GM -- Update -- Mid-Year 2025

GM: will invest $4 billion in US manufacturing plants. This is huge. The emphasis will be on high-margin, large, gasoline-guzzling SUVs and pick-up trucks.

Announced June 10, 2025:

Plants in Michigan, Kansas, and Tennessee will expand finished vehicle production of several of GM’s most popular vehicles:

• Orion Assembly, Orion Township, Michigan: GM will begin production of gasoline-powered full-size SUVs and light duty pickup trucks at Orion in early 2027 to help meet continued strong demand. As a result, GM’s Factory ZERO in Detroit-Hamtramck, Michigan will be the dedicated assembly location for the Chevrolet Silverado EV, GMC Sierra EV, Cadillac ESCALADE IQ, and GMC HUMMER EV pickup and SUV.
• Fairfax Assembly, Kansas City, Kansas: Fairfax Assembly will support production of the gasoline-powered Chevrolet Equinox beginning in mid-2027. Sales of the recently redesigned Equinox were up more than 30% year-over-year in the first quarter of 2025. Fairfax remains on track to begin building the 2027 Chevrolet Bolt EV by the end of this year. GM expects to make new future investments in Fairfax for GM’s next generation of affordable EVs.
• Spring Hill Manufacturing, Spring Hill, Tennessee: GM will add production of the gasoline-powered Chevrolet Blazer at Spring Hill starting in 2027, alongside the Cadillac LYRIQ and VISTIQ EVs, and the Cadillac XT5.

July 15, 2025: update from GM via Reuters, just part of the entire press release:

General Motors said on Tuesday it will move production of the Cadillac Escalade to a Michigan assembly plant, while adding new capacity for gasoline-powered Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra light-duty pickups at the same facility.

The Escalade is currently produced in Arlington, Texas, alongside other large SUVs such as the GMC Yukon, Chevrolet Suburban and Chevy Tahoe. Production at Arlington is expected to remain consistent after the Escalade moves to Michigan.

The automaker will be adding production of the Silverado and Sierra trucks at its Orion Township, Michigan factory, in addition to existing production in Fort Wayne, Indiana. The gasoline-powered trucks and SUVs are among GM's biggest money makers.

GM told Reuters the moves would "help meet continued strong customer demand."

GM said it will begin manufacturing the SUVs and light-duty pickup trucks at its Orion Assembly plant in early 2027. Orion Assembly was previously slated to build electric trucks starting next year.

Core Scientific -- CoreWeave -- Denton, TX -- July 14, 2025

Locator: 10010COREWEAVE.

Link here.

CoreWeave Inc. is expanding a data center that is projected to double the electricity needs of a city near Dallas, another example of the strains that artificial intelligence workloads are placing on the US power supply.

Local officials have grappled with how to handle the increased stress on the electricity grid from the project, according to a late 2024 presentation and emails seen by Bloomberg.

The site is being developed by Core Scientific Inc. and will be used by OpenAI in Denton, Texas. Last week, CoreWeave announced it would acquire Core Scientific for about $9 billion, in part, to gain direct control of its data centers aimed at supplying AI work.

Denton, about 50 miles northwest of Dallas, has almost doubled its population in the last 25 years to about 166,000 residents. To meet the spike in AI-related power demand, the city is passing on any extra costs to the data center operator and constructing additional grid infrastructure.

Like some other large AI data center projects, the site in Denton was focused on cryptocurrency mining before pivoting to AI workloads in December. This transition means unrelenting power consumption — the site will no longer curtail operations when power prices are high — which will increase grid strain.

“Now you’re talking about a facility that has to have energy 24 hours a day, 365 days a year,” Puente said. That challenge will be mitigated by the addition of backup generators and batteries, he added.

Unlike many large projects, the Denton data center didn’t receive local tax exemptions. Officials expect more than $600 million in property and sales tax from the data center expansion, more than double the costs it plans to incur, according to an analysis document seen by Bloomberg. It also anticipates that 135 new jobs will be created.

The Denton site, which is already being rented by CoreWeave, is Core Scientific’s largest planned project at about 390 megawatts of power. It’s “utilizing the majority of extra system capacity” in the city, wrote a utility executive in a January email seen by Bloomberg. Any additional large power users will exacerbate overloads on the grid, the executive added.

That is significantly larger than a traditional data center, but still an order of magnitude smaller than some megaprojects such as Oracle Corp.’s Stargate in Abilene, Texas. “When fully built out, it will host one of the largest GPU clusters in North America,” Core Scientific Chief Executive Officer Adam Sullivan said of the site during a May call. “Denton is a flagship facility.”

 ************************************
My Thoughts

My reply to the reader who sent me the Coreweave link above.

Thank you, I had not seen that.

In fact the story hits closer to home that I imagined.

The "city" they are referring to is Denton. Denton is where I took Arianna every weekend for water polo tournaments during her high school years. It's about a 40-minute drive, I suppose, just north of us. It's a huge city.

Claim to fame: the movie "Rocky Horror Picture Show" was set in Denton, TX -- a real cult classic.

Denton is just north of the I-35 / Texas State Highway 114 interchange where one of the biggest Buc-ee's is located and where the Texas Motor Speedway is located.

Today, 2025, the population geographical center in the DFW area is just north of Dallas (Frisco, McKinney, Plano where Dallas Cowboys have their headquarters) but in 2050 the Tx DOT says the DFW population center will move to Rhome, Texas, where the Texas Motor Speedway is located, as well as another airport, and where GE (or whoever?)  makes Burlington Northen locomotives.

Right now Texas' Silicon Valley is along I-35 north of Austin, that activity will gradually move to north Texas around Frisco (north Dalla), Southlake (US headquarters for Schwab located there near the I-35 / Texas State Highway 114; and Denton, north of Ft Worth.

Finally:
I-35: Mexico to Austin to DFW north to Oklahoma City to Kansas City and points north.

Texas State Highway 114 is being expanded and some places now is ten lanes across. the thoroughfare from Dallas to I-10 to Los Angeles.

That's how I keep the three major thoroughfares straight in my mind when I'm on the road.

121 south to where I live and south to Forth Worth
121 north to Frisco (Dallas Cowboys)

360 east to Dallas
360 west back to where we live and DFW airport

114 east to Dallas

114 west to Los Angeles

So that Denton story is a big, big story for us.

Lots and lots of jobs.

University of North Texas is located in Denton.

University of Texas Dallas is to the east and becoming a huge engineering (computer) center -- in the past six years.

Thank you for the story.

 

From A Reader, Replying To My Recent Comments On China And, Unrelated, AI -- July 6, 2025

I have contacted you several times in the past on sundry matters. I am the  former ND guy who has lived in .................. I retired ....... five years ago from a technical position (........................). I had a couple of comments that I wanted to share with you.

I have been following the affairs in China for quite some time.  ...............  In the last year, Xi's status has diminished greatly and many of his appointees to positions  and supporters have been purged.  He has had significant health issues but the real status of his health have only been guessed at.  The supposition is that is to be a change in government at the end of summer into fall.  There are many blogs and podcasts on China, but the one I trust to not just follow rumors is:

Lei's Real Talk            https://www.youtube.com/c/LeisRealTalk

She does several videos per week touching on CCP matters and current status of China.   You may also be interested in past videos pertaining to China's population is no where near the stated number.  There is much evidence that their population is more in line with 700 to 900 million rather than state reported figure.  There are whole towns that have been razed since there were very few people living there.  The economic slowdown coupled with tariff threats has wreaked havoc with their manufactureing output. Many people are being paid a fraction of their normal wage since the companies they work for are in a cash crunch.

In another matter,  I had worked in AI since the middle 80's. One of my roles .....was to generate software for technical purposes such as analysis of technical data since there was no commercial software available at that time.  While there is great potential for AI to be used, much of the current applications are a lot of hype. The current versions of AI to generate applications is at best glorified pattern recognition. That is why it has been used for photo / image identification in security applications.  There is no intelligence in AI, it is just very good at recognizing patterns that are similar or have connections.  The current attempts to use information on the web to generate results is a problem in there is no check for any validity. The whole analysis is circular and problematic.  False information is given just as much weight as true information and the results are only based on frequency.  If 51% of the information used is false or not quite true, the result provided will be coming from the false information.  .......  I was working with several universities to generate new approaches to analyzing these types of data. When used properly, the techniques are quite powerful.

Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill -- July 3, 2025

There will be a lot of articles asking the question, "who won, who lost?"

If I'm asked, my answer:

In the big scheme of things, if someone asks me who are the winners, who are the losers with this bill, this is my answer. It's very, very simple.

The big winner is the United States.

The big loser is the rest of the world.

Seriously. It's pretty easy.

Or another way to say the same thing: The big winners: those who support MAGA. -- those who want America to succeed, and widen the gap between capitalists and socialists.

The big losers: elitists and globalists. Those who hate to see America succeed at the "expense" of the rest of the world.

 ******************************
Thoughts

OBBB:

• US debt: "it's a spending problem not a revenue problem"
• it's been proven, without a doubt, that human behavior defaults to living beyond one's means
• that is also true with many / most / all countries ever since the invention of the nation-state
• in the past 100 years, the US federal government has had a budget surplus in 12 non-consecutive fiscal years.
• the most recent year in which the US has a budgetary surplus: FY 2001
• wow, that was almost 25 years ago -- ancient history
  
• in CY 2000: Bill Clinton, Tom Daschle, Harry Reid
  
• another truism: those who try to reduce government spending are portrayed as enemies of the people, or worse
  
• the GOP should take a page from the Dems' playbook and worry about the US debt only in years when the government is led by the opposition party 

*************************
More

 l

Apparently these tax cuts are in the OBBB. There is still confusion. But VDH says these tax cuts are in the bill or there is talk about these tax cuts:

• no federal income tax for the military -- being talked about
• no federal income tax for first responders -- being talked about
• no taxes on overtime -- in the bill?
• no taxes on social security (and apparently no income limits yet) -- in the bill?

So, we'll have to wait and see. But it's amazing. Even after the all 980 pages of the tax bill were read out loud in the US Senate, we still -- apparently -- don't really know what's in the bill.

Apple, AI, Perplexity, And $500 Million Spent On New Office Space In Bay Area -- June 29, 2025

From ChatGPT this date.

Updates

June 30, 2025: AAPL pops on rumor that Apple is considering partnership of some sort with Perplexity and/or OpenAI. Rumors suggests both will "insert" into Siri. Would be blow to Google. Would also make the anti-monopoly case against Google/Apple moot.

Original Post 

See this link, why this question got asked.

Perplexity AI:

Apple has been in internal talks about potentially acquiring or partnering with Perplexity AI, a San Francisco–based startup valued at around $14 billion. This move would mark a major shift in Apple’s AI strategy.

What is Perplexity AI?

• Perplexity is a conversational AI search engine and chatbot that provides real-time answers with cited sources.
• it supports multiple large language models, including its own, and had about 15 million users by mid‑2024.

Why Apple is interested:

• boost Siri & search
• Apple could integrate Perplexity’s AI capabilities directly into Siri, Spotlight, and Safari, potentially compensating for its lag behind rivals
• reduce reliance on Google With a $20 billion‑per‑year deal with Google for Safari search revenue under regulatory scrutiny, Apple needs an alternative search & AI platform
• acquire top-tier talent 
• buying Perplexity would bring in experienced engineers and researchers to accelerate Apple’s internal AI development

Where things stand:

• talks are early-stage and internal—involving top execs like Adrian Perica and Eddy Cue
• no formal offer has been made yet, and Perplexity publicly states it’s unaware of any M&A discussions

Other big players—Meta and Samsung—have also expressed interest, though talks there have stalled

Bottom Line

Apple is quietly exploring a possible acquisition of Perplexity AI to strengthen its AI and search technology—potentially its largest-ever deal. But as of now, nothing’s finalized; the discussions are still preliminary.

Investing In Quantum Computing -- June 14, 2025

With regard to investing in quantum computing, what would you recommend for a 20-year-old investor with minimal experience in investing? 

From ChatGPT:

Excellent — you’re looking at this exactly right: for a 20-year-old new investor, quantum computing can be fascinating but high risk. Let me quickly frame this for you:

---

Quantum Computing: High-Risk, Long-Horizon Play

At age 20, you have the biggest asset: time. Quantum computing may take 10–20 years to fully mature commercially. So, a small speculative allocation might make sense alongside a core portfolio.

Here’s a simplified way to look at the most “investable” companies for a new investor:

My advice for a 20-year-old investor:

1. Core first: (80%)
   

   Build your portfolio mostly around index funds (e.g., S&P 500 ETFs like VOO or SPY).

2. Speculative sleeve: (15%)

   Consider allocating ~1-5% to high-risk speculative plays like IonQ or Rigetti.
   

   Big Tech with quantum exposure: MSFT, GOOGL, IBM (10%)
   Pure Quantum Plays: IONQ, RGTI (5%)
   

3. Diversify your quantum exposure:

   You’re already getting indirect exposure through companies like Microsoft, Google, and IBM.

4. Stay informed:

   Follow quantum tech news — things change fast here.

5. Don’t FOMO into hype cycles:

   Quantum stocks can swing wildly based on press releases and investor sentiment.

   ChatGPT will build three investment strategies:

   • Core (80%): see above
   • Sleeve (15%): see above
   • Moonshot (5%): see below.

   Moonshot, quick example:

   Let’s say you start with $5,000:

   • $2,500 — VTI (US stock index)

   • $1,000 — VXUS (international index)

   • $500 — BND (bonds or cash equivalent)

   • $500 — MSFT + GOOGL + IBM (big tech)

   • $250 — IONQ

   • $250 — ARKQ or similar

   From my perspective: the BND (bonds or cash equivalent) does nothing for the portfolio; the analyst is simply investing using "old school" percentages. If the $500 is simply a place to park cash to build up a position of cash from which to make future equity purchases, the that's fine. But thinking that 10% of an investment in a bond fund will help even out the volatility is crazy. 

   I suppose re-allocating on a monthly basis might be a reason for a position in bonds or cash.

   So, for example, when the larger bucket (VTI) exceeds 50% of total portfolio, see something and re-invest the proceeds in any of the other buckets that are less than their recommended percent (20%, 10%, 10%, 5%, 5%). 

   But, wow, that's still an incredibly conservative equity portfolio.

   How about: 
   

   • VTI: 25% (unfortunately that already included a lot of Big Tech)
   • VXUS: 25%
   • big tech: 30%
   • pure quantum: 20%

   Because VTI already includes so much Big Tech, how about:
   

   • VXUS: 25%
   • VTI: 15%
   • top four of the magnificent seven: 35%
   • pure quantum: 25%

Gary Cohn -- Bio

Gary Cohn from wiki:

Early life and education:

Gary Cohn was born to an Eastern European Jewish family, the son of Victor and Ellen Cohn, and was raised in Shaker Heights, Ohio. His father was an electrician who later became a real estate developer.[13] Cohn was diagnosed with dyslexia at a young age, and attended four schools by the time he reached sixth grade.[14] His childhood experiences with dyslexia were a featured case study in David and Goliath by Malcolm Gladwell. Cohn studied at Gilmour Academy for high school and graduated in 1979.

Cohn received a Bachelor of Science degree with a major in business administration from American University in 1982.

Career:

Cohn started his career at the U.S. Steel home products division in Cleveland, Ohio.[19] After a few months, he left U.S. Steel and became an options dealer in the New York Mercantile Exchange. He taught himself the basics of options by reading about it in the days between meeting the hiring manager and joining the New York Mercantile Exchange.[

Cohn was hired by Goldman Sachs in 1990 and became a partner at the firm in 1994. ] In 1996, he was named head of the commodities department, and in 2002, he was named the head of the Fixed Income, Currency and Commodities (FICC) division. In 2003, he was named co-head of Equities, and in January 2004, Cohn was named the co-head of global securities businesses.  He became president and Co-Chief Operating Officer, and director in June 2006.While at Goldman Sachs, Cohn was also a member of the firm's board of directors and Chairman of the Firmwide Client and Business Standards Committee.

In 2010, Cohn testified to Congress on Goldman Sachs' role in the 2008 financial crisis. He testified: "During the two years of the financial crisis, Goldman Sachs lost $1.2 billion in its residential mortgage-related business. We did not 'bet against our clients', and the numbers underscore this fact."