Uber Partners with BYD

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Uber Partners with BYD

The ride-hailing giant Uber [UBER] has announced a multi-year agreement with the Chinese electric vehicle (EV) leader [BYDDF] that will see the latter provide 100,000 EVs. Incentives will be offered to Uber drivers to switch to EVs, including discounts on maintenance and leasing; the partnership will initially launch in Europe and Latin America. Elsewhere, Nissan [NSANY] and Honda [HMC] have announced a joint research project into technologies for next-generation software. Volkswagen [VWAGY] reported that Q2 margins declined; BMW [BMWYY] similarly reported a lower-than-expected Q2 profit margin.

Meta Saves the Day

Revenue at the social media giant Meta Platforms [META] climbed 22% over the last three months to $39.1bn, beating analysts’ expectations of $38.3bn. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that the strength of its core advertising business will allow Meta to continue investing heavily in artificial intelligence (AI), and that its AI chatbot was on course to become the world’s most-used AI assistant. Elsewhere, Bloomberg reported that Amazon [AMZN] had expressed interest in a takeover of Covariant, which makes AI software used in industrial robots, while Elon Musk has denied that his AI start-up xAI is planning to acquire chatbot start-up Character.AI.

Chip Stocks Soar — Except ARM

Shares in semiconductor companies rose on Wednesday, with investors reassured that big tech firms would continue to invest in AI. Nvidia [NVDA] and Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] had fallen sharply amid a turbulent earnings season but have since trimmed losses. Reporting Wednesday, the Qualcomm [QCOM] share price rose 5% after it forecast Q4 revenue above analyst expectations. However, also on Wednesday, Arm’s [ARM] revenue forecast prompted an 11% drop in its share price. Lastly, Applied Materials [AMAT] has been denied a Chips Act grant for a $4bn R&D centre in Silicon Valley.

With Lithium in the Doldrums, Albemarle Cuts Capacity

The world’s largest lithium producer, Albemarle [ALB], is shuttering one of its two processing trains in Australia and will scrap construction of a third. Lithium is a key component of batteries for EVs, and prices have been driven down by the ongoing slump in the EV market. The move will mean the loss of 300 jobs; it is “entirely due to market conditions and the commercial realities that lithium prices will stay lower for longer”, according to an Albemarle spokesperson, as reported by Bloomberg.

It Keeps Getting Worse for CrowdStrike

Shareholders have filed a suit in an Austin, Texas federal court, alleging that CrowdStrike [CRWD] executives defrauded investors by making “false and misleading” statements maintaining that the firm’s updates were adequately tested. The filing highlights that the CrowdStrike share price fell 32% in the 12 days after the massive IT outage that affected computer systems worldwide. The company has denied the allegations and said that as of Monday the outage had been entirely resolved.