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Rep. Scott Fitzgerald, R-Wis., is seen during a group photo with freshmen members of the House Republican Conference on the House steps of the Capitol on Monday, January 4, 2021.
Tom Williams | CQ-Roll Call, Inc. | Getty Images

A Republican lawmaker is readying a bill that would require businesses subsidized by foreign governments to disclose that information when they pursue large mergers subject to U.S. regulatory review.

The bill, led by Rep. Scott Fitzgerald, R-Wisc., and tentatively named the “Stopping Foreign Government Subsidies for Mergers Act,” would require businesses backed by state-owned entities to notify regulators of that backing when they report a deal of more than $92 million in value.

That additional information can help regulators assess how a company might act once merged, Republican Federal Trade Commissioner Noah Joshua Phillips, who supports the legislation, told CNBC in an interview Wednesday.

Noah Phillips, commissioner, Federal Trade Commission, testifies during the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee hearing tilted The Invalidation of the EU-US Privacy Shield and the Future of Transatlantic Data Flows, in Russell Building on Wednesday, December 9, 2020.
Tom Williams | CQ-Roll Call, Inc. | Getty Images

“Our presumptions in the law and the way we do our work are based on the notion fundamentally that firms profit maximize. They seek to make money,” Phillips said. “But state-owned entities don’t necessarily have the pursuit of profit as their ultimate motive, and as a result, they may not act in the same way as the companies that we normally look at do.”

A firm that values certain political objectives over profits might make a different calculation when it comes to the risk of pursuing anticompetitive conduct, like steeply undercutting rival prices only to raise them later on. While Phillips declined to speculate on the types of conduct in which a state-owned entity might engage, he said it would help to know their potential incentives in order to assess the facts of each individual case.

As it stands, regulators may become aware of a foreign government subsidy in a merger case, but Phillips said requiring that information up-front will allow them to “develop expertise and ask the right questions.”

The bill builds on a recommendation last year from the bipartisan U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. In its annual report to Congress, the commission recommended the FTC have a system in place to determine how proposed transactions are influenced by such foreign government support.

The commission found that the Chinese government would back companies it saw becoming national champions and eventually push them to expand into the U.S. and other countries.

“This process assists Chinese national champions in surpassing and supplanting global market leaders,” the commission wrote in its annual report to Congress.

The commission said “China’s trade-distorting practices” mean that “U.S. workers and companies, no matter how innovative and efficient, struggle to compete when the Chinese government so decisively tilts the playing field in favor of Chinese companies through a variety of legal, regulatory, and financial mechanisms, and when U.S. companies are granted access to the Chinese market, it is at the cost of transferring valuable intellectual property to their Chinese counterparts.”

The group warned that the risk is particularly acute when it comes to emerging technologies, where China allegedly seeks to “surpass and displace the United States altogether.”

“Failure to appreciate the gravity of this challenge and defend U.S. competitiveness would be dire,” the commission wrote. “Because these emerging technologies are the drivers of future growth and the building blocks of future innovation, a loss of leadership today risks setting back U.S. economic and technological progress for decades.”

Though Fitzgerald said he’s in the early stages of engaging with colleagues about co-sponsoring the bill, he said he believes China’s apparent willingness to devote major resources toward corporate subsidies could rally lawmakers on both sides of the aisle behind the proposal.

The bill would not place any national security assessment requirements on the antitrust agencies, which Phillips said are best left to the existing agencies responsible for that type of review. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. (CFIUS) within the Treasury Department is already responsible for reviewing national security implications for mergers with foreign entities, for example.

But Phillips and Fitzgerald said there remains a need to assess foreign-subsidized businesses from a potential harm to competition perspective, which is squarely within the antitrust regulators’ purview.

Doug Melamed, a Stanford University law professor and former Acting Assistant Attorney General of the Antitrust Division at the Department of Justice, said one possible outcome of such legislation, if passed, would be a chilling of mergers with state-owned entities.

“The most important effect of that kind of requirement might be to deter the acquisition in the first place,” Melamed said. “Because if the Chinese have some interesting stake in company X that would not ordinarily surface … this might deter it if they don’t want their position to be known.”

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Mark Zuckerberg unveils $799 Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses

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Mark Zuckerberg unveils 9 Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses

At the Meta Connect developer conference, Mark Zuckerberg, head of the Facebook group Meta, shows the prototype of computer glasses that can display digital objects in transparent lenses.

Andrej Sokolow | Picture Alliance | Getty Images

Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday unveiled the $799 Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses, the social media company’s first consumer-ready smart glasses with a built-in display.

The glasses, which costs $799, contain a small digital display that can be controlled via hand gestures through a wristband powered by neural technology, confirming a CNBC report in August. A promotional video of the new smart glasses appeared on Meta’s YouTube page on Monday but was later removed.

Tune in Thursday at 11:00 a.m. ET: Meta Chief Product Officer Chris Cox joins CNBC TV to discuss with Julia Boorstin the highlights of Meta’s annual Connect event, live from the company’s HQ in Menlo Park CA.

The new smart glasses are a bridge between the company’s audio-only Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses and the experimental Orion augmented reality glasses that the company revealed at last year’s Connect event. Orion can overlay 3D visuals over a person’s real-world field of view with the help of a wireless computing puck, but the glasses are expensive to make and not yet available to consumers.

The Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses come with the Meta Neural Band, an EMG wristband that allows users to control the device using hand gestures.

“These are glasses with the classic style that you’d expect from Ray-Ban, but they’re the first AI glasses with a high resolution display and a fully weighted Meta neural band,” Zuckerberg said.

With the new glasses, people can do tasks like watch videos through the display or see and respond to text messages, Zuckerberg said. The display doesn’t block a person’s view, and it disappears when not being used, he said.

The glasses go on sale in the U.S. on Sept. 30.

During a demo, Zuckerberg repeatedly attempted to call Meta tech chief Andrew Bosworth unsuccessfully.

“This is uh — you know, it happens,” Zuckerberg said.

Meta has been developing its smart glasses with eyewear giant EssilorLuxottica since 2019, and last year renewed a long-term partnership agreement to continue making the products.

The company on Wednesday also debuted the Oakley Meta Vanguard smart glasses, intended for athletes who participate in high-intensity sports like snowboarding and mountain biking. The Oakley-branded glasses will cost $499 when they launch on Oct. 21, making it $100 more expensive than the Oakley Meta HSTN glasses that went on sale in June.

The Oakley Meta Vanguard smart glasses have a sportier look than the Oakley Meta HSTN glasses thanks to a wraparound design that extends its colorful lenses around a person’s temples. Unlike the Oakley Meta HSTN glasses, the new model contains a button on the underside of its frames so that athletes who wear helmets can more easily capture photos and videos.

The new sports-centric smart glasses have up to nine hours of battery life, can capture 3K video and contain speakers that are louder than their predecessors. The glasses can connect with Garmin-branded fitness watches to track certain stats like their heart rates using the Meta AI assistant. Preorders start today.

Meta also debuted the Ray-Ban Meta (Gen 2), the latest version of the company’s original smart glasses. The Ray-Ban Meta (Gen 2) costs $379, up from $299 for the version released in 2023. The Ray-Ban Meta (Gen 2) has double the battery life of the previous model, lasting 8 hours on a single charge, and a more powerful camera that can capture 3K Ultra HD video. The new glasses go on sale today.

Zuckerberg also announced Horizon TV, pitching it as a way to watch television shows, sporting events and movies using the company’s Quest VR headsets. Some of Meta’s partners who will be contributing content to the app include Disney and Universal Pictures, Zuckerberg said.

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Netskope prices IPO at $19, valuing company at $7.3 billion

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Netskope prices IPO at , valuing company at .3 billion

Thomas Fuller | SOPA Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images

Cybersecurity company Netskope is eying a $7.3 billion valuation after pricing shares at $19 for its upcoming IPO, at the top end of its expected range.

Netskope will start trading on Thursday on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “NTSK.” The share sale raised $908.2 million.

Earlier this week, Netskope lifted its expected pricing range to between $17 and $19 a share, up from an original range of $15 to $17. The company revealed plans to go public last month.

Netskope’s offering comes amid a hot period for IPO activity after a years-long lull spurred by step inflation and soaring interest rates. The long-overdue resurgence has fueled optimism on Wall Street and in a venture capital industry eager for return on investment.

Ticket reseller StubHub slid 6% it its first day of trading Wednesday, but a lackluster start may not be reason for concern. CoreWeave went public in March and closed flat in its first day, with shares going on to triple.

Swedish buy now, pay later firm Klarna jumped 15% in its debut this month. Peter Thiel-backed cryptocurrency exchange Bullish, design software company Figma and stablecoin issuer Circle have also jumped since their recent market debuts.

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The cybersecurity sector is also undergoing a busy stretch for dealmaking fueled by ongoing artificial intelligence advancements and a shifting threat landscape.

This year’s biggest tech deals include Google’s whopping $32 billion acquisition of Israeli cloud security startup Wiz and Palo Alto Network‘s $25-billion CyberArk buyout. Thoma Bravo-backed SailPoint went public in February after the private equity firm took it private in 2022. Cybersecurity competitors CrowdStrike and Zscaler have also made acquisitions this year to beef up their offerings.

Santa Clara, California-based Netskope was founded in 2012 and is led by co-founder and CEO Sanjay Beri. At the end of July, the company said it had 2,910 employees and 4,317 customers across 90 countries.

Netskope says it competes in the IT security vendor and networking space against the likes of Broadcom, Cisco, Palo Alto Networks and Zscaler.

Annual recurring revenues rose 33% to $707 million at the end of July and revenues reached $328 million for the six months ended July 31. The company also reported a net loss of $170 million during that period.

Some of Netskope’s significant backers include Accel, Iconiq and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

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AI startup Nscale came out of nowhere and is blowing away Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang

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AI startup Nscale came out of nowhere and is blowing away Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang

Nscale, the UK-headquartered AI infrastructure provider.

Courtesy: Nscale

Two years ago, Nscale was a brand new startup in the U.K. that had yet to raise any outside funding or officially announce its existence.

Last year the London-based company came out of stealth, and in December announced that it had raised its Series A fundraising, totaling $155 million.

Now, Nscale finds itself at the center of the action in the hottest market on the planet: artificial intelligence. And it has close to $700 million in fresh capital from Nvidia, the world’s most valuable company.

In press releases on Tuesday, Nscale was named as an AI infrastructure partner for Nvidia, Microsoft and OpenAI, as the companies expand their buildouts in the U.K. Nscale then said it signed a five-year $6.2 billion agreement with Microsoft and Aker to develop “hyperscale AI infrastructure” in Europe, specifically Norway, where Aker is headquartered.

OpenAI made prior headlines with Nscale, announcing plans in July for a data center in Norway for a Stargate-branded AI data center. Nscale agreed to commit $1 billion for the project, with the goal of racking up 100,000 Nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs) at the site before 2027.

It’s a remarkably quick rise for a company that wasn’t even around when OpenAI kicked off the generative AI boom with the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022. At that time, what’s now Nscale was part of Arkon Energy, which was established a year earlier to provide infrastructure for cryptocurrency mining. Nscale was spun out to address soaring demand for data centers capable of handling AI workloads.

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Like CoreWeave, which went public this year and now sports a market cap of $58 billion, Nscale is combining data center space, power and lots of GPUs with its own software in order to an provide end-to-end service for AI infrastructure.

CoreWeave, which supplies infrastructure to Microsoft, Google, Nvidia and OpenAI, also has roots in crypto. Founded in 2017, the company built up its initial fleet of Nvidia GPUs for ethereum mining before pivoting to AI.

Nscale didn’t respond to a request for comment following this week’s announcements, but CEO Josh Payne, who previously founded Arkon, told CNBC in late July that the company was targeting two big problems in Europe. One is a lack of sufficient computing capacity and the other is a “very fragmented market.”

“What the continent needs is large AI infrastructure projects deploying compute [power],” Payne said, after the announcement with OpenAI for the Norway buildout. “The ecosystem can consume from the project to build AI products, to generate productivity growth and economic benefit.”

Payne wrote in a LinkedIn post on Wednesday that the agreement with Microsoft and Aker is a “huge win for European-owned AI infrastructure.”

Europe has been pushing the concept of “sovereign AI,” requiring data centers and AI workloads to be located and processed on European soil. Nscale has quickly emerged as an important player in the U.K.’s bid to evolve into a global leader in AI. In January, Britain laid out an AI “action plan,” promising to reduce bureaucracy to help its domestic AI sector thrive.

Trump’s UK trip sparks tech investment splurge

While Nscale is addressing the European market, many of its early partners are big U.S. AI vendors. They timed their announcements on Tuesday to President Donald Trump’s state visit to the U.K.

On Wednesday, Trump visited Windsor Castle and met with King Charles, Queen Camilla and other members of the royal family. His trip comes at a contentious moment for U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who is under pressure to bring stability to the country after the exit of Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner over a house tax scandal and a major cabinet reshuffle.

Microsoft headlined the U.K. announcements, committing $15.5 billion of new investment to computing equipment. The software giant said it plans to work with Nscale to construct what will become the U.K.’s largest supercomputer in Loughton, a suburban town in the English county of Essex.

The site will initially house 23,040 Nvidia Blackwell GPUs to be delivered in the first quarter of 2027. When it goes live, it will generate 50 megawatts of AI capacity, scalable to 90 megawatts, according to a statement from Nscale.

“No one can make that kind of capital investment unless they’ve got somebody already committed to spend the money once the work is complete, and that’s the role we’re playing,” Microsoft President Brad Smith said Tuesday, adding the deal represents a major vote of confidence in Nscale.

OpenAI said it would launch a U.K. version of Stargate through a partnership with Nscale and Nvidia. OpenAI will deploy 8,000 GPUs in the project’s first phase early next year, with the option to expand capacity to approximately 31,000 GPUs over time.

Stargate U.K. will operate across a number of sites in the country — one of the early ones being Cobalt Park, an industrial state in the Northern English city Newcastle. Stargate was initially spawned in the U.S. in January as part of President Trump’s effort to push investments in AI infrastructure.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang attends the “Winning the AI Race” Summit in Washington D.C., U.S., July 23, 2025.

Kent Nishimura | Reuters

Nvidia’s announcement on Tuesday included an investment of up to £11 billion ($15 billion) with Nscale and CoreWeave to boost U.K. AI infrastructure.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang separately revealed on Wednesday that the chipmaker had made a £500 million ($683 million) equity investment into Nscale.

“We convinced ourselves that Nscale could be a national champion for AI infrastructure in the U.K.,” Huang told journalists at a press conference in London.

Nick Patience, AI practice lead at the Futurum Group, told CNBC that Nscale is “a key part of Nvidia’s push in the U.K. market and an acknowledgment by the government that it has to do something to get the AI infrastructure built here, which has been a long slog.”

Rapid growth

After exiting stealth in May of last year, Nscale’s first public announcement came two months later, when the company partnered with UAE’s Open Innovation AI to deploy 30,000 GPUs. Around the same time, Nscale said it was acquiring Kontena, which was founded in 2018 and specialized in high-performance computing data centers.

The next month, Nscale announced an agreement with Asian telecom company Singtel to offer a “GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaaS),” and serve customers in Europe and Southeast Asia. Initially, Nscale’s infrastructure relied on GPUs from Advanced Micro Devices. Today, the startup promotes various offerings from market leader Nvidia.

Nscale’s big financing landed in December, when the company said it raised $155 million in a round led by Sandton Capital Partners, with participation from Kestrel0x1, Blue Sky Capital Managers and Florence Capital.

Sandton co-founder Rael Nurick said in the press release that with its “unique vertically integrated approach, Nscale is building the hyperscale AI platform to power AI at scale.”

Nscale said at the time that it had grown its AI data center pipeline to 1.3 gigawatts from 300 megawatts the prior year to and that it was aiming to have 350,000 GPUs running by the end of 2027.

By comparison, CoreWeave said at a banking conference last week that its portfolio consists of “about 2.2 gigawatts of capacity that’s coming online.” The company said in its IPO prospectus in March that its 32 data centers were running 250,000 GPUs.

It’s been a whirlwind few years for Payne, Nscale’s founder. While he was serving as executive chairman of Arkon, he was also operating chief at Australia’s Battery Future Acquisition Corp., a blank check company that says it’s “targeting critical battery minerals and related supply chains.”

He’s got a lot of work in front of him.

Building out AI data centers with costly GPUs is a capital intensive process that’s historically required a hefty amount of debt. CoreWeave had raised a total of $12.4 billion in debt through the end of 2024, in addition to well over $1 billion in equity financing before its IPO. It announced a $1.5 billion bond sale in July after a $2 billion debt offering in May.

Nscale was trying to raise $1.8 billion earlier this year through a private credit deal led by bankers at Goldman Sachs, according to Bloomberg.

In the December video tied to Nscale’s equity fundraising, Payne called it “one of the largest Series As raised in U.K., European history.” He said the company would use the cash to deploy up to another 4,000 GPUs in its data center in Norway and to develop up to 180 megawatts of capacity in the company’s portfolio.

The aim, Payne said, was to deploy 50,000 GPUs by the end of 2025 and 150,000 by the end of next year.

“The key challenges that we see in the market is the significant increase in density at the GPU level,” he said. “This funding allows us to scale up materially” he said, and to become “one of the largest players in Europe.”

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