00:00 Speaker A
it feels like we’re kind of talking, let’s say like the heavy industry part of the AI cycle, right? It’s big data centers, it’s a lot of chips. Um but you know, you’re thinking about things like robotics, automation, which kind of feel to me the more I think about it, more I read about it, like that feels like where AI is going to make a larger impact on my life in five or 10 years than, you know, how many chips are in a data center and, you know, Utah or whatever it is. Like what are those opportunities like? And and what are companies, maybe some opportunities you see, um in those spaces, that robotics, um that automation area that is part of the AI trade, but you know, I think just doesn’t have the buzz the way some of these mega cap uh chip related names do.
00:54 Zeno
Yeah, I think I think it’s a great way to look at it and it’s how we’ve looked at it for a long time. as you know, we were uh behind the world’s first robotics index and ETF that was launched in 2013. So we’ve always kind of had an eye and focused to that physical automation. Um and if you look at a similar parallel story of like the the silicon build out that we’re seeing now, um robotics and let’s call it the edge and inference of AI, it’s it’s it’s nexus uh and polymorphism into the real world. We see a different and and more broad stroked uh uh you know, set of players involved. So, you obviously have power involved. So you have companies like Infineon and others that are helping, you know, not just help with power utilization in data centers, but at the edge and robots, drones, whatever form factor that appears, you not only have sensor compute limitations and power compute limitations, but form factor. So, companies that help get the max value and that that involves like energy, form factor uh and quality. Uh that’s that’s really going to be the the table stakes for for developing that next uh frontier. And obviously, robotic simulations are accelerating rapidly to enhance these capabilities. So, you know, going from sim to real, which is how, you know, the industry phrases it, involves having the right hardware and software stack. So, um
02:29 Zeno
you kind of get both of that like that physical automation and digital automation within Robo and think strategies. Uh but again, you know, with um, you know, Ambarella for example, uh at one point traded at $200 per share. It’s at $85 per share. It’s starting to get that inference and edge economy uh uptick. They got a pretty big partnership with Insta 360 for 360 uh degree camera footage. But if you start to think about like, okay, what are the next bigger growth factors? It really is that edge intelligence and it really hasn’t been priced in the same way. And these companies are smaller market caps too. So they have more room to grow and at a certain point there’s only so much money the economy can afford to invest in a specific area. We’re kind of in this like game theory, power theory, power dynamics theory, data center build out, but where does that trickle into? And and eventually we’ll see more and more of that compute happening on the edge with smaller models and autonomy. But let’s not forget that they will be tethered to the cloud. So connectivity is also a big consideration here. And so names like Cloudflare, Qualcomm and MediaTek are all very important to that that more um we’ll call it even longer duration. uh maybe even a bigger opportunity in these data centers. Um maybe data center is is the biggest investment of the next two, three years, but we’ll start to see these other areas really take off. And and I think we’re start earning season, for example, really started to show more excitement about this, especially we had seen several years of a downturn for the robotics industry which might surprise many people listening here today.
05:21 Speaker A
Yeah, it’s interesting just looking at that uh Ambarella stock chart. It’s like, oh, there’s still Covid overhangs out there. Uh stock’s still down from where it was the end of 2021. Um quickly, you mentioned hardware, so it made me think of meta, what we saw from them last week and I’m just curious how you think about uh let’s say the way they’re like combining their previous, you know, metaverse AR ambitions, combining it now, tethering it to what they want to do in AI and making that all part of one story. Um and and you know, both the technical side of it and then what they hope to be a large consumer side in the end.
06:18 Zeno
Yeah, look, I was never that excited by Metaverse as pure metaverse, like virtual reality. It’s like most of our lives and and really should be in the real world. So I’ve always been excited about things that can enhance our daily living. Um, their latest uh meta display and and neural bands, um are a step towards that. The the SDK is currently limited to their ecosystem. So I think that’s something that needs to happen. But, you know, long story short for those that missed it or haven’t really known much, you know, they now have these uh glasses that have a little display that’s pretty seamless, um high quality display that’s uh that’s there and you have a wristband that comes with it that you can now control. So you’re eliminating uh the keyboard, the mouse, um and my thought is eventually they’ll open up the SDK to partners uh to do things like control things around your home, like replace remotes. Um, and so what you’re really looking at is something I’ve been calling for a while, like the post smartphone economy, but we’ve been stuck with our little comfort bricks for a long time now. Um, and we really can move past that. And again, that requires, you look back to Google glasses which I had a pair of 10 years ago as like a little dem demo uh I actually won it at at an event. But um, we’ve really been hardware constrained and software constrained and both of those are improving to the point where you can do local and cloud compute and the connectivity on a device and a form factor that is comfortable for a human, not just a robot. Um, but the two have a lot of parallelisms uh in terms of how they’re both combining at the same time to provide real-time, um let’s call it sense, analyze and act capabilities. Um, and that’s kind of one of the mottos of the robotics industry is what kind of defines a robot. So again, um we are becoming a little bit more cyborg but also getting kind of like fantasia like powers. Now, I’m out of I don’t even have a Facebook right now, so somebody like me, I need to see it connected to other things. But again, um there’s an entire hardware and software stack of winners that go from, you know, the companies helping Taiwan’s semiconductor make these chips on the infrared side and the edge compute side for a meta, but also the connectivity and sensors and up and down stream there. So again, really excited about all these different areas coming together, especially as we head to 2026 and uh I think we’re starting to see that pull through in the in the strategies too.
09:23 Speaker A
Yeah, agree. I’m tired of having a phone, but the only solution I guess is going to be more technology someday. All right, uh Zeno, we’ll leave it there. Thanks so much.
09:36 Zeno
Thank you.
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