PARIS — Eutelsat is one of the biggest satellite companies in the world, but has faced declining revenue in its traditional businesses at a time when it is handling a huge acquisition and facing disruption from billionaires Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.
“OneWeb is the big bet,” Berneke told CNBC in an interview this week at the VivaTech conference in Paris.
Eutelsat makes most of its money from satellites that provide connectivity to broadcast operations like TV networks. But that revenue is slowly declining. These so-called geostationary or GEO satellites is what Eutelsat specializes in.
OneWeb, a British company, specializes in so-called low Earth orbit, or LEO satellites, which are used for things like internet connectivity.
By combining Eutelsat’s legacy GEO business with the LEO business of OneWeb, Berneke feels like it could be a big advantage.
“[What ]OneWeb brings is a low orbit constellation, a bit like Starlink, where we can then start combining the two networks with a GEO plus LEO network,” Berneke said.
Starlink aims to create a constellation of satellites that provide internet connectivity on Earth.
Shareholder pushback
Over the last year, Eutelsat shares have fallen roughly 50% on the big changes taking place at the company. Eutelsat suspended its dividend last year to focus on investment in OneWeb and its new satellites known as “Gen 2.”
Berneke admits this has upset shareholders but there are new investors coming into the stock.
“We’ve seen some pushback from shareholders. And that has to do with a bit of a big change. Eutelsat used to be a company paying very high dividends with a very stable cash flow, but not a lot of growth. And what we’re telling them now is that with this merger, we’re going to be a high growth company,” Berneke said.
“We’re going to stop paying any dividend. And they should see that returns coming back once we’ve paid 4 billion [euros] for Gen 2 [satellites]. So that’s a bit of 180 degree, which means that a lot of, especially the shareholders who are there who liked the annual dividend, are saying, ‘well, maybe we’ll take our retirement money somewhere else and go there’.”
Berneke revealed to CNBC that the company plans to dual list on the London Stock Exchange as soon as the OneWeb deal is closed.
Elon Musk shakes up market
Part of Eutelsat’s hope with OneWeb is that it will help the company compete with Musk’s Starlink as well as Jeff Bezos and Amazon’s effort with Project Kuiper. The latter is also attempting to launch satellites for internet connectivity.
“We just have the two biggest business innovators coming in and saying, ‘oh, this is an interesting space, I can do something here. I can actually industrialize this niche.’ And I think that’s what Elon Musk needs to have a lot of credit for doing, really shaking up this,” Berneke admitted.
Many Eutelsat shareholders see the OneWeb acquisition as a risk. But Berneke said that Musk has changed the way businesses think about risk.
“Elon Musk is changing the way we think about risk broadly in business, I think one of the great things he’s ready to do is putting his money behind taking risks and moving fast forward,” Berneke said.
“One of the things we need to start doing is taking a measured risk, but also be able to move forward superfast and learn from those risks.”
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang attends a roundtable discussion at the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris on June 11, 2025.
Sarah Meyssonnier | Reuters
Nvidia announced Tuesday that it hopes to resume sales of its H20 general processing units to clients in China, saying that the U.S. government had assured the company would be granted licenses.
Nvidia’s sales of the H20 chips, which had been designed specifically to keep them out of export controls on China, were halted in April.
“The U.S. government has assured NVIDIA that licenses will be granted, and NVIDIA hopes to start deliveries soon,” the company said in a statement.
This comes against the backdrop of a preliminary trade deal between Washington and Beijing last month that sought China to resume rare earth exports and the U.S. to relax tech export controls.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in recent months has ramped up his lobbying against export controls, arguing that they inhibited American tech leadership. In May, Huang said chip restrictions had already cut Nvidia’s China market share nearly in half.
Huang also announced a new “fully compliant” GPU, NVIDIA RTX PRO, saying it was ideal for smart factories and logistics.
The potential change in U.S. stance follows a meeting between Huang and U.S. President Donald Trump last week.
In his meeting with Trump and U.S. policymakers, Huang had reaffirmed Nvidia’s support for the administration’s job creation and onshoring efforts, as well as the aim for America to lead in global AI, the company said.
Meanwhile, in Beijing, it was confirmed that Huang has met with government and industry officials to discuss the benefits of AI and ways for researchers to advance safe and secure AI for the benefit of all.
In this photo illustration, a man seen holding a smartphone with the logo of US artificial intelligence company Cognition AI Inc. in front of website.
Timon Schneider | SOPA Images | Sipa USA | AP
Artificial intelligence startup Cognition announced it’s acquiring Windsurf, the AI coding company that lost its CEO and several other senior employees to Google just days earlier.
Cognition said on Monday that it will purchase Windsurf’s intellectual property, product, trademark, brand and talent, but didn’t disclose terms of the deal. It’s the latest development in an AI talent war, as companies like Meta, Google and OpenAI fiercely compete for top engineers and researchers.
OpenAI had been in talks to acquire Windsurf for about $3 billion in April, but the deal fell apart, and Google said on Friday that it hired Windsurf’s co-founder and CEO Varun Mohan. Google is paying $2.4 billion in licensing fees and for compensation, as CNBC previously reported.
“Every new employee of Cognition will be treated the same way as existing employees: with transparency, fairness, and deep respect for their abilities and value,” Cognition CEO Scott Wu wrote in a memo to employees on Monday. “After today, our efforts will be as a united and aligned team. There’s only one boat and we’re all in it together.”
Cognition didn’t immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment. Windsurf directed CNBC to Cognition.
Cognition is best known for its AI coding agent named Devin, which is designed to help engineers build software faster. As of March, the startup had raised hundreds of millions of dollars at a valuation of close to $4 billion, according to a report from Bloomberg.
Both companies are backed by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund. Other investors in Windsurf include Greenoaks, Kleiner Perkins and General Catalyst.
“I’m overwhelmed with excitement and optimism, but most of all, gratitude,” Jeff Wang, the interim CEO of Windsurf, wrote in a post on X on Monday. “Trying times reveal character, and I couldn’t be prouder of how every single person at Windsurf showed up these last three days for each other and for our users.”
Wu said that the acquisition ensures all Windsurf employees are “treated with respect and well taken care of in this transaction.” All employees will participate financially in the deal, have vesting cliffs waived for their work to date and receive fully accelerated vesting for their, according to the memo.
“There’s never been a more exciting time to build,” Wu wrote.
The Grok logo is being displayed on a smartphone with Xai visible in the background in this photo illustration on April 1, 2024.
Jonathan Raa | Nurphoto | Getty Images
The European Union on Monday called in representatives from Elon Musk‘s xAI after the company’s social network X, and chatbot Grok, generated and spread anti-semitic hate speech, including praise for Adolf Hitler, last week.
A spokesperson for the European Commission told CNBC via e-mail that a technical meeting will take place on Tuesday.
xAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Sandro Gozi, a member of Italy’s parliament and member of the Renew Europe group, last week urged the Commission to hold a formal inquiry.
“The case raises serious concerns about compliance with the Digital Services Act (DSA) as well as the governance of generative AI in the Union’s digital space,” Gozi wrote.
X was already under a Commission probe for possible violations of the DSA.
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Grok also generated and spread offensive posts about political leaders in Poland and Turkey, including Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk and Turkish President Recep Erdogan.
Over the weekend, xAI posted a statement apologizing for the hateful content.
“First off, we deeply apologize for the horrific behavior that many experienced. … After careful investigation, we discovered the root cause was an update to a code path upstream of the @grok bot,” the company said in the statement.
Musk and his xAI team launched a new version of Grok Wednesday night amid the backlash. Musk called it “the smartest AI in the world.”
xAI works with other businesses run and largely owned by Musk, including Tesla, the publicly traded automaker, and SpaceX, the U.S. aerospace and defense contractor.
Despite Grok’s recent outburst of hate speech, the U.S. Department of Defense awarded xAI a $200 million contract to develop AI. Anthropic, Google and OpenAI also received AI contracts.