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This is the Bloomberg daybure podcast.

Good morning. It's Friday the 26th of

June. I'm Caroline Hipka in London.

Coming up today, tech stocks tumble as

open AI reportedly delays its IPO and

Apple hikes prices on rising chip costs

just as AI demand begins to justify its

massive expense. The tech sector in

Naples helps to lead a regional revival

that could be a gamecher for Italy and

beyond. Plus, his majesty's royal

contribution. King Charles and Prince

William disclosed the tax they paid HMRC

for the first time in modern history.

Let's start with a roundup of our top

stories. Stocks are falling as a

sell-off in Apple shares and reporting

that open AI may delay its IPO rattle

confidence in artificial intelligence

bets. South Korea's tech heavy Cosby has

tumbled 8% triggering a 20inut trading

halt as Asian markets slumped to a

2-week low. In Tokyo, SoftBank shares

have plunged 13% after the New York

Times reported that the chat GPT maker

Open AI is leaning towards delaying its

planned listing until next year.

According to the paper, bankers advising

the startup believe that recent

volatility in tech stocks along with the

performance of SpaceX shares following

its record IPO could dampen retail

investor appetite for the offering.

Blind's remain bossic says that waiting

may be the smart move if the company

wants to maximize its value.

>> SpaceX, Anthropic, Open AI, there were

supposed to be the holy trinity of IPOs

this year. Three AI companies all

potentially coming out of the gate with

trillion dollar valuations. We got

SpaceX, Anthropicus filed

confidentially, and the best we know,

they still plan to move forward. Open

AAI also making that confidential

filing. But this New York Times report

suggesting that there have been some

discussions with Sam Alman who leads

this company where basically the

advisers said that if you go out of the

gate now, you're not going to have that

$1 trillion valuation.

>> Bloomberg's remain bustic there after

open AI's latest funding round earlier

this year gave it a valuation of 852

billion.

Well, that reporting on the chat GPT

maker came shortly after Apple announced

price hikes for Macs, iPads, and home

devices. The iPhone maker stock fell

more than 6% in US trading as the

company sought to offset rising costs

caused by unprecedented global demand

for memory chips. 248 Ventures chief

investment stratey strategist Lindseay

Bell believes the move is a sign that AI

stocks may have peaked. I think that the

Apple's stock price reaction is sending

a signal that the rest of the market

might not have gotten today. And to me,

it says this could be the first sign

that the AI bubble could potentially be

starting to deflate. And I don't say

that lightly. I say that in a market

that we've been in that rewards margin

expansion and at the very worst margin

maintenance.

>> Lindsy Bell speaking there as shares of

Apple's Asian suppliers also fell

sharply following the news. A ship has

been hit by an unidentified projectile

in the straight of Hormuz. The container

ship Ever Lovely was struck while it was

sailing along a recommended route.

According to its Taiwanese operator,

Bloomberg TV's Middle East correspondent

Abir Abu Omar says that it's the first

reported attack since the interim US

Iran peace deal came into force. Now,

there are some reports that suggest that

the Iranian army through those

projectiles. The US side says it's too

early to tell, so it's it's not really

clear yet who the culprit in this attack

is, but the latest reporting suggests

that it's the IRGC. Abir Abu Omar added

that oil prices which had earlier

returned to pre-war levels turned higher

on the news. Brent crude touched session

highs close to $76 a barrel after the

attack. They have since declined.

Emergency services in Venezuela are

still searching for victims after two

earthquakes struck the country earlier

this week. Rescue teams in the coastal

city of Katia Lamar are looking for

those trapped by several collapsed

buildings after residents compiled lists

of missing people on social media. Luis

Pache from the Red Cross says that their

work is more than just getting people to

safety.

>> They're going to have psychosocial

needs. They're going to have physical

health requirements. And so we're

setting up stations. We've already

ordered a mobile health facility. We've

already unlocked 2 million of our own

funds to deliver to the Venezuela Red

Cross um so that they can continue to

perform these services and so we're

we're moving.

>> That was the Red Crosses Lois Patche who

is speaking there. The total death toll

from the incident has risen to 235

people but thousands more injured

according to the country's health

minister. A volunteer-run database now

lists 11,278

people missing in the coastal city state

of La Guerra. Here in the UK, King

Charles III has revealed his personal

tax bill in a move to increase

transparency around the British

monarchy. Bloomberg Adabio has the

story. The king of England voluntarily

paid 12.9 million in tax last year,

whilst his son, Prince William, paid7.76

million. The figures were revealed in

statements from Buckingham and

Kensington Palace released yesterday for

the first time ever. The unprecedented

window into the finances of the British

monarchy come at a time of increasing

scrutiny. Earlier in June, a report from

the National Audit Office showed that

the disgraced former Prince Andrew

Mountbatter Windsor received private

income by subleting three cottages on

the royal estate where he lived. The

king's assets range from castles to

riverbeds, placing him among the world's

wealthiest people. In London, Tiwa

Alabio, Bloomberg Radio. The heat wave

searing much of Europe is officially the

most severe ever recorded in the region

with intensely high temperatures pushing

politicians to call for action. Now,

researchers at World Weather Attribution

found that temperatures were between 5

and 12° C above seasonal averages in

France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and

southern England. The UK's Green Party

leader, Zack Palanski, has told

Bloomberg Radio that laws need to catch

up with the reality of climate change.

>> It's not just infrastructure. We should

have a maximum workplace temperature.

It's outrageous that we have uh lowest

workplace temperature where you can't

work in the cold, but we don't have that

for heat. Businesses, schools, we will

have to be flexible. And this won't

always be a popular message. People

don't like change.

>> But if we don't change, we're not going

to survive. And it's as stark as that.

As the um environmental office puts it,

we need to adapt or die. Zach Palansky,

who was joined by members of a UK

Parliament environment committee, who

wrote to the government asking for its

views on how to adapt to overheating.

The extreme temperatures have been

deadly and are forecast to continue

today before easing over the weekend.

So, those are our top stories for you

this morning. In a moment, we're going

to bring you more on artificial

intelligence reaching an important

tipping point that could justify the

data center spending splurge. Plus,

Italy stark north south divide may be

shifting thanks to Naples. But before

that, something else has caught my

attention this morning. Are you jetting

off anywhere? To eat the airline food or

not eat the airline food, Bimbo Business

Week has been to one of the biggest

airline catering sites in the world.

This is a sprawling food factory outside

of Hong Kong where they make those

little plastic trays or the plates of

food. If you're in first class, good for

you. In terms of what they have been

reporting about, I just think that it's

an extraordinary story because as we

think about the AI roll out around

automation, around kind of the modern

economy, basically this whole business

is still massively labor intensive,

physically demanding, repetitive work.

catering workers are among the lowest

paid employees across aviation. A lot of

workers um can't endure the shifts and

there's a huge kind of attrition rate

around 50% in some countries in terms of

annual uh you know staff attrition. 5

billion people bought a pl boarded a

plane last year. Um so it's kind of a

huge deal and a massive industry.

Ultimately what is underneath the silver

foil is all down to airline budgets of

course but there is some fine dining

that has crept into uh meals even at

30,000 ft. So I just think it's a really

interesting and important sort of story

that actually even as we think about

automation and jobs may be being

massively altered due to AI manual labor

in some industries is just still really

big. Have a look at Bloomberg Business

Week uh this week to read that story

around uh the airline industry. Open AAI

is reportedly holding off on its IPO

while Apple is hiking prices, both of

which are tied to the story of AI and

whether the massive costs of investment

will be worth it. A new report from

research firm Exponential View shows

that revenue from artificial

intelligence has now surpassed

depreciation costs. Our global business

reporter Jacob Reid has been writing

about this and he joins us now. Jacob,

good morning. So, as we think about AI,

this is a really important story. This

idea of depreciation, why is that so

important when it comes to working out

whether AI is going to be worth it?

>> Yes, depreciation is like an AI, you

know, in anything. If you buy a car new

from a showroom after you've driven it

around for a couple of years, it's going

to have lost a fair chunk of its value.

Or the same as your new iPhone and you

go and trade it in a few years later and

hey presto, it's not worth what it once

was. It's exactly the same for

artificial intelligence chips. You know,

we hear the news year after year of

these chips getting faster and more

efficient, and that means last year's

chips are worth less. Now why this

really matters for the accounting is

that these big firms Google, Microsoft,

Meta, they need to say in their in their

accounting, how many years are our chips

going to depreciate and they've actually

got a fair bit of leeway to say that and

it's it's really hard to know because

chat GPT is only 3 years old and it's

saying we think our chips are going to

last four, five or six years but it has

a massive impact on, you know, how how

many write downs, how much loss they

have to put on now, how how their profit

and loss looks. And also, some of these

firms, they're borrowing as collateral

against their chips, which may or may

not be worth what they say they are. It

it really caught my attention because

you might know the big shot that that

fantastic film and Michael Bry has said,

or this is potentially one of the

biggest ways people are fiddling the

numbers. So plenty of people would

disagree with him but it's an active

question.

>> Yeah, absolutely. I think that's really

important as we try to understand you

know the cost benefit um and the

accounting around AI but how did

exponential view sort of calculate all

of this and you talk in your reporting

about AI at a tipping point.

>> Yeah. So they they what they did was

pretty snazzy. Um, first of the kind

really because we know quite a lot about

the supply side of the AI industry. You

know, these these so-called

hyperscalers, they they give us figures

about how much they're spending on chips

and data centers. But OpenAI, Anthropic,

they're still private companies and even

even Google and Meta that are public

companies. They don't really break it

down into that much detail how much

demand is there for their AI products.

So what this report did was was was try

and track that demand from the bottom

up. They looked at over a thousand

companies. They scoured, you know,

company filings, executive statements,

press reporting, that sort of thing to

build this really big model. And as you

say the result from that was saying we

maybe reached a tipping point where

global AI revenue and that that excludes

China for now but global AI revenue has

overtaken is outpacing those

depreciation costs and it's not a done

thing that that will continue right

depreciation costs will keep on going up

as that capital expenditure uh keeps on

going up but symbolically it feels kind

of important. Yeah, absolutely. And a

really really interesting uh analysis of

the landscape when it comes to AI.

Jacob, thank you so much for being with

us. That is our global business

reporter, Jacob Reed. Thank you for your

time. Stay with us. More from Bloomberg

Daybre coming up after this.

To Italy now, where Naples is leading a

regional revival in the south of the

country that could be a gamecher for

Italians, but also for Europe. Joining

us now, Allesandra Miglatio in Rome.

Bloomberg Western Europe economy

reporter, Allesandra, good to speak to

you. Italy is Europe's third biggest

economy, but the north south divide, the

industrial and wealth gap has been so

deep. How is that changing now? It's um

well, we've crushed some numbers and we

were surprised to see that it it really

seem there's something is happening. I

mean, of course, the south remains

problematic as far as unemployment, as

far as demographics. The the population

is not comparable to the industrialized

north, but um we saw that southern Italy

is growing 07% compared to both Italy

and northern Italy, for example, growing

05 and Campa, the region where Naples is

located, is growing, grew in 2025 09%.

That's quite something, you know,

compared to a 05 for the country. And

that's just 2025. But then what we saw

when we looked further back is that it's

not a one-off. Um if you go from 2019 to

2024, you see that the south has grown

7.7% and the rest of the country just

5.8. So what are we seeing? It's it's a

matter of pace. It's not that the south

is richer than the north. The north

remains extremely rich. It's just that

when you see an area that has had so

much trouble and has been so far behind

and it starts finally growing, then you

know the pace will obviously be much

faster. We see that with developing

nations. But what I think really struck

us was that it's not just a one-year

thing. We see a trend. Something is

moving in the south and the economy

really is it seems to be picking up and

it seems to be concentrating around a

few cities. So certainly Naples body in

the east and then Katana in Sicily.

>> Yeah, I think it's really fascinating

reporting. I wanted to highlight it to

our listeners because I was amazed to

read in your story that the Naples

region is second to Milan for startup

businesses which is um you know very

interesting and that a lot of this has

been done by using European money and so

you know powered by EU funds maybe there

are lessons across Europe for all of

this in terms of how to build economic

dynamism.

>> Thanks for listening to Bloomberg

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