On Episode 1030 of The Core Report, financial journalist Govindraj Ethiraj talks to Jaspreet Bindra, Co-founder and CEO of AI&Beyond.

SHOW NOTES

(00:00) Stories of the Day

(01:09) FIIs Are Back, Even As Oil Dips Below $90 A Barrel

(03:11) LNG Flows Through Strait Of Hormuz Have Crossed Pre-War Levels

(04:15) Anthropic Could Raise Upto $63 Billion In Its IPO And Start Trading In 10 Days Time

(06:14) Net NPA Ratio In Banks Are At Record Lows

(07:29) Smaller Towns And Cities Are Driving Growth In Passenger Vehicles Now

(08:36) What Happens To Nvidia If Jensen Huang Has To Leave The Company?

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NOTE: This transcript contains the host's monologue and includes interview transcripts by a machine. Human eyes have gone through the script but there might still be errors in some of the text, so please refer to the audio in case you need to clarify any part. If you want to get in touch regarding any feedback, you can drop us a message on feedback@thecore.in.

Good morning, it's Wednesday, the 11th of November and this is Govindraj Ethiraj broadcasting and streaming weekdays from a slightly cooler Mumbai, India's financial capital. We are still in Diwali week. Wednesday too is a holiday but not a market holiday and the markets are open today.

Our top stories and themes…

Foreign portfolio investors are back even as oil dips below $90 a barrel

Liquefied natural gas flows through the state of Hormuz have crossed pre-war levels

Anthropic could raise up to $63 billion in its IPO and start trading in 10 days time.

What happens to NVIDIA if Jensen Huang has to leave the company?

Smaller towns and cities are driving growth in passenger vehicles

And net NPA ratios in banks are at record lows.

Markets, LNG, Anthropic and FIIs

Foreign investors have bought shares worth about $4.1 billion so far in November, already their biggest monthly inflow since September 2024, so more than two years.

India's benchmark indices were close to their highest levels in over eight months on Monday as they showed signs of consolidation after a long rally thanks to falling crude prices and of course foreign portfolio investors. On Monday again Brent crude futures had fallen to about $97 a barrel after President Trump said it unlikely that he would order fresh attacks on Iran while talks to end the conflict were progressing according to a Reuters report. The benchmark indices had already risen over 10.5% over seven sessions through Friday last week which was their longest winning streak this year.

The markets were flat on Sunday in a special trading session but were up again slightly on Monday. Tuesday of course was a holiday. So on Monday the Sensex closed 107 points up at 81,606 and the Nifty was up 58 points at 25,044 so above the 25,000 mark.

Now a lot of foreign brokerages are also putting out positive reports on the Indian markets with Citibank raising its N2027 target to 28,000 that's for the Nifty implying a 12% upside while HSBC upgraded India to overweight from neutral and many others have also shifted their weights upwards. The rupee has also been having a few good days though it snapped a six-day winning run on Monday. It hit a six-month high of Rs.

93.69 per dollar but closed slightly lower at Rs. 93.92 on Monday. Prognosis for Wednesday is expectedly positive because on Tuesday oil prices fell even further.

Brent crude futures were below $90 a and were hovering around the $90 mark on Tuesday afternoon. And back home gift Nifty futures were up signalling a firm start for the markets on Wednesday morning. Back to energy, softer oil prices will also reduce pressure on India which is the world's third biggest importer and consumer of crude.

Reuters reported that the monthly tally of laden liquefied natural gas or LNG tankers exiting the state of Hormuz has reached its highest in October since the tracking data. Last month about 31 LNG tankers went to the key waterway according to data from S&P Global Energy of which 23 were loaded at Ras Lafan in Qatar and 8 at Das Island in the United Arab Emirates according to that Reuters report. October exports were the highest since February when the war started and were up from September's corresponding tally of 23 vessels exiting the state according to that data.

Remember India imports a lot of LNG and LNG is also critical not just for powering industry and vehicles but also supplying pipe natural gas to homes. Analysts at S&P Global Energy told Reuters that they were looking at UAE at back to pre-war transit levels and Qatar at over 30% of pre-war Hormuz transits. On Wall Street, Anthropic has said it will offer about 825 million shares in its upcoming IPO at a price range of between $70 to $78 per share according to an updated filing on Tuesday, bringing the five-year-old AI company a step closer to a potentially historic Nasdaq debut, a CNBC report said.

The company is planning to price on November 18 and trade on November 19, the CNBC report said, adding that Anthropic is targeting a retail allocation of about 20% which is much higher than the typical IPO which is about 5 to 10%. At the high end of the range, Anthropic could net up to $64 billion in proceeds and the company could end up being worth close to $1.4 trillion, up from the $965 billion valuation it announced as part of a funding round in May. On the other hand, SoftBank Group reported its first net loss in almost two years after it took a $3.7 billion write-down over its U.S. data centre projects and AI valuations dipped around the world, Bloomberg reported, adding that the company wrote down non-refundable advance payments it made to secure power generation equipment for its 8-gigawatt Ohio project and other data centres.

As we've been pointing out on the core report, many data centre projects are likely to be revisited and will face some resistance now that the Democrats are in charge of both the Senate and the House following the midterm elections. And back home, India is battling with high air pollution levels common at this time of the year but awareness levels about its impact continue to rise and hence, there have been much stronger or louder public outcry which hopefully will lead to more public policy responses as well. Mumbai's civic body banned the lighting of aerial crackers like rockets after there was a series of fires across the city on Sunday and Monday.

Polluted air obviously harms tens of millions of workers who work outdoors across the country, whether in areas like construction or even gig workers. This obviously has a direct economic impact on health, labour, and productivity.

Net NPA Ratio In Banks Are At Record Lows

The gross non-performing assets ratio of 30 scheduled commercial banks fell about 53 basis points year-on-year to about 1.5% in the second quarter of this year, with the net NPA ratio hitting a record low of 0.34%, according to a report from CareEdge Ratings.

One reason for this is faster loan growth, which explains most of the fall in the ratios, the report said. Gross non-performing asset stock fell about 11% year-on-year to about 357,000 crore rupees and net NPA stock fell about 11% to about 0.78 lakh crore or about 78,000 crore rupees. The gross non-performing asset ratio fell faster at public sector banks than at private banks.

Quarterly provisions rose about 7.4% quarter-on-quarter to about 27,000 crore rupees, which was led by a roughly 15% rise at public sector banks but were about 9% lower year-on-year. The CareEdge Ratings report says that the weak monsoon is the main risk ahead and they expect agricultural gross non-performing asset ratio of scheduled commercial banks to rise to about 5.3% to 5.6% by March 2028.

Smaller Towns And Cities Are Driving Growth In Passenger Vehicles Now

Smaller cities and towns have emerged as the biggest contributors to India's passenger vehicle market expansion this year, accounting for more than half of the incremental registrations between Jan and October 2026, even as rural India recorded the fastest growth in percentage terms.

Data from market analytics from Jato Dynamics reported in the Business Standard says non-metro urban markets added about 389,000 vehicles during the 10-month period accounting for about 55% of the industry's incremental registrations. Registrations in non-metro urban markets rose about 17% year-on-year to about 2.6 million units from 2.2 million in the corresponding period last year. Overall passenger vehicle registrations grew about 18% to 4.5 million units during January to October compared to about 3.8 million a year earlier.

While rural India led growth at 27% that Jato report says its share of total registration stood at 16.7 or just under 17% while metros recorded a 15% growth and accounted for about 26% of the market.

What Happens To Nvidia If Jensen Huang Has To Leave The Company?

Did NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang have an affair with a suspected Chinese spy? Well, the first he has admitted to but the second part that she's a spy is not established. Nevertheless, NVIDIA shares were down after Mr. Huang on Sunday admitted to and apologised for his affair with Alice Huang, a Chinese citizen based out of Singapore.

The company's board that's NVIDIA's board says it has begun an independent investigation in light of reports that Mr. Huang was the target of a Chinese intelligence campaign. So NVIDIA is being investigated as to whether Alice Huang's company MegaSpeed was illegally diverting AI chips made by NVIDIA for use in China and authorities in Taiwan and Singapore would be probing what they suspected were ties to China and its intelligence services the Wall Street Journal said. Now all of this threatens Jensen Huang's leadership of NVIDIA and by extension the AI industry that depends on its technology.

Reports in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and other outlets said earlier that the US government had concluded Alice Huang was likely sending information to Chinese intelligence while having a close relationship with Jensen Huang. The NVIDIA board meanwhile said it had no reason to believe that either national security or NVIDIA secrets were compromised and that it had confidence in Jensen and his leadership team. The Wall Street Journal reported that the Commerce and Justice Departments in the United States had opened an investigation into whether the company was smuggling chips into China.

The journal also said authorities in Singapore and Taiwan focused on Alice Huang putting physical surveillance teams on her and officials involved in those investigations suspected she was recruited by Chinese intelligence services after they learned of what they saw as a close relationship between her and the NVIDIA chief. Now word of federal investigation into Jensen Huang established that it was more than just a romantic relationship he may well have to leave NVIDIA which is where the big problem comes in. Huang has about 60 direct reports far more than the average tech leader and they send him emails with top five things that he reads and responds to at all hours.

A Bloomberg report pointed out adding that while it is not uncommon to see cult-like tech CEOs who obsess over details, Huang is in a class of his own. He has led the business since its very beginning 33 years ago, the longest such run in Silicon Valley, and even as NVIDIA grew into one of the world's most powerful companies with a stock return of more than 700,000%, there is still no one designated to potentially replace him. A Reuters report said that such is Huang's spell that a casual night of fried chicken and beer in Seoul with the CEOs of Samsung and Hyundai last year sent the shares of two South Korean food companies soaring while his endorsement of Marvel Technology as the next trillion dollar company also sent the shares of the custom chipmaker to record highs.

Huang has been a leading counterweight to AI sceptics, has dismissed fears of a bubble, and also challenged Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's apocalyptic warning that the technology could pose an existential threat to humanity. So where does all of this leave NVIDIA in specific and AI in general? I reached out to Jaspreet Bindra, founder of AI&Beyond, columnist, author, including often on AI teams, and I began by asking him to first describe NVIDIA to us, including its key product portfolio.

INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT

Govindraj Ethiraj: Jaspreet, thank you so much for joining me. So, I'm picking up on the latest developments in the Bay Area, and more specifically, what's been happening in NVIDIA. Now, a federal investigation has begun, and there has been some government enquiries into Jensen Wang's, let's say, movements in the last couple of years, and the larger question being, of course, whether the deals that NVIDIA did with an organisation in Singapore were in turn being driven or run by a Chinese company.

But let's put all of that aside for a moment. The question really that I'm posing is, if Jensen Wang were to go, if the enquiries or the investigations were to bring out something adverse, and he had to leave, what happens next? Before I come to that, maybe the question that I'd really pose first is, what is NVIDIA's portfolio look like today?

And how critical is it in terms of, let's say, the R&D input or Jensen Wang's own input that goes into them?

Jaspreet Bindra: The news is all over, so it's good to kind of get into some of the innards here. Look, what NVIDIA makes powers AI. Without NVIDIA, there is no AI today.

And in fact, NVIDIA started off building what they call GPUs, which were used for gaming. And you know, with Jensen Wang, he has this amazing ability to look around corners, as well as to go really deep, really, really deep. He's a hardcore engineer.

And he saw the rise of gaming, and he started his company actually to address that market, which people like Intel, etc. were not, and they took over the gaming market. You know, people used to go buy NVIDIA, which basically meant they were going for something in their gaming stuff.

Then he again saw around corners, and when crypto was coming in, and these big crypto farms were being set up, he realised that GPUs could be just the right thing because of parallel processing, etc., to fuel the crypto boom. And that was like his second wave. But the third wave was like the big tsunami, in a sense, where around 2012, something called AlexNet, which very few people noticed, which really set off this whole area of deep learning, and then, you know, generative AI and all the big AI stuff that we see now started around 2012.

But again, what Jensen Huang saw was that his GPUs with some modifications, he saw that there will be an AI boom coming in 2012. And he also realised that he could capitalise on it and, you know, become the infrastructure for it. So NVIDIA chips are the infrastructure for the AI, entire AI industry, close to 90% of it.

And that is why it is so important. There's a quick second bit here, which is that no other CEO today is as identified with the company as Jensen Huang is to NVIDIA. When the news of his affair broke out, it's almost as if NVIDIA is having an affair.

He is more popular than the NVIDIA logo. Not only is he the evangelist for it, or the visionary for it, but he also is the engineer for it. And he has 60 direct reports, etc., etc. And that's why this combination of two things, this remarkable ability to see around corners, and the fact that he is the company, which is the largest company on earth, or almost the largest company on earth, is what makes this interesting.

Govindraj Ethiraj: Right. So as you look ahead, now, you know, the comparison I can think of is Steve Jobs and Apple. So there was a lot of question marks about what would happen to Apple when Steve Jobs would go.

And of course, in the case of Steve Jobs, he was ill, and it took some time, and he withdrew slowly. But nevertheless, despite all the planning, there were question marks about his successor, who was Tim Cook, and who, of course, did a good job. But what is the equivalent, if at all here?

Not the person, but could there be a transition of that sort?

Jaspreet Bindra: Certainly, Steve Jobs is a great example. I mean, frankly, even Bill Gates and Microsoft, you know, had something similar. And there are a lot of companies where their founders, especially Elon Musk, I mean, SpaceX in its S1 filing itself for the IPO, basically said that, look, if there's no Elon Musk, then we don't know what's going to happen to the company.

It's not a new thing in that sense. And so there are these four super founders, if it may, who are absolutely joined at the hip with the company, and Mark Zuckerberg, same thing. However, having said that, if you look at history, great companies with great products, great technology, in this case, do manage to survive their founders.

You know, this happened with Steve Jobs, as you said. It happened with TSMC. Similar, it definitely happened with Bill Gates.

Yes, they had more time. In this case, there are a couple of problems. One is that there is no real number two.

Equally, frankly, of super founders, it's also fairly, unfortunately common that founders get embroiled in scandals of the sort that Jensen Huang has. And again, there are many names I can say. So I think if it's just that, if it's just a reputational thing, because of the particular dalliance that it had, I think NVIDIA would more than survive.

I mean, there would be some punishments across the board, etc., etc. And then, you know, some apologies, etc. But if it was proven that this was basically where secrets were being passed down, then it is much, much more serious.

And then it can have more serious implications. But my last thing that I would say is that given everything, given how the world is today, given how the political system also will protect NVIDIA and Jensen Huang, despite everything, I do see Jensen Huang and NVIDIA continuing together in some capacity or the other. I don't think breakaway.

Govindraj Ethiraj: Right. And if let's say tomorrow, if we were looking for an ideal replacement or a successor to Jensen Huang, and let's look at the worst case, then that person would have to be a design, chip design specialist or engineer. For example, again, using Apple, Tim Cook was seen more as a guru or someone who would really crack the logistics, including, you know, the manufacturing and everything and as the primary skill, and then, of course, everything else that Apple needs.

Jaspreet Bindra: Yeah. So, you know, think of it this way. Steve Jobs was a zero to one guy.

He produced something out of nothing. Okay. Tim Cook was a one to 10 guy.

Okay. He put that one that was there and took it to 10. Okay.

And I don't think Steve Jobs had the one to 10 skills. I think largely been proven that Tim Cook didn't have the zero to one skills. Now, Jensen Huang has both zero to one as well as one to 10 skills.

Now, in case a replacement were to happen, I think they would look for a one to 10 kind of a replacement. There's a lot of innovation, which is still can happen in NVIDIA's products. And it's just not chips.

Actually, there's a software suite called CUDA. They build stuff for physical AI, which is robotics, etc. So there's a whole lot of innovation stuff.

And so I think they would look for not necessarily a designer. And I wouldn't be surprised if they look outside. Okay.

And so, you know, from one of the big massive cloud players, for example, because again, at the end of it, NVIDIA is an infrastructure company. They build the infrastructure. They do it very, very well, far, far superior than anyone else.

And therefore, I think it would be more an infrastructure at scale person or player who would be the best position to replace Jensen Huang if it came to that.

Govindraj Ethiraj: Got it. Jaspreet, thank you so much for joining me.

Jaspreet Bindra: Good to be here. It'll be interesting to see how this all plays out.

Govindraj Ethiraj: Indeed, it will be. Thank you so much.

Jaspreet Bindra: Thank you.