The price of ether rebounded to near-record levels on Friday after Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell hinted at upcoming rate cuts and investors returned to risk-on mode.

The second-largest cryptocurrency was last higher by 12% at $4,738.91, according to Coin Metrics. Last week, ether nearly touched its 2021 all-time high of $4,866.01, before falling as low as the $4,000 level this Tuesday.

Bitcoin rose 3% to $116,191.09.

The moves came during Powell’s annual address from Jackson Hole, Wyoming. “With policy in restrictive territory, the baseline outlook and the shifting balance of risks may warrant adjusting our policy stance,” said Powell.

“Traders seem to have been caught completely off-sides by Powell’s dovish comments today,” said Jordi Alexander, CEO at crypto trading firm Selini Capital. “The market positioning in recent sessions has seen clear risk-off moves in assets like crypto and tech, and today’s setting up of a September rate cut is causing a panicked repositioning, which could continue through the illiquid weekend as shorts get squeezed.”

“Momentum is back on the menu with the administration and the Fed seemingly aligned on easing,” he added.

Around the time of the speech, ETH saw about $120 million in short liquidations in a one-hour period, according to CoinGlass. When traders use leverage to short ether and the coin’s price rises, they buy ETH back from the market to close their positions. In turn, this pushes the coin’s price even higher and results in more positions being liquidated.

Shares of companies focused on accumulating ether, which were some of the hardest hit this week when investors rotated out of tech names, bounced with the coin Friday. Bitmine Immersion and SharpLink Gaming jumped 14% and 12%, respectively.

Shares of Peter Thiel-backed ETHzilla tumbled more than 38% at one point Friday after the ether treasury company offered up to 74.8 million of its shares for resale. It was last down 30% following Powell’s Jackson Hole remarks.

Elsewhere, Solana-focused treasury firm DeFi Development surged 19%, and crypto exchange Coinbase advanced 6%. Stablecoin issuer Circle gained 7%, and bitcoin proxy Strategy added 5%.

Ether exchange-traded funds saw $287.6 million in inflows Thursday, which snapped a four-day streak of outflows, according to crypto research platform SoSoValue. Still, those funds collectively were on pace for their first week of net outflows ($578.9 million) since May 9 and biggest week of outflows on record.

Bitcoin ETFs on Thursday logged their fifth session in a row of outflows, bringing their total for the week to $1.15 billion. They are now on pace for their biggest week of net outflows since Feb. 28.

Kimbal Musk, the younger brother of the world’s wealthiest person, said Elon Musk “deserves to be paid,” as Tesla remains locked in a legal saga over its CEO’s pay package.

“I think my brother deserves to be paid,” Kimbal Musk said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Friday. “He has zero pay for the past six to eight years. I don’t think that’s right. I’ll let Tesla shareholders make that decision, but I believe that it does need to be. He needs to be paid.”

Elon Musk isn’t paid a salary or any cash bonuses at Tesla. He is compensated through “performance awards” of valuable stock options that are granted based on Tesla hitting certain milestones.

Earlier this month, Tesla granted Elon Musk an “interim” pay package of 96 million shares, which would be worth about $29 billion. The package includes shares that vest in two years as long as he continues as CEO or in another key executive position.

The pay plan was approved by a “special committee” of the Tesla board, with Elon Musk and Kimbal Musk recusing themselves, board members Robyn Denholm and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson said in an Aug. 4 letter to shareholders.

The award came after a Delaware judge in December ordered Tesla to revoke Elon Musk’s $56 billion pay package from 2018, which was the largest compensation plan in U.S. history for a public company executive.

Before the Delaware ruling on his 2018 pay plan, in January 2024, Musk said he wanted even more pay and control of Tesla in a post on X, which was formerly known as Twitter.

“I am uncomfortable growing Tesla to be a leader in AI & robotics without having ~25% voting control,” Musk wrote at the time. “Enough to be influential, but not so much that I can’t be overturned. Unless that is the case, I would prefer to build products outside of Tesla.”

He was already building products outside of Tesla, including at his newest artificial intelligence venture, xAI, which was formed in Nevada in March 2023.

The new pay package was granted to Musk without a shareholder vote, and will only apply if Musk and Tesla lose on appeal in Delaware.

An investment group that works with pension funds, the SOC Investment Group, sent a letter this week to Nasdaq asking them to investigate Tesla, saying its board should have attained shareholder approval for the new package under Nasdaq listing policies.

Denholm and Wilson-Thompson wrote in the letter that the special committee is working to “address a longer-term CEO compensation strategy,” which it plans to put to a shareholder vote at Tesla’s upcoming annual meeting in November.

— CNBC’s Lora Kolodny contributed to this report.

When Texas Instruments announced a $60 billion manufacturing megaproject in July, it was a bold bet that companies would want to mass produce foundational microchips on U.S. soil. In August, Apple vowed to do just that.

During the same Oval Office press conference where President Donald Trump announced a 100% tariff on chips from companies not manufacturing in the U.S., Apple CEO Tim Cook upped his companies’ U.S. spending commitment to $600 billion over the next four years, up from an original $500 billion announcement in February.

Part of that spending, Cook said, will go toward making “critical foundation semiconductors” for iPhones and other devices at Texas Instruments’ new chip fabrication plants in Utah and Texas.

In July, CNBC became the first news organization to see the inside of TI’s newest fab in Sherman, Texas. There, full production is on schedule to start by the end of 2025. It’s one of seven new factories the chipmaker is building in the U.S. to provide chips to major customers like Nvidia, Ford Motor, Medtronic and SpaceX.

Although Texas Instruments doesn’t make the world’s most advanced chips, its essential components are found almost everywhere, from smartphones to the graphics processing units powering generative AI.

“If you have anything that plugs into the wall, or has a battery in it, or has a cord in it, you probably carry more than one TI chip in it,” said Mohammad Yunus, TI’s senior VP of technology and manufacturing.

But just one month after TI announced the $60 billion project, its shares plummeted 13% following weak guidance and tariff concerns raised in its July 23 earnings call. 

“The worry is their end customers. Like in the wake of tariff uncertainty, they don’t know what to expect. Are they stockpiling?” said Stacy Rasgon, senior analyst at Bernstein Research.

It remains to be seen whether demand will remain high once tariff uncertainties calm. Still, shares did recover some ground in August.

“I would position them as more of a tariff winner than a tariff loser,” said Timothy Arcuri, managing director at UBS. Arcuri said TI’s U.S. foundry will allow it to undercut the pricing of its rivals’ Taiwan-made chips.

The market for TI’s chips, however, is not a guarantee. After TI had trouble keeping up with demand during the chip shortage in 2020, Arcuri said TI’s share of the analog market “fell off a cliff.” It went from a high of 19.8% in 2020 to a low of 14.7% in 2024, according to UBS.

TI’s $60 billion megaproject includes four fabs in Sherman, Texas, one in Richardson, Texas, and two in Lehi, Utah. The new fabs will give TI five times the capacity it has today, Yunus told CNBC.

“They’re making a big bet on the fact that they regain share and that demand comes rocketing back,” Arcuri said. “If you don’t regain that share, it’s hard to justify building this much capacity.”

While each TI chip costs about $0.40, according to Arcuri, they play crucial supporting roles for the world’s most advanced technologies. In a new partnership with Nvidia, for example, TI is developing a chip to drive efficiency in power-hungry data centers.

In 2009, TI made another bold move to help bring the cost of its chips down further. It opened the world’s first 300 millimeter fab for analog chips, re-purposing a memory fab from Qimonda after the chipmaker went bankrupt in the financial crisis.

“That’s what really was the catalyst for TI to have such a cost advantage,” Arcuri said.

The new wafer size gives TI “tremendous cost efficiency” because 300mm can fit “2.3 times more chips in it versus a 200mm wafer,” Yunus said. TI’s been closing and selling off some of its 200mm fabs, and all of its seven new fabs will produce on 300mm wafers.

TI told CNBC it’s the country’s biggest analog and embedded semiconductor manufacturer, selling tens of billions of chips each year. About 60% of revenue comes from customers based outside the U.S., with China making up about 20%. 

About 75% of TI’s capital spend happens in the U.S., but it also makes chips abroad at fabs in Germany, Japan and China, the company told CNBC. It does testing and assembly in Mexico, Taiwan, the Philippines and Malaysia, where it’s spending $3 billion on two new sites, one of which is now in production. 

TI’s global footprint is a benefit in the “dynamic situation” of tariffs right now, Yunus said.

“Our manufacturing across 15 different sites provides us the position to be able to support our customers, no matter where they are and in any political or economic environment,” he said.

Although TI considered building its new sites internationally in places like Singapore, the company ultimately settled on Sherman, Texas. The small city 65 miles north of Dallas has a population of just 50,000 people. It’s also home to a GlobalWafers factory. The Taiwan-based company manufactures the bare silicon wafers that chips, including TI’s, are made on.

Sherman Mayor Shawn Teamann said the city is now “the hub of the Silicon Prairie.”

Teamann’s grandfather worked alongside Kilby at TI in the 1950s. TI first came to Sherman in 1966, but when it announced plans to close its outdated 150mm fab, the city enticed TI to stay with incentives like tax breaks and water discounts.

The plan worked, and in 2021, TI announced it would stay in Sherman with a campus of new 300mm fabs. Now, the first of four 300mm fabs is complete in Sherman. Teamann said the 300mm project has more than doubled the city’s rate of population growth since it was announced in 2021.

As for federal support, TI got $1.6 billion of CHIPS Act funding, and a whopping 35% investment tax credit from Trump’s big bill passed in July. 

At the state level, Gov. Greg Abbott has long offered incentives to chip companies willing to build in the state, from low taxes to the $1.4 billion Texas CHIPS Act passed in 2023.

Samsung is the other chip giant in Texas since 1996. The South Korean company is building a $17 billion advanced chip fab near Austin. That’s also where Apple, Amazon and AMD design many of their chips. Other chip companies in Texas include Infineon, NXP, X-Fab, Micron, GlobalFoundries, and tool supplier Applied Materials. 

Making chips takes an immense amount of water, and about a quarter of Texas is in drought. 

Luckily, Sherman has water rights to nearby Lake Texoma.

“It was about acquiring more rights, ramping up our production and being able to provide for the mass quantities of water it takes to run a semiconductor facility,” said Teamann, adding that the fab has almost doubled the amount of water Sherman uses.

TI will use about 1,700 gallons of water per minute when the new Sherman fab is complete, with plans to recycle at least 50% of that, Yunus said.

Chip manufacturing is also a power hungry process, so it helps that Sherman has a power plant that recently increased capacity. TI’s new Sherman fab will run entirely on renewable energy, said Yunus, adding that making chips on 300mm wafers also helps with energy efficiency.

“You use pretty much the same amount of energy but produce 2.2 to 2.3 times more chips,” he said.

Texas’ uniquely independent grid largely cuts the state off from borrowing power across state lines. In 2021, that grid failed during an extreme winter storm, causing at least 57 deaths and halting production at chipmakers like Samsung and NXP. TI told CNBC it maintained “critical operations.”

“We built redundancy into this facility,” Yunus said. “We have multiple transmission lines that feed power into the site. We also have large diesel storage tanks that we’re able to use, and generators that can continue to power the site for a few days.”

Highly skilled chip engineers are another scarce resource. It’s a talent pipeline that’s been stymied by the dramatic decline of U.S. global semiconductor manufacturing. The U.S. went from holding a 37% share of the market in 1990 to just 10% in 2022, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association.

But TI has developed partnerships with various universities, community colleges and the military to fill the talent gap necessary to fill the roles at its Sherman fab.

“There’s a lot of younger people moving to the area. I actually think it’s going to be easier for them to get the talent now than it would have been 5 to 10 years ago,” Arcuri said.

With the full $60 billion project, TI said it expects to create 60,000 U.S. jobs, but the company could not give an expected completion date when asked for one.

“It’s hard to predict when exactly that will take off,” Yunus said. “We’re hopeful that we’ll continue to build out at a pretty brisk pace, but it really depends on the market.”

Watch the video for an in-depth look at TI’s first completed fab in Sherman: https://www.cnbc.com/video/2025/08/22/apple-will-make-chips-at-texas-instruments-60-billion-us-project.html