This helps us understand, for example, the US Government Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Underexplored Systems for Utility-Scale Quantum Computing (US2QC) and its 5-year partnership and funding support for:
- Atom Computing: Atom is based in Berkeley CA but may be heading for Denmark, having received USD10.21M Series B - III on June 4, 2024 from Denmark’s Export and Investment Fund. As at 30 Jun 2024 Atom has raised USD 101.46M over 8 rounds and may be headed for an IPO. In Oct 2023 Atom announced its record-breaking 1,225-qubit quantum computer.
- Microsoft which is working on the development of a utility-scale quantum computer based on topological qubits.
- PSIQuantum, focused on photonic fault-tolerant quantum computing. The Australian Federal government and Queensland State government have co-invested AUD 940 million in PSIQuantum's project. PSIQuantum is privately held (ie: not a publicly traded stock).
Generative AI also requires powerful technical infrastructure, currently met with arrays of stacked GPUs such as those produced by Nvidia. The resource-intensive processes involved in handling a query include tokenization, embedding, contextualization, task interpretation, response generation (decoding, sampling, iteration) and post-processing, all in real time.
🌎 Where we invest
The stocks we invest in are located in USA, Taiwan and Australia.
Our current preference for investment in USA takes into account issues such as market size and policy issues in areas of economic, monetary, government fiscal (incl taxation) and debt directions that impact on the business environment and exchange rates.
Right now these drivers continue to favour our current investment preference for large innovative technology companies addressing global markets, and QC and AI companies that are capable of attracting large scale investment funding.
Most of the largest global technology companies, ranked by market capitalisation are listed on the NASDAQ and NYSE
- there is only one ASX-listed company that has a market cap above USD100bn BHP (USD151bn) - ranked #90, and that's not in our investment focus area
- another company, Arm Holdings plc is a British semiconductor and software design company - it considers its competitors to be IBM, Intel and AMD, which are already in our portfolio.
The biggest risk we foresee in US investment is policy uncertainty that may result from changes in US presidency, and government and economic/fiscal policies.
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Currencies (FX)
/ The wild ride of the AUD/USD since the AUD was floated in Dec 1983 [History]
In 2010 the AUD was valued above parity with the USD. We concluded that this was unlikely to be sustained in the long term, and this influenced our decision to invest in NASDAQ stocks at that time. Over the next 8 years the AUD fell from USD 1.080 on 2 Mar 2012 to a low of USD 0.574 on 20 Mar 2020, substantially boosting the AUD value of our NASDAQ and NYSE stocks.
AUD and USD Currency Ratings
AUD Fitch Affirms Australia at 'AAA', Outlook Stable. 09 Nov 2023
USD Fitch Affirms the United States at 'AA+'; Outlook Stable. 1 Mar 2024
📆📈 Fitch Ratings Review Calendar
😇 Disclaimer
TechInvestment.com content is not intended to represent or be relied upon as investment advice.