloud unit. Impact the workers. They say they were told this week. Some were related to performance issues. The unit continues to hire. Report does say 150 jobs were cut in the Seattle area. Full scope reductions doesn’t sound like we could determine just yet, of course. Oracle stock, I mean, it has been a monster. It’s up about 50% this year already. And you know what most in the street still say, still a buy.
01:23 Caleb Silver
Yeah, well, it’s 150-ish jobs that we know of right now. But listen to the drumbeat coming out of these big tech companies. Microsoft 15,000 or so layoffs. Meta announcing several thousand layoffs here. They over hired coming out of the pandemic and they hired a lot during this build out of their cloud infrastructure and of their data and their AI teams. And now they’re paring back the most significant metric right now throughout Silicon Valley and among tech investors is revenue per employee. Who’s squeezing the most revenue out of each employee? And at the top of that list is just who you think it is. It’s Nvidia.
02:25 Speaker A
How much do we know?
02:27 Caleb Silver
It’s Nvidia something like $2.5 million per employee just given the incredible profit margins that it generates. So all these companies are trying to get to those types of numbers where they are squeezing the most out of the least people that they can. This is the productivity gains. This is the promise of AI. And this is what also shareholders have been rewarding them for. So not a surprise and I think we’re going to hear more of this. We’ve had something like 150,000 tech jobs cut already so far this year on top of about 230,000 last year.
03:14 Speaker A
Wow. All right, moving on. Here’s another name on your radar. Eli Lilly is in the green as the company signs a $1.3 billion deal teaming up with superliminal medicines to develop new treatments through AI to treat obesity and heart-related diseases. So Caleb, it sounds like superliminal gets up to 1.3 billion. Lilly gets rights per reports to develop and commercialize compounds arising from the collaboration.
04:04 Caleb Silver
Yeah, well, congratulations on you for saying the name of the company, right, more than one time.
04:11 Speaker A
Try to say 10 times fast.
04:15 Caleb Silver
Right. But look, this is the space that’s hot right now, right? Weight loss drugs, mood altering drugs that help with weight loss and also using AI for the discovery of that. Not a lot of money for Lilly to get into that space and deeper into that space. All these drug companies are looking for the next blockbuster and all the blockbusters have come from the weight loss space over the last few years. Not a surprise here at all. Pretty good deal for the company whose name I cannot mention because I don’t have your skills, but we’re going to probably see more deals like this, combining AI with the most advanced therapeutics for the hottest drugs on the market. Makes perfect sense.
05:04 Speaker A
Separate headline, Eli Lilly raising the list price for so busy busy shot in the UK by as much as 170%. Apparently that brings rates in line with other countries new price still below apparently the level here. Finally, let’s on here on Bitcoin miner Terawulf soaring at the announcement that Google will take an 8% stake in the computing provider. The announcement is part of two 10 year contracts Terawulf just signed with cloud operator Fluid Stack. Google is backing Terawulf for $1.8 billion of Fluid Stack lease obligations, it’s basically guaranteeing the project gets financed. What do you make of this one?
05:54 Caleb Silver
This is all about data storage. Data storage for high intensity computing, high density AI computing. That’s basically what Terawulf does. It has these incredible data centers, good technology, and they’re going to need more and more of it. It’s a zero-sum game out there for these big super scalers that want to control the AI conversation and the ecosystem. They have to have power and they have to have storage. Terawulf is a good solution for Google in this department. Again, Alphabet has a lot of money planning to spend on a company like this. Money well spent, probably, because they’re going to need as much of this as possible.
06:42 Speaker A
Nice run for Terawulf this year. How just look at how analysts think about it. I got 11 buys, one hold, no sells on the street.
