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The Apple Park campus stands in this aerial photograph taken above Cupertino, California, U.S., on Wednesday, Oct. 23, 2019.

Sam Hall | Bloomberg | Getty Images

A former Apple software engineer was charged with allegedly stealing Apple’s autonomous technology for a Chinese self-driving car company, the Department of Justice announced Tuesday.

Weibao Wang worked as a software engineer at Apple from 2016 to 2018, a DOJ indictment said. Wang worked on Apple’s Annotation Team, and was granted “broad access” to databases which the Justice Department said could only be accessed by 2,700 of Apple’s 135,000 employees.

Wang is the third former Apple employee to be accused of stealing autonomous trade secrets for China.

Wang has been charged with six separate counts involving the theft or attempted theft of Apple’s “entire autonomy source code,” tracking systems, behavior planning for autonomous systems, and descriptions of the hardware that was behind the systems.

A year into his employment, four months before he quit his job at Apple, Wang accepted a job at the U.S.-based subsidiary of an unnamed Chinese company which was developing autonomous driving technology and began to siphon “large amounts” of sensitive commercial technology and source code, the indictment alleged.

In April 2017, only 5,000 of Apple’s 135,000 full-time employees had been informed about the project, the DOJ indictment alleges, or around 4% of the company. An even smaller segment, around 2%, had access to “one or more” of the databases Wang accessed, the indictment continues.

Law enforcement executed a search of Wang’s home in California on Jun. 27, 2018, where they found large quantities of stolen, confidential, and proprietary data, the indictment alleges. Wang was able to flee the country even after law enforcement executed the search, despite promising that he wouldn’t.

Wang boarded a flight to Guangzhou, China from San Francisco International Airport. In a press conference, U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of California Ismail Ramsey said Wang was in China and would face ten years in prison for each count if extradited and convicted.

The charges were announced as part of a sweeping enforcement action led by the Disruptive Technology Strike Force. Four other cases were unveiled across the United States, involving criminal behavior to supply Iranian forces with sensitive ballistic technology, Russian intelligence and research units with quantum technology, and sanctions-violating exports.

The allegations against Wang come after another Apple employee, Xiaolang Zhang, pleaded guilty in San Jose federal court to a similar theft involving trade secrets in Apple’s car division.

Like Wang, Zhang had planned to flee to China. Both Zhang and Wang were working at Apple’s autonomous division at the same time, and both left their employment at Apple in 2018.

Another employee, Jizhong Chen, was also facing federal charges over his alleged 2019 theft of sensitive information. Chen also attempted to flee to China, according to court documents. Chen’s case is proceeding in California federal court.

Apple declined to comment on the case.

Read the indictment here:

— CNBC’s Kif Leswing contributed to this report.

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Nvidia to report third-quarter earnings after the bell

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Nvidia to report third-quarter earnings after the bell

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang arrives at the launch of the supercomputer Gefion, at the Vilhelm Lauritzen Terminal in Kastrup, Denmark, Oct. 23, 2024.

Ritzau Scanpix | Mads Claus Rasmussen | Via Reuters

Nvidia reports fiscal third-quarter earnings Wednesday after the market closes.

Here’s what Wall Street is looking for, per LSEG consensus estimates:

  • Revenue: $33.16 billion
  • Earnings per share: 75 cents, adjusted

How Nvidia sees the current quarter shaping up is even more important than the results. Investors want to see if the chipmaker can continue to grow at a fierce rate, even as the artificial intelligence boom enters its third year. Wall Street expects Nvidia to forecast 82 cents per share on $37.08 billion in sales.

Much of that future growth will have to come from Blackwell, its next-generation AI chip for data centers currently shipping to customers Microsoft, Google and Oracle.

Analysts will listen carefully to comments from CEO Jensen Huang to hear what he says about the demand for Blackwell. The company could also address reports that some of the systems based on Blackwell chips are experiencing overheating issues.

In August, Nvidia said it expected about “several billion” in Blackwell sales during the January quarter.

Nvidia stock has nearly tripled since the start of 2024.

The company reported a 122% growth in sales in the most recent quarter, but that was a slowdown from the 262% year-over-year growth it reported in the April quarter and the 265% growth in the January quarter.

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Bitcoin rises to a fresh record above $94,000 as investors watch Trump transition, ETF options

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Bitcoin rises to a fresh record above ,000 as investors watch Trump transition, ETF options

Jonathan Raa | Nurphoto | Getty Images

Bitcoin advanced past $94,000 on Wednesday for the first time as traders continued to monitor President-elect Donald Trump’s transition back to the White House and weighed early options trading on bitcoin ETFs.

The price of the cryptocurrency was last higher by more than 1% at $94,461.75, according to Coin Metrics. Earlier, it traded as high as $94,834.33.

Coinbase shares rose 2%. Meanwhile, MicroStrategy jumped 8%, bringing its week-to-date gains to 36%.

Bitcoin has been regularly hitting fresh records since the election, though in smaller increments since the postelection rally faded last week, on hopes that Trump will usher in a crypto-friendly era for the industry that includes a more supportive regulation and a potential national strategic bitcoin reserve or stockpile.

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Bitcoin continues its climb toward $95,000

Traders this week are keeping a close eye on Trump’s appointments for Treasury Secretary and the Securities and Exchange Commission chair.

“We’re still very much in a phase of kind of pricing in the Trump trade,” said Joel Kruger, market strategist at LMAX Group.

He also pointed to the “mainstream, institutional adoption that we’re getting by way of the approval of the bitcoin and ETH spot ETFs this year” and options trading on those ETFs going live beginning Tuesday, which he called “another reflection of the maturation of the crypto market.”

Options on BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF (IBIT) began trading on the Nasdaq Tuesday. The Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC), the Grayscale Bitcoin Mini Trust (BTC) and the Bitwise Bitcoin ETF (BITB) are expected to have options available Wednesday.

Elsewhere, traders are looking forward to Nvidia earnings after the bell, which could impact bitcoin’s price. The cryptocurrency often benefits from moves in risk assets broadly, more so this year as institutional investors have become more comfortable with it thanks to bitcoin ETFs.

Don’t miss these cryptocurrency insights from CNBC PRO:

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Alphabet’s VC arm backs little-known SAP rival Odoo, boosting valuation to $5.3 billion

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Alphabet's VC arm backs little-known SAP rival Odoo, boosting valuation to .3 billion

Fabien Pinckaers, CEO of Belgian-based enterprise software startup Odoo.

Odoo

Odoo, a startup taking on SAP in the realm of enterprise software, boosted its valuation to 5 billion euros ($5.3 billion) in a secondary share round led by Alphabet‘s venture fund and Sequoia Capital.

The Belgium-based company develops open-source enterprise resource planning software, with over 80 applications available on its platform offering businesses tools for accounting, customer relationship management, human resources and e-commerce and website building.

Fabien Pinckaers, CEO and co-founder of Odoo, told CNBC in an interview this week that his company didn’t have a need to raise any primary capital as it is “cash profitable” and growing revenue at a rate of 50% year-over-year. Enterprise resource planning, he said, is “still a very fragmented market.”

“The reason everybody [has] failed [in this market] is that it’s quite complex,” Pinckaers told CNBC. “Small companies have complex needs from accounting to inventory, to website, e-commerce, point-of-sale. It’s a lot and they don’t have budget, and they need something that is simple and affordable.”

“Nobody succeeded to get both,” he added. “You have complex products like SAP that run well for large companies. But it’s complex and expensive.”

Andrew Reed, partner at Sequoia Capital, added that the market Odoo is addressing “just requires more gestation time than most startups both because the core system is very complex, and making it simple to use for small businesses and various countries is no small feat.”

Humble beginnings

Odoo “is not your traditional Silicon Valley tech story,” according to Reed.

Pinckaers opened the company’s first-ever office 22 years ago on a farm in Belgium. That was all he could afford at the time. Later, as the company started bringing in revenue, Odoo opened two additional offices in Belgium, home to the firm’s research and development, support and technical teams.

Today, Pinckaers resides in India with his family. He’s lived there for a year now, working to expand the company’s presence there, hiring more people, increasing marketing and broadening Odoo’s overall partner network.

Odoo had billings of 370 million euros last year and is on track to top 650 million of billings in 2025 — after that, the company is hoping to top the 1 billion-euro billings milestone by 2027. Billings — or the total sum of all invoices for a given year — is Odoo’s preferred metric for tracking annual revenue performance.

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Around 80% of Odoo’s business today accounts for open-source software, with the remaining 20% coming from software licensed for a fee, Pinckaers said. Open source refers to a type of software that allows users to access the underlying code — most often free of charge — which they can then modify and adjust.

In no rush to IPO

Despite Odoo now being at the scale of an IPO-ready business, Pinckaers said he’s in no rush to take the company public. If anything, remaining private has given Odoo flexibility to stay focused on investing for the long term, he said.

Odoo’s private backers aren’t in a rush for the firm to go public, either. Alex Nichols, partner at Alphabet’s CapitalG, told CNBC that he’s not worried about “IPO timing,” adding that factors like public market conditions are ultimately “out of our control.”

Pinckaers built the business to the size it is today primarily by bootstrapping — that is, growing without raising external funding. Odoo hasn’t had to raise primary capital from investors in a decade, opting instead to let early investors and employees sell shares in secondary sales.

The last time Odoo secured primary funding was in 2014, when it raised $10 million in a Series B round. Prior to the latest secondary round, Odoo was most recently valued by investors at 3.2 billion euros.

Odoo’s other backers include the likes of private equity firms Summit Partners, Noshaq, and Wallonie Entreprendre, which all sold a portion of their shares to CapitalG and Sequoia as part of the 500-million-euro investment announced on Wednesday.

Even after selling a portion of its shares, Summit remains Odoo’s largest institutional shareholder. Pinckaers himself has never sold his own personal shares.

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