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Sep 19, 2025
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TGIF! Nvidia spends more than $900 million to hire Enfabrica's CEO and some engineers, and the chip giant is also investing $5 billion in Intel stock. Elon Musk’s xAI tells staff that its Grok chatbot now has 64 million monthly users.
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Nvidia has spent more than $900 million to hire the CEO of networking startup Enfabrica and a number of engineering employees, as well as pay for the firm’s technology in a nonexclusive license, according to two people with direct knowledge. Nvidia, an existing investor in the firm, approached the company with an offer in recent weeks, after the startup began seeing early success with its networking technology. A spokesperson for Nvidia declined to comment and Rochan Sankar, the CEO of Enfabrica, did not respond to a request for comment. It’s not clear why Nvidia didn’t acquire the company outright, but instead structured the deal in a similar way to how other big tech companies have done similar acquihires of AI companies. CNBC first reported on the deal. Enfabrica, founded in 2019, is developing chips for AI
data centers that aim to solve key networking and memory bottlenecks in large clusters of Nvidia graphics processing units. Enfabrica’s technology connects GPUs so all the chips can process large amounts of data quickly. Enfabrica was the No. 1 computing startup on The Information’s 50 Most Promising Startups list in 2024. Nvidia has invested heavily into networking and in 2020 bought networking giant Mellanox for $7 billion, which is now the backbone of its advanced GPU systems. Enfabrica previously raised around $300 million from investors including Valor Equity Partners, Atreides Management, Sutter Hill Ventures and Spark Capital.
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Nvidia is to invest $5 billion in Intel stock as part of a partnership in which Intel will build Nvidia-custom designed CPU chips to integrate in Nvidia’s AI systems, the companies said on Thursday. The news sent Intel’s stock soaring 29%. The deal strengthens the prospects for Intel, which had been flailing in recent months as it struggles to catch up to chip design rivals such as Nvidia and to chip manufacturers like TSMC. Intel, known for its central processing units, will now count Nvidia as a major customer. CPUs are widely used in data centers for various types of computing, but they are also needed alongside Nvidia’s AI chips. Nvidia currently uses chip designer Arm’s architecture for its CPUs. This new deal will give Intel a piece of that business. On a call with reporters, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said
a large portion of cloud providers and enterprises still use Intel’s architecture, known as x86, in their data centers, rather than Arm-based chips. The collaboration will give Nvidia a chance of selling more sophisticated AI systems to those customers. Nvidia would join the U.S. government, which recently took a 10% stake in Intel. Nvidia is likely to have a stake of around 3.6%, based on Intel’s market capitalization of Thursday of $140 billion. Huang declined to comment on whether Nvidia separately plans to manufacture any of its AI chips at Intel’s chip foundry.
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Elon Musk’s xAI told staff this week that its Grok chatbot has 64 million monthly users, the New York Times reported on Thursday. By contrast, OpenAI said in August that ChatGPT had hit 700 million weekly users, while Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in July that its Gemini app had 450 million monthly users. xAI also has a much smaller enterprise business than OpenAI or Google. Musk pushed through several changes to xAI’s leadership this summer, including by removing some duties from early employee Jimmy Ba and removing all
direct reports from co-founder Igor Babuschkin, who would go on to leave the company in August, the report said. He then elevated former Tesla and X staffer Ross Nordeen and former Google researcher Tony Wu, who are now in charge of xAI’s products, according to the Times.
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Microsoft will spend $4 billion in the next three years to build a new data center in Wisconsin as it races to meet demand for servers that power AI applications, the company said Thursday. The data center announcement comes as Microsoft nears completion of a $3.3 billion data center in Mount Pleasant, Wisc., which is scheduled to come online early next year, Microsoft said. The move shows that Microsoft’s data center expansion isn’t slowing down, despite saying earlier this year that it was temporarily pausing some construction on the first Wisconsin data
center. At the time, Microsoft rebutted reports from media and analysts that the pause was indicative of a broader slowdown in data center spending. The company spent nearly $90 billion on capital expenditures in the year ending in June, blowing past its own projection for that period, and said that its capex will rise in the coming year. Microsoft has said repeatedly that AI customers’ demand for servers is outpacing its supply. OpenAI, Microsoft’s biggest cloud customer, recently signed a deal to spend more than $300 billion on Oracle servers in the coming years after complaining
that Microsoft wasn’t moving fast enough to provide data center capacity.
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The House Select Committee on China is planning to send a letter to PayPal CEO Alex Chriss on Friday, seeking assurances that the U.S. payment giant is complying with anti money-laundering rules after it entered into a partnership earlier this year with a unit of Chinese tech giant Tencent. In a draft copy of the letter viewed by The Information, the Committee said U.S. authorities had identified Tencent’s payment feature for its popular WeChat messaging app for allegedly facilitating money-laundering operations tied to fentanyl trafficking. Further, it claimed that PayPal’s integrations with Tencent’s payment feature through their partnership “risk converting a coordination platform for criminal networks into a direct payment rail.” The Committee requested that PayPal provide documents including agreements with Tencent, as well as organizational charts and risk
assessments. In July, PayPal announced a series of global partnerships with many of the world’s largest payment systems, including Tencent’s payment business. The U.S. company said the partnership would enable PayPal users who travel to China to use the PayPal app to make purchases at local stores that accept WeChat’s payment system. PayPal has been contacted for comment.
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Deliveroo CEO Will Shu will step down from the company after DoorDash completes its acquisition of the European food delivery company, he said in a statement Thursday. The roughly $4 billion deal is expected to close in October. Shu cofounded Deliveroo, which is headquartered in the U.K., in 2013 and took the company public in 2021. But the company struggled to turn a profit, and announced the planned sale to DoorDash earlier this year. Europe has emerged as a fast-growing battleground for DoorDash and its archrival Uber, and the two U.S. firms have sparred over some of the same deals as they try to expand the number of markets they operate in. In Europe, they also face competition from the Amsterdam-based investment firm Prosus, which said it would acquire Deliveroo competitor Just Eat Takeaway.com for roughly $4.3 billion cash in February. That deal made Prosus the biggest delivery group outside the U.S. and China.
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