China's tech giants secure NVIDIA chips Amid growing geopolitical tensions between the US and China, major Chinese tech companies have invested billions in acquiring specialized AI chips from NVIDIA in a veritable race against time. Companies such as ByteDance Alibaba $BABA (+5,5%) and Tencent $700 (+4,95%) have bought NVIDIA H20 chips en masse to protect themselves from US export restrictions. According to the business magazine Nikkei Asia, the three tech giants have together ordered around one million H20 chips, which is almost a year's supply. These chips were specifically ordered before the new US restrictions come into force in April 2025. ByteDance in particular is said to have taken aggressive action; together with other companies, rush orders worth over 12 billion US dollars were placed. The H20 chips are an adapted version of the H100 model and offer sufficient capacity for demanding AI applications despite reduced computing power. The chips are particularly popular in China due to their price-performance ratio and availability. These developments are not without consequences for NVIDIA: The company expects the new export restrictions to result in a slump in sales of around 5.5 billion US dollars in the first quarter of 2025. Chinese tech companies are now turning their attention to domestic alternatives such as Huawei's Ascend chips. Spotify expects weaker user growth After a strong start to the year, music streamer Spotify is expecting less momentum in the second quarter. Company CEO Daniel Ek announced that some disruptive noise must be expected in the short term. The number of monthly active users, an important indicator for advertisers, is likely to grow less strongly in the current quarter than recently, which has disappointed the forecast. Spotify shares came under pressure in pre-market trading and lost six percent. However, Ek remains optimistic in the long term. Spotify's freemium model offers users a great deal of flexibility in uncertain times, as they can choose between a free, ad-financed offering or paid premium services. In the first quarter, the number of premium subscribers rose by twelve percent to 268 million, while monthly active users increased by ten percent to 678 million. In the second quarter, Spotify expects a further increase to 689 million, although analysts had expected more. Revenue rose by 15 percent to 4.2 billion euros, but here too the experts' expectations were higher than the actual figures.
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