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Dec 03, 2025
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Happy Wednesday! Amazon Web Services unveils new AI models and Trainium3 cloud servers. Marvell Technology plans to acquire photonics startup Celestial AI for up to $5.5 Billion. Shopify says its merchants generated 27% growth in Black Friday weekend sales.
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Amazon Web Services, at its annual re:Invent customer conference on Tuesday, unveiled a new Amazon AI model that can process text, speech, images and video, confirming The Information’s earlier report. Called Amazon Nova 2 Omni and currently available as a preview, it’s designed to save customers the work of stitching together multiple AI models, AWS CEO Matt Garman said in a keynote speech. AWS also launched a new service called Amazon Nova Forge which lets customers build their own AI models. Customers such as Reddit are using the service to incorporate
their own proprietary data with Nova models, an approach that can yield better accuracy and a higher degree of customization, Garman said in the keynote. Garman also announced the availability of the first cloud servers powered by Trainium3, the latest version of AWS’ custom chip for training and running AI models. One early customer is Decart, a startup developing AI video and image models. AWS didn’t name other customers for Trainium3, although it did say it is now using the chip to power its Bedrock AI application-building service.
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Marvell Technology said Tuesday that it would acquire Celestial AI for $3.25 billion in a cash-and-stock combination, confirming a report in The Information late Monday night that the two companies were in advanced talks. The chipmaker is paying $1 billion in cash and $2.25 billion in stock upfront. If Celestial AI reaches certain revenue milestones by 2029, Marvell would also pay Celestial’s current shareholders an additional $2.25 billion in stock, which would bring the total deal value to more than $5.5 billion. The Information reported that the total deal price,
including earnouts, exceeded $5 billion. A deal with Celestial could help Marvell build out its data center offerings. Celestial AI, last valued at $2.5 billion in a March fundraising, develops an optical interconnect technology, which uses laser light instead of electrical signals to more efficiently move data between AI processors and memory inside data centers. Marvell expects Celestial to generate meaningful revenue and said it could reach a $1 billion dollar run rate by the fourth quarter of fiscal 2029.
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Shopify said Tuesday its merchants generated $14.6 billion in worldwide sales during the Black Friday and Cyber Monday holiday shopping weekend, a 27% increase from last year. The average cart price was $114.70, a 5% increase from last year. That increase is likely affected by tariffs, which have driven many merchants to hike their prices, as well as overall inflation. Shopify said the top-selling product categories included cosmetics, apparel and fitness and nutrition items. About one third of orders placed on Shopify sites were made using Shop Pay, Shopify’s one-click checkout that has become a key selling point of its e-commerce software. That figure is a 39% increase from last year, the company said. The sales increases were despite an outage to some Shopify systems on Cyber Monday that left some merchants unable
to log in or access their point-of-sale and other backend systems. Adobe said that overall, merchants recorded $44.2 billion in online sales between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday, a 7.7% increase from last year.
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Italian tech conglomerate Bending Spoons is acquiring ticketing firm Eventbrite for about $500 million in cash, ending Eventbrite’s eight year sojourn on the public market. The acquisition also follows a spate of other purchases by Bending Spoons, which appears to be specializing in snapping up faded U.S. tech firms, having bought AOL, video tech firms Vimeo and Brightcove, and Evernote. Bending Spoons is paying $4.50 a share for Eventbrite, whose stock price closed on Monday at $2.48. At that price, Eventbrite had an enterprise value of only $14 million, as its cash was almost equivalent to its market capitalization. That also means Eventbrite will cost Bending Spoons only about $270 million. Eventbrite’s revenue has been in decline—it fell 12% in the first nine months of this year—but the company was cash
flow positive.
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Prediction market Kalshi said it raised $1 billion in a fundraising round led by existing investor Paradigm at a $11 billion valuation, more than double its $5 billion valuation in October. Kalshi, which dominates the U.S. prediction market, is facing competition from rival Polymarket, which is set to re-enter the U.S. after gaining regulatory approval. Polymarket raised at a $8 billion valuation in a round led by Intercontinental Exchange in October. Kalshi also faces new entrants such as Robinhood, crypto.com and DraftKings that are launching their own prediction markets. Kalshi partners with some of the apps and currently gets more than half of its volume from users on Robinhood. It will use the new funding to attract users, integrate more brokerages and broaden its offerings. It told investors it was on an annualized pace for between $600 million and $700 million in net revenue, The Information previously reported. Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, Meritech Capital, IVP, ARK Invest, Anthos Capital, CapitalG, and Y Combinator also participated in the round.
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Torben Severson, the chief of staff to Amazon’s retail chief Doug Herrington, is leaving the ecommerce giant for OpenAI, where he will be head of global business development, Severson said on LinkedIn. Severson spent more than 17 years at Amazon. Until taking the role working for Herrington in March, he was vice president of worldwide corporate business development for more than six years.
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