Financial Data and Key Metrics Changes - The company reported good Q2 results with strong pricing, although volume mix remained flat after accounting for downsizing [5] - The bottom line was slightly better than expected, indicating overall financial health [5] Business Line Data and Key Metrics Changes - The chocolate category showed significant pricing increases and revenue growth management (RGM) actions aligning with expectations [6] - The biscuits category in North America is experiencing a decline in volume, while emerging markets are showing double-digit growth [10][12] Market Data and Key Metrics Changes - North America is facing consumer anxiety and a focus on essential items, leading to a decline in the biscuits category [9][10] - Emerging markets, particularly Brazil, India, and Mexico, are experiencing sustained volume and value growth despite softer consumer confidence [11][12] Company Strategy and Development Direction - The company aims to boost productivity and implement incremental pricing in North America to counteract inflation and improve profitability [14][16] - There is a focus on maintaining share gains in alternate channels such as club and dollar stores [16] Management Comments on Operating Environment and Future Outlook - Management does not anticipate a material rebound in the North American category for the remainder of the year, citing ongoing consumer sentiment challenges [13][17] - The company remains cautious about the impact of cocoa prices and consumer behavior on future earnings, with a focus on maintaining gross profit dollar growth [45][46] Other Important Information - The company is actively managing its debt and share repurchase strategy, indicating a pragmatic approach to capital deployment [65] - There is no significant impact from GLP-1 drugs on current volumes, with economic factors being the primary driver of consumer behavior [67][69] Q&A Session Summary Question: Insights on key geographies and North America actions - Management highlighted a strong quarter in Europe but acknowledged challenges in North America, emphasizing the need for demand-driving actions [4][6] Question: Clarification on guidance for the second half - Management confirmed that the guidance reflects a realistic view of the tougher areas, particularly in chocolate and the U.S. market [20][23] Question: Cocoa market outlook and pricing strategy - Management discussed favorable cocoa market fundamentals and potential pricing strategies for 2026, indicating a cautious but optimistic approach [25][44] Question: Impact of consumer behavior on pricing and volume - Management reassured that the planned pricing increases are selective and aimed at protecting key consumer price points [54][56] Question: Retailer destocking in North America - Management attributed retailer destocking to cash flow management and a slowdown in consumption, indicating a strategy to shift focus to value channels [75][76]

Network Performance - Base's new block config features higher burst capacity but lower sustained capacity [1] - This configuration leads to earlier price hikes, potentially reaching a peak of approximately 30 transactions per second (TPS) [1] - Base is iteratively adjusting its gas limit, increasing it weekly while maintaining the gas target at 50% of the gas limit, resulting in 2x Elasticity [2] Scalability and Elasticity - The industry is learning and iterating on the concept of "Elasticity" in the context of blockchain throughput [1] - Base is scaling and adjusting its throughput based on learning and iteration [1][2]

AI Infrastructure & Market Trends - Modern AI applications are expanding across various sectors like finance, energy, healthcare, and research [3] - The industry is evolving from initial LLM training to Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines and agentic AI [3] - Vulture is positioned as an alternative hyperscaler, offering cloud infrastructure with 50-90% cost savings compared to traditional providers [4] - A new 10-year cycle requires rethinking infrastructure to support global AI model deployment, necessitating AI-native architectures [4] Vulture & DDN Partnership - Vulture and DDN share a vision for radically rethinking the infrastructure landscape to support global AI deployment [4] - The partnership aims to build a data pipeline to bring data to GPU clusters for training, tuning, and deploying models [4] - Vulture provides the compute infrastructure pipeline, while DDN offers the data intelligence platform to move data [4] Scalability & Flexibility - Enterprises need composable infrastructure for cost-efficient AI model delivery at scale, including automated provisioning of GPUs, models, networking, and storage [2] - Elasticity is crucial to scale GPU and storage resources up and down based on demand, avoiding over-provisioning [3] - Vulture's worldwide serverless inference infrastructure scales GPU resources to meet peak demand in different regions, optimizing costs [3] Performance & Customer Experience - Improving customer experience requires lightning-fast and relevant responses, making time to first token and tokens per second critical metrics [4] - Consistency in response times is essential, even with thousands of concurrent users [4] - The fastest response for a customer is the ultimate measure of customer satisfaction [4] Data Intelligence Platform - DDN's Exascaler offers high throughput for training, with up to 16x faster data loading and checkpointing compared to other parallel file systems [5] - DDN's Infinia provides low latency for tokenization, vector search, and RAG lookups, with up to 30% lower latency [5] - The DDN data intelligence platform helps speed up data response times, enabling saturated GPUs to respond quickly [6]