| |  | Nov 20, 2025 | | | | | | Happy Thursday! Nvidia recorded a blockbuster quarter. xAI is in talks to raise $15 billion at a $230 billion valuation. Larry Summers resigns from OpenAI board after the Epstein scandal.
| | | | Nvidia's revenue rose 62% to $57 billion in the three months ended October compared to the same period a year earlier, largely from sales of AI chips and related equipment. Remarkably, its sales growth accelerated 8 percentage points compared to the July quarter, and Nvidia has projected even faster growth—65.4%—in the current fiscal quarter. The result could ease fears about investors bidding up prices of AI-related equities too high, relative to the revenue AI is producing for consumers and businesses. It comes after Nvidia's primary customers, including Microsoft, Meta and Google, increased projected spending on data centers that will use Nvidia chips. Nvidia shares rose 4% in after-hours trading. They were up around 34% this year before the end of normal trading Wednesday. Shares are trading at nearly 32 times its expected earnings over the next year, down from 36 times forward earnings as of three months ago. That means its shares have been getting cheaper even as its financial position strengthens. Still, four of Nvidia's customers made up 61% of Nvidia revenue in the October quarter, which was higher percentage than in prior quarters, showing its business carries what investors refer to as concentration risk. "There's been a lot of talk about an AI bubble. From our vantage point we see something very different," CEO Jensen Huang said in a call with analysts. CFO Colette Kress said recent separate data center deals involving Saudi Arabia and AI startup Anthropic would further boost Nvidia growth beyond what it has already projected. Free cash flow rose 31% to $22.1 billion compared to the year-ago period. The company, which has $60 billion in cash, has been spending more than $12 billion a quarter buying back its own stock while it also spends generously to fund dozens of AI startups and data centers, which will end up boosting its sales in the long run. Nvidia's recent revenue growth looks particularly impressive compared to its distant rival AMD, which reported 36% revenue growth in the September quarter, and also in spite of Nvidia getting squeezed out of the Chinese market, which until recently was a substantial part of its business. In addition to chips, Nvidia's sale of networking equipment that connect servers to each other continued to accelerate in the October quarter, generating more than $8 billion of revenue. | | | | XAI, the artificial intelligence startup run by Elon Musk, has told shareholders that it's planning to raise money at a $230 billion valuation, according to two people who were notified of the terms. It intends to raise $15 billion, according to one of the people. A spokesperson for the two-year-old startup did not respond for comment. The financing would more than double the last valuation for the AI business, which combined with X (formerly Twitter), earlier this year. That transaction valued the company above $100 billion. XAI, like rivals OpenAI and Anthropic, needs huge amounts of capital to secure access to the AI chips needed to train and run models. On Wednesday, Humain, owned by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, said Humain and xAI have signed an agreement to build low-cost data centers in Saudi Arabia. The Wall Street Journal earlier reported the valuation and CNBC earlier reported the size of the investment. | | | | Former Harvard University President Larry Summers has resigned from OpenAI's board of directors following a congressional committee's release of emails showing a personal correspondence between him and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein that continued until shortly before Epstein's arrest in 2019, according to a statement from OpenAI's board. "Larry has decided to resign from the OpenAI Board of Directors, and we respect his decision," said the statement from OpenAI's board. "We appreciate his many contributions and the perspective he brought to the Board." Summers confirmed his resignation in a statement. "In line with my announcement to step away from my public commitments, I have also decided to resign from the board of OpenAI," he said. "I am grateful for the opportunity to have served, excited about the potential of the company and look forward to following their progress." Summers had been on the board of the ChatGPT-maker for the past two years, a period during which OpenAI had restructured, putting it on a path to going public, and dramatically expanded into new businesses. Summers was Treasury Secretary in the Clinton administration and was National Economic Council director under President Barack Obama. He is also a former president of Harvard. Summers said on Monday he would be stepping back from public commitments in the wake of the Epstein emails. | | | | Salesforce's Slack has told customers in mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan that they must migrate their accounts to partner Alibaba Group before February, if they want to continue with instant-messaging service, according to a Slack customer in mainland China and an Alibaba Cloud employee. The move is in response to a privacy and data security law that came into effect this year in mainland China, according to the Alibaba employee, adding that Alibaba has started helping Slack customers with the change in recent days. Some Slack customers with billing addresses in these four regions were told earlier this week that their subscriptions wouldn't be renewed, according to the Alibaba employee. They were told they could maintain access by buying the service through Alibaba Cloud, according to emails reviewed by The Information. A Salesforce spokesperson said that "Slack workspace creation and user provisioning are not currently supported in all markets. Our paid customers can provision individual user access for employees working anywhere legally permitted." Alibaba didn't reply to a request for comment. Salesforce and Alibaba announced a strategic partnership in 2019 in which Alibaba would be the exclusive cloud provider of Salesforce services in these four regions, but that agreement wasn't put into full practice until the recent days. Salesforce is the latest U.S. company to separate its Chinese customer service, after Zoom in 2020 and Microsoft's LinkedIn in 2021 began working with local partners or replaced their services with a local product, underscoring the deepening technological divide between the U.S. and China as companies increasingly operate on separate networks. | | | | Nvidia said Wednesday it had struck deals to rent $26 billion of servers from cloud providers over the next six years, doubling the cloud spending commitments it disclosed just three months ago. The cloud spending plan implies Nvidia will rent several hundred thousand of its own graphics processing units from cloud providers like Amazon and Google that purchase them. Nvidia said in a regulatory filing that it will pay $1 billion to rent servers in the current fiscal year, $6 billion in both 2027 and 2028, $5 billion in 2029, and $4 billion in both 2030 and 2031. That will make Nvidia one of the world's biggest cloud spenders and users of GPUs. Nvidia said it might not use all of the capacity. Nvidia said some of its commitments "may be reduced, terminated or sold to others" by the cloud providers from which it rents servers. Nvidia's spending commitment increased even though it has stepped back from its nascent cloud computing business known as DGX Cloud, which aimed to rent out GPUs to business customers. These days, Nvidia uses most of the DGX Cloud server capacity for its own internal efforts, The Information has reported. Earlier this summer, Nvidia launched another kind of cloud service, DGX Cloud Lepton, which helps businesses rent GPUs from various cloud providers. Nvidia's cloud commitments includes its agreement to rent 10,000 of its AI chips back from cloud startup Lambda, The Information first reported. Nvidia also rents its chips from CoreWeave and major cloud providers including Oracle and Amazon. | | | | Elon Musk's xAI and the Saudi government-owned company Humain are jointly developing a data center in Saudi Arabia, the companies said on Wednesday. The data center will use more than 500 megawatts in electricity, the companies said, though they did not say when the facility will be up-and-running. xAI already has two large data centers in Memphis, Tenn. that feature hundreds of thousands of Nvidia chips. The second of those facilities, Colossus 2, is still under construction and will use more than 1 gigawatt of power once it's fully operational, xAI has disclosed. That would make it more than twice as large as the Saudi facility. Musk appeared onstage with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang at a U.S.-Saudi business conference in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday, where he briefly mentioned the deal. In a press release published by Humain, which is majority owned by the Saudi Public Investment Fund, the company said it would also "collaborate to deploy xAI's Grok models throughout the nation." | | | | OpenAI and Target announced plans to make the retail giant's app available through ChatGPT's new app feature on Wednesday, marking the latest tie-up between the AI startup and a large retailer as OpenAI looks to help users with more shopping-related tasks. The Target partnership differs from other commerce-related deals OpenAI has announced so far, which have centered around retailers like Walmart making their products available to shop via ChatGPT's Instant Checkout feature, instead of through their own apps. By keeping transactions in its app, Target can maintain more control over the shopper experience, a key concern for many large retailers, and also preserve its access to shopper data and ad revenue. Through the app, shoppers will be able to browse for Target products, build a cart, and check out for in-store pickup or home delivery. The companies said Target will soon add support for its Target Circle loyalty program as well as same-day delivery. In addition to the ChatGPT app launch, Target will also continue to use OpenAI's APIs and enterprise ChatGPT subscriptions, the companies said. | | | | Brookfield, one of the largest infrastructure investors, said it would acquire up to $100 billion in energy, land, data center and computing assets used to power artificial intelligence. Kuwait's $1 trillion sovereign wealth fund and Nvidia will invest in a new Brookfield Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure Fund, which has raised $5 billion of a $10 billion target, the firm said Wednesday. Brookfield plans to tap additional co-investors and other sources of financing to reach its $100 billion goal. It said an up to $5 billion investment in fuel cells made by Bloom Energy will be part of the fund. The firm, with more than $1 trillion in assets, is the latest large asset manager, alongside firms like Blackrock and Blackstone, to pour funding into the resources needed to develop and run AI. The firm said it's already invested more than $100 billion in digital infrastructure and power assets. Brookfield also said it will start a cloud company called Radiant that will buy Nvidia chips for national AI projects. | | | | Adobe agreed to acquire Semrush, a digital marketing software provider, for $1.9 billion as the design giant pivots to artificial intelligence. Adobe will pay $12 a share in cash for Semrush, which had a market capitalization of over $1 billion as of Tuesday. The deal with Semrush, which offers tools to help businesses to understand how they appear on AI search engines, could help Adobe to better serve marketers and boost its AI offerings, the company said in a press release. Shares of Adobe have fallen more than 20% this year, as investors grow wary of the impact of artificial intelligence on the design giant. Adobe is investing in AI products and also held talks in recent months to buy London-based Synthesia, an AI startup that generates video avatars of people for about $3 billion. Centerview Partners and Davis Polk & Wardwell advised Semrush on the transaction. Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz advised Adobe. | | | | Crypto exchange Kraken said on Wednesday it has confidentially filed for an initial public offering in the U.S., moving ahead with its plan to list despite a recent-sell of crypto-related stocks. The filing comes a day after it raised $200 million from Ken Griffin's Citadel Securities at a $20 billion valuation. Kraken is working with Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs on the offering, Bloomberg reported. Crypto-related IPOs have fared well in the public market earlier this year but a recent sell-off in bitcoin and other crypto stocks have weakened their prospects. Shares of stablecoin issuer Circle, which traded as high as $263 in June, has fallen by more than 45% the past month to below $70 while crypto exchange operator Bullish erased prior gains and has fallen below its IPO price of $37. | | | Popular articles
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