Arvind's Newsletter

1.Amazon to build India's AI muscle with $12.7 billion bet on infrastructure: Business Standard

With artificial general intelligence (AGI) inching closer and the US locked in a high-stakes tech rivalry with China, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is making a bold but quiet move — betting on India to become the third major force in the global artificial intelligence (AI) race. It’s pouring $12.7 billion into infrastructure (infra) that could help shape who controls the computing backbone of tomorrow’s most advanced AI systems.

Amid growing concerns in the US about lagging behind China in AI development — and as tech leaders like Sam Altman predict AGI could arrive within years — AWS is building Cloud infra across India’s tech hubs that could power the next generation of AI breakthroughs. The company’s $12.7 billion commitment through 2030 represents one of the largest foreign tech investments in the country.

2.Bosch acquires majority stake in JCHAI, becomes major player in India’s AC market: Economic Times

Robert Bosch GmbH has significantly expanded its presence in the Indian home appliance market by acquiring a 74.2% stake in Johnson Controls-Hitachi Air Conditioning India (JCHAI). This acquisition, part of an $8 billion global deal, positions Bosch as a full-spectrum player, adding ACs to its existing premium appliance offerings.

This is part of a global deal where Bosch a year back announced take over of the global AC solutions business for residential and light commercial buildings from Johnson Controls and decided to acquire 100% of the Johnson Controls-Hitachi Air Conditioning joint venture, including Hitachi’s 40% stake. The size of the global deal is $8-billion – the biggest transaction in Bosch’s history.

Bosch already has a home appliance business in India where it sells refrigerators, dishwashers, washing machines, kitchen appliances and vacuum cleaners positioned in the premium segment competing with LG and Samsung. The addition of the AC business of JCHAI will make Bosch a full spectrum player in India and give it a scale of distribution and manufacturing.

3.Adani Seeks Battery Tieup With BYD in Renewables Push: Bloomberg

The Adani Group is exploring a tieup with Chinese EV giant BYD Co. to manufacture batteries in India and extend its push into clean energy, according to people familiar with the matter.

The Adani Group denied exploring any form of collaboration with BYD for battery manufacturing in India in a stock exchange filing, despite people saying Adani is personally heading discussions with BYD executives.

Talks between Adani and BYD are at a preliminary stage and may not progress, with Adani also talking to other Chinese renewable energy firms, as the group aims to launch mass production of lithium-ion cells for use in electric vehicles and stationary energy storage.

4.Indian regulator calls for ‘structural reform’ of derivatives market after Jane Street probe: Financial Times

India’s capital markets regulator has called for “structural reforms” to the country’s vast derivatives market, hinting that a clampdown on options trading could have further to run even after curbing retail activity and temporarily banning US trading firm Jane Street for alleged manipulation. 

Tuhin Kanta Pandey, chair of the Securities and Exchange Board of India, whose action against Jane Street was its most stringent to date, told the Financial Times the regulator was trying to curb unfair practices in the market to protect small investors, as “the volumes have come down but not to the extent that is desirable”. 

India’s options market accounted for almost 90 per cent of global trading volume last year, according to industry body the FIA, with nine out of 10 individual traders losing money, according to a Sebi report last month.

Jane Street’s India trades have put a spotlight on the sometimes hazy boundaries between illicit trading and arbitrage reports Bloomberg. The firm, which has said it did nothing wrong, is expected to argue that its large Indian options trades were a response to outsized demand from retail investors, and that it was trying to close price gaps in the cash, futures and options markets. Key factors to determine manipulation typically include whether the activity impacted market prices in a way that wouldn’t have happened otherwise or didn’t have an economic purpose other than making profits. The rise of high-frequency firms that use algorithms to trade on price discrepancies in split seconds has made it more difficult for regulators to unpack and decipher the tactics used.

5.Maruti Suzuki to expand beyond cars: Board clears MoA changes for drones, EVs & more: Economic Times

Maruti Suzuki’s board approved changes to its Memorandum of Association, allowing the company to move beyond manufacturing cars. Maruti will now also invest in electric vehicle charging, clean energy, and drones, in addition to expanding into used-car sales, recycling, and carbon-credit monetisation.

Currently, Maruti commands a 41% share in the passenger car segment in the country, making it India’s largest seller. But, Tata leads in the EV segment, followed by MG.

Maruti’s recent changes reflect a shift toward emerging mobility and sustainable tech ventures.

6.Tesla board awards $30bn of shares to Elon Musk: Financial Times

Tesla’s board has approved the award of 96mn shares worth about $30bn to Elon Musk as part of a new pay deal after the billionaire chief executive threatened to leave the electric-vehicle maker if he was not given more stock.

In a filing on Monday, Tesla said the decision was recommended by a special committee formed by the board comprising just the chair, Robyn Denholm, and her fellow director Kathleen Wilson-Thompson. It was then approved by the board.

“Retaining Elon is more important than ever before,” the company said in a letter to shareholders on Monday. “We are confident that this award will incentivise Elon to remain at Tesla.”

7.AI is coming for the consultants. Inside McKinsey, ‘This is existential.’: Chip Cutter in Wall Street Journal

“Companies pay dearly for McKinsey’s human expertise, and for nearly a century they have had good reason: The elite firm’s armies of consultants have helped generations of CEOs navigate the thorniest of challenges, synthesizing complex information and mapping out what to do next.

Now McKinsey is trying to steer through its own existential transformation. Artificial intelligence can increasingly do the work done by the firm’s highly paid consultants, often within minutes.

That reality is pushing the firm to rewire its business. AI is now a topic of conversation at every meeting of McKinsey’s board, said Bob Sternfels, the firm’s global managing partner. The technology is changing the ways McKinsey works with clients, how it hires and even what projects it takes on.

And McKinsey is rapidly deploying thousands of AI agents. Those bots now assist consultants in building PowerPoint decks, taking notes and summing up interviews and research documents for clients. The most-used bot is one that helps employees write in a classic “McKinsey tone of voice"—language the firm describes as sharp, concise and clear. Another popular agent checks the logic of a consultant’s arguments, verifying the flow of reasoning makes sense.

Sternfels said he sees a day in the not-too-distant future when McKinsey has one AI agent for every human it employs.

“We’re going to continue to hire, but we’re also going to continue to build agents," he said.

Already, the shape of the company is shifting. The firm has reduced its head count from about 45,000 people in 2023 to 40,000 through layoffs and attrition, in part to correct for an aggressive pandemic hiring spree. It has since also rolled out roughly 12,000 AI agents.

“Do I think that this is existential for our profession? Yes, I do," said Kate Smaje, a senior partner Sternfels tapped to lead the firm’s AI efforts earlier this year. But, “I think it’s an existential good for us."“ Read on Gift article.

8.The huge buildout of artificial intelligence infrastructure in the US is reshaping the country’s economy in ways not seen in more than a century: Wall Street Journal and others

Capital expenditure to power AI — largely in the form of data centers — contributed as much as 40% of overall American GDP growth in the second quarter, one economist estimated. That investment comes with risks, a Wall Street Journal columnist argued: If AI doesn’t pay off quickly, Big Tech will not be able to sustain the spending pace, and could go bust waiting for the technology’s payout.

Yet Silicon Valley could also be transforming itself into a version of the 19th-century US railroad tycoons, spending hugely to reduce input costs, thereby making itself near-impossible to disrupt.

9.London’s Heathrow airport unveiled “shovel-ready” plans for its long-debated third runway, which it hopes it can have operating within 10 years: Sky News

Heathrow is Europe’s busiest travel hub, but is running at capacity, which the project’s proponents say bottlenecks UK growth. The new runway and an accompanying sixth terminal would boost annual passenger throughput from 84 million to 150 million although opponents are concerned about environmental impacts, and myriad veto points in the British zoning system can cripple infrastructure plans.

A high-speed rail line running north from London is years behind schedule and double the original budget, while the application for a road tunnel under the Thames ran to 350,000 pages and cost £300 million before the plan was even approved.

10.The upstart company that wants to build the world's largest aircraft: BBC

The WindRunner is an ambitious aircraft project that could make it easier to use larger wind turbines. The company behind it, however, has never built a plane before.

The WindRunner is already being called the largest aircraft in the world, before it has even been built. But this leviathan is not being made by Airbus, Boeing or Lockheed. It is being made by a company that has never built an aircraft before.

Serial entrepreneur and aerospace engineer Mark Lundstrom founded Radia in 2016 to massively expand the size of the onshore wind power industry after he had a "eureka moment"

"We are building the world's largest aircraft and we're doing that because there's a gigantic gap in the capability of heavy-lift aircraft," says Lundstrom, the company's CEO and founder. "It amazes me that there is no large cargo aircraft in production or planned to meet this need, except for the Radia WindRunner.