Author: Jaxon Bennett

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Nvidia chief Jensen Huang said it would “accelerate the recovery” of its China sales, after a détente between Beijing and Washington allowed the leading AI chipmaker to resume shipments of a key processor specifically designed for the Chinese market.Huang told a press conference in the Chinese capital on Wednesday that the company had not yet received export licences from Washington to restart shipments of its H20 product, but he expected them “to come through very shortly”. Nvidia had reported a $4.5bn writedown…

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Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Chipmaking equipment supplier ASML said the impact of US tariffs was “a bit less negative than we anticipated”, as artificial intelligence drove strong orders for its lithography machines. Sales in the Netherlands-based company’s second quarter rose 23 per cent to €7.7bn, just ahead of analysts’ forecasts. Net bookings, a closely watched metric that includes orders for chipmaking gear placed by customers but not yet delivered, were €5.5bn, better than the €4.4bn analysts had expected, according to Visible Alpha, a research company. Surging orders for…

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Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Technology sector myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.Nobody loves a good bandwagon like a venture capitalist. Among European start-up investors, “resilience” and “sovereign” tech are giving even artificial intelligence a run for its money as the hottest new buzzwords. Led by Germany’s Helsing, which pulled in another €600mn in a fundraising led by Spotify co-founder Daniel Ek’s investment group last month, defence tech companies making drones, submarines and other battlefield systems have taken the place once occupied by e-scooters, grocery apps and the metaverse in investors’ hearts. Many European…

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Unlock the White House Watch newsletter for freeYour guide to what Trump’s second term means for Washington, business and the worldDonald Trump has claimed more than $90bn in investments in the battleground state of Pennsylvania on Tuesday, as he sought to deliver on his economic promises and turn around his faltering approval rating.Speaking at the Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit, the US president pledged “lots of jobs”, speedy permits for electric plants and billions of dollars in new investment in energy and artificial intelligence infrastructure.“We’re back in Pittsburgh to announce the largest package of investments in the history of the…

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Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Commerce secretary Howard Lutnick said the US’s reversal of restrictions on sales of chips to China followed recent trade negotiations with Beijing over rare earths.President Donald Trump curbed exports of Nvidia’s H2O artificial intelligence chips to China in April as part of an escalation of his trade war with Beijing.But a person familiar with the situation said the commerce department would start approving export licenses for these chips, after Nvidia on Monday said it expected to restart sales to Chinese companies.Lutnick said…

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Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Brandon Lutnick, son of US commerce secretary Howard Lutnick, is nearing a roughly $4bn deal with an early bitcoin supporter to buy billions of dollars in the digital tokens using a vehicle backed by Cantor Fitzgerald.Cantor Equity Partners 1, a blank cheque vehicle that raised $200mn in cash in an initial public offering in January, is in late-stage talks with Adam Back, founder of crypto trading group Blockstream Capital, to buy more than $3bn in the digital currency, according to two people…

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Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Activist hedge fund Elliott Management has built a sizeable stake in Global Payments as the payment processing group looks to win back investors after its $24.2bn acquisition of Worldpay caused shares to plunge to a 10-year low, said people familiar with the matter. The investment comes as the Atlanta-based payments group plots its future after buying Worldpay earlier this year in its biggest acquisition to date as it tries to grow its core business of processing payments for merchants.The three-way, cash-and-shares acquisition…

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Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.No engineer left behind. On Friday night, Google said it would hire the top talent of a developer of artificial intelligence tools called Windsurf, including its chief executive. As part of the $2.4bn package, it will also license Windsurf’s technology. Welcome to Silicon Valley, where the line between acquiring people and acquiring businesses gets ever fuzzier.While tech giants are getting a warmer reception from US President Donald Trump’s administration than they did under Joe Biden, making acquisitions is still far from easy.…

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Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Artificial intelligence myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.Mira Murati’s artificial intelligence start-up has named chip giants Nvidia and AMD among its new investors, as the former OpenAI chief technology officer closes one of the largest initial funding rounds in Silicon Valley history.Thinking Machines Lab raised $2bn at a $12bn post-money valuation in a “seed” round, previously reported by the Financial Times, despite there being few details about what the company is working on or a product.Based in San Francisco, the company on Tuesday announced the Andreessen Horowitz-led round, with…

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Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.One Japanese tech group has emerged a significant, yet under-appreciated, beneficiary of the global artificial intelligence boom. Shares of Fujitsu have risen by nearly two-thirds from last year’s lows as it positions itself as a serious contender in enterprise AI transformation. Fujitsu has launched proprietary generative AI platforms and invested heavily in hybrid computing infrastructure as well as developing advanced liquid cooling systems that help reduce data centre power consumption. Yet even as its AI momentum accelerates, a crisis from the UK…

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