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Glonghui, May 12 | According to Bloomberg, General Motors plans to lay off several hundred white-collar employees in its global Information Technology (IT) department to reduce operational costs and make room for talent with backgrounds in artificial intelligence (AI), software development, and emerging digital technologies. Sources familiar with the matter revealed that the layoffs will affect around 500 to 600 people, and management began notifying impacted employees on Monday morning. General Motors later confirmed to the media that it is indeed adjusting certain positions and stated that this workforce reduction is part of the IT department's transformation plan, aimed at maintaining the company's technological advantage in future competition.

Glonghui, May 12 — The wafer foundry GlobalFoundries recently pointed out that, benefiting from the explosive demand for AI inference and agent applications, the server CPU market is experiencing a structural growth “super cycle”, with AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm seen as the main beneficiaries. In the past, during the AI training phase dominated by GPUs, the usage ratio of GPUs to CPUs was about 8:1. However, as AI applications shift toward inference and agents, this ratio has dropped to 4:1 and may even approach 1:1 in the future. This means the importance of CPUs in data scheduling, memory management, and system collaboration has increased significantly. GlobalFoundries has identified AI server CPUs as a key growth driver and has pledged to return 50% of its free cash flow to shareholders.

Glonghui, May 12 – The South Korean market's SK Hynix continued to strengthen today, rising over 4% during trading to reach 1.967 million KRW, hitting a new all-time high. Its year-to-date cumulative increase expanded to over 200%, with a market capitalization exceeding 1.4 quadrillion KRW.

Golden Fortune Report, May 12 | Economist Ma Guangyuan pointed out in a post that today's market is indeed very much like the period right before the 1999 bubble burst. Why is the market compared to 1999? Because, as everyone knows, 1999 was the peak of the internet frenzy at the time. The Nasdaq Index rose by about 400% from 1995 to 2000, but increased by approximately 150% in just the short span of 18 months between 1999 and 2000. Cisco, Yahoo, AOL, and Amazon all had price-to-earnings ratios commonly between 100–300, a large number of purely conceptual companies went public, and their stock prices surged by 300%–1000% on listing, with no revenue and no profit. After the internet bubble burst that year, the decline in the Nasdaq Index was truly terrifying. In March 2000, after the Nasdaq hit a historical peak of 5048.62 points, it plummeted all the way to 1114.11 points in October 2002, with an accumulated drop as high as 78%. The total market capitalization evaporated by more than 5 trillion US dollars. So, to this day, whenever everyone talks about the narrative of AI, whenever everyone discusses AI, if you look back, the stories and narratives being told are almost exactly the same as today. The market suffered a devastating blow; thus, when nowadays everyone is talking about the AI narrative, discussing AI, all valuations are about AI, all stories are about AI, everyone will recall the bursting of the internet bubble back then.