Oracle wins the bride 🙄
Government’s generosity, VI launch, and green investments.
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Government’s generosity 👏
Loosening up its purse strings a bit, GOI announced a ₹30,000 crore liquidity scheme for 37 non-banking, housing finance companies and for monetary financial institutions, as part of its self-reliant India agenda to keep business humming.
The financial entities covered in the disbursal had been struggling to raise outside capital from the open markets to fund their advances — thanks to the pandemic led economic plague looming, so they had applied with the government for a special liquidity consideration. The program basically offers full government backing to any debt based securities issued by these companies.
The government also used the occasion to highlight other assurances in place to strengthen financial foundation. They released a slew of other data on capital infusions made via public and private sector banks, including loans of upto ₹1.63 lakh crores to millions of individuals as well as MSMEs. GOI has also disbursed some ₹25k crores for farmer working capital. Read more.
While we’re talking about the government,
Senior RJD leader, former union minister for Rural Development, and the architect of the employment-guarantee MGNREGA scheme, Raghuvansh Prasad Singh, passed away yesterday. Singh contracted the coronavirus and was admitted at the AIIMS facility in the capital. He was 74. RIP.
Giving the bride away, finally 🙄
Bytedance has finally picked Oracle as the buyer for TikTok’s US operations, in some weirdly constructed “tech-partnership” deal, putting an end to a 2-month long charade. News on the subject is still breaking out but any deal will be subject to China’s and Trump’s approval.
Last night actually turned out to be quite eventful. First, Bytedance vehemently denied any interest in selling just the algorithm that powers TikTok, again dissing the US government’s attempt to break apart the company.
Soon thereafter, the company rejected Microsoft’s bid. Obviously this shocked everyone considering this was THE most credible bid in place, backed by Walmart and a couple of other entities. Here’s a statement by Microsoft if you’d like to nerd out.
Then later in the evening the company finally accepted Oracle’s and its partners’ proposition, and the news was still developing as I finalized today’s issue. Check this.
Takeaway: nobody is stupid enough to think that this deal wasn’t a political setup and sabotage. Sure there would be some eyewash justification for picking Oracle, but you can’t deny the fact that Oracle founder Larry Ellison being a vocal Trump backer may have influenced this decision.
Otherwise, how does Oracle, a growth-stalled enterprise tech company that has zero experience building a consumer technology business run away with one of the hottest social platforms made to date?
Acquisition of the decade? 💯
NVIDIA — the company that makes graphic cards announced that it would buy Arm Holdings, a company that makes ARM architecture based CPUs. Currently, Softbank owns Arm Holdings, and NVIDIA will pay $40 billion to get the deal done.
Some backstory: ARM basically stands for Advanced RISC Machines — a type of processors that are suitable for everyday embedded electronics devices due to their low cost and low power consumption benefits. British company Arm Holdings (now owned by Softbank) is one of the largest makers of these processors in the world and rose to prominence due to explosive demand for electronics gadgets in the last couple decades (watches, calculators, TVs, game consoles, smartphones). ARM processors power phones from Apple, Samsung, Microsoft — literally everyone.
So why is NVIDIA buying Arm Holdings?
Because NVIDIA wants to dominate the datacenter processing market.
As of today, Intel owns like 85-90% of the datacenter processor market. Their CPUs (based on the x86 architecture) are the gold standard of processing power.
However, over the past decade or so, with the explosion of data and proliferation of AI, the demands of datacenter hardware has evolved such that the role of CPU is de-prioritized and barely reduced down to a control hub that tells other chips what to do.
Basically, an expensive CPU from Intel based on the full blown x86 architecture is sometimes an overkill in simple applications. Instead, what we call computation “accelerators” are gaining prominence.
Accelerators are basically chips that help speed up data intensive computations. For example, churning through billions of data points or training AI models which takes repeated computations at lightning fast speeds. Thankfully, GPUs designed to handle visual graphic computations in parallel turned out to be amazing at this function (other chip types such as FPGA, custom ASICs etc. are good at this function too).
In 2010, Google was the first company to use NVIDIA GPUs for deep learning applications. Then in 2015 or so, NVIDIA, formally embraced this revolution and launched a dedicated line-up of GPUs designed for data-center applications. And since then sales exploded. In no time NVDA began realizing the potential it holds in the datacenter market.
So in 2019, the company purchased Israel based Mellanox Technologies, the maker of high-speed interconnect systems and switches.
Then NVIDIA continuously launched a bunch of software and frameworks to help improve performance of its hardware when put to use inside the datacenter.
Now finally with an ARM CPU maker in its pocket, NVIDIA is closing the full loop of a modern datacenter computing stack — wherein it owns:
Central processing unit (Arm Holdings)
Accelerator (GPUs) and
Networking and interconnect systems(Mellanox)
NVIDIA can focus its R&D in improving these entities together and optimizing performance. Not to mention, the CPU-acceleration model will increasingly find use in smartphones, computers and other edge devices as well, giving NVDA direct entry into these markets.
Essentially, this deal is the culmination of a decade-long shift in modern computing architecture, and NVIDIA’s vision to become a datacenter-first computing company. Read more.
Bottomline: the combination of NVDA and ARM along with NVDA’s Mellanox purchase, create a combined entity that is a powerhouse in computing hardware suited for the future we are heading into. Intel and other rivals are massively disadvantaged and should be threatened by this deal. 🔥
Securing green future 🙌
One of India’s largest clean energy firms, Greenko, is looking to invest almost a billion dollars in a new battery storage business, including building domestic manufacturing capacity to produce Li-Ion batteries in India for industrial and transportation applications.
India lost the solar boom to China partly because Indian companies were late to recognize the opportunity and invest in building a robust value chain accordingly. Greenko believes this move is part of its agenda to NOT repeat mistakes, while helping India become self-reliant in this space.
Greenko’s investments come in the backdrop of Japan based ORIX corp’s $980 million investment in Greenko for about 17% stake — marking the single largest clean energy investment to date in India.
India rarely gives the opportunity to offer credits for taking proactive measures to capture mammoth opportunities, but green energy is one avenue where praise is warranted. Government’s plans to infuse ₹18,000 crores via the PLI scheme for green-tech manufacturing as well as other incentives for giga factories for cell and battery manufacturing projects have truly sparked up the mood of domestic as well as foreign investors.
Capital talks 💰
We’re literally spending our lives inside Chrome tabs right now, why not learn a new language while at it.
Toucan believes you’d be interested in that proposition and has raised $3 million to make that possible. The company builds a chrome browser extension that translates web pages and teaches you languages in the backdrop as you browse on the internet. GSV Ventures led the round with 5 other funds and angels pitching in.
Browser extensions are making a surreptitious comeback as increased use of desktops and laptops keep people away from smartphone apps. PayPal led the way last year when it acquired a chrome extension, Honey, that searches for deals for $4 billion.
Talking about healthcare, 🩺
Biotech firm Gilead Sciences is closing in on a deal to buy Immunomedics Inc. and its famous breast cancer drug Trodelvy for $20 billion, a 100% premium at its market value.
Trodelvy has shown great promise in treating lung and other cancers and this deal will help Gilead broaden its oncology therapies portfolio and perhaps put the company back on the growth track after its Hepatitis-C and HIV drugs have been declining in sales. Gilead recently drew attention towards its COVID-19 drug Remdesivir which the US authorized in July.
Moving onto VI, 🗼
With re-branding done, the next act for Vodafone is unveiling its new look on a grand stage, and what stage could be better than the IPL? The company has managed to successfully get on board as the co-presenting sponsor of the upcoming Dream11 IPL 2020, all set to unveil its new cape en-masses. VI has acquired co-sponsorship rights of the live broadcast which will be telecast on the Star Sports network. Read more.
Tweet of the day -
What else are we snackin’ 🍿
🏛️ Antitrust case tossed - The competition commission of India has dismissed a case by Beverly Hills Polo Club for alleging AMZN of abuse of dominance and creating unfair market conditions and barriers to entry.
🚕 What is remote - Ride hailing giant Ola is combining its offices in Bengaluru in a gigantic 425,000 sq. ft. facility. The new space can accommodate 4-5k people with lease running for 15 years. The space will be used for Ola’s existing operations, financial services and expanding electric mobility business.
⛽ Petro boost for Heartland - PMO has inaugurated 3 petroleum sector projects which will help meet the demand for domestic cooking gas in the state of Bihar. The PM highlighted spending of about ₹21,000 crore spent on 10 petroleum and gas based projects as part of the PM’s package for Bihar.
💉 COVID trials back baby - AstraZeneca has now resumed the trial of its COVID-19 vaccine after a safety pause prompted by an unexplained illness in one of its participants. The trial was given a green signal by British regulators to resume after a safety review. Trials in US remain halted.
😷 Medical achievements - A team of Hyderabad doctors have performed the country’s first double lung transplant surgery on a 32 year old COVID-19 patient who was suffering from sarcoidosis which affected his lungs.
😎 Zoom working to up security - The video platform has introduced a 2-factor authentication to provide extra security to admins and organizations to prevent any trivial security breaches. Zoom has been critiqued a lot for deprioritizing user security.
👍 Appeasing governments - FB has joined many other companies to offer paid time off to the employees who want to volunteer at the US polls in November. The company has also offered free advertising to the state election authorities for the poll worker election push.
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