The value of bitcoin exceeded the threshold of $66,895 in October for the first time in history.
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Bitcoin rose to its highest level in more than a month on Wednesday, as traders got excited about the prospects of a spot bitcoin ETF following a series of recent applications from companies including BlackRock.
The price of bitcoin jumped nearly 10% to $30,621.80, its highest level since April, according to Coin Metris, extending gains from earlier in the day.
Investors are growing bullish about the prospects of BlackRock and other major institutional names getting involved in digital assets.
That’s despite all the bad news that’s been surrounding the crypto space of late, with the market still reeling from the scandal of FTX’s collapse and the ensuing regulatory fallout.
“The slate of spot bitcoin ETF application announcements by larger institutions has definitely brought back bullishness into the crypto markets,” Vijay Ayyar, head of international markets at CoinDCX, India’s largest crypto exchange, told CNBC.
“We also hit major support at $25K for BTC, and we’ve seen this move be driven more by pure spot buying rather than a short liquidation type move which is quite healthy,” Ayyar said.
“Market structure wise on BTC we broke a major downtrend that started in April this year and lasted around 2 months, hence most traders would be looking for us to test at least $32,000. Breaking that level opens up $36,000 and then $45,000 to 48,000.”
ETF announcements
Earlier this week, BlackRock submitted an application for a spot bitcoin ETF, which would track bitcoin’s underlying market price. Crypto proponents say this would give investors exposure to bitcoin without them having to own the underlying asset.
Coinbase is listed as the bitcoin custodian for the proposed BlackRock ETF. BlackRock has an existing strategic partnership with Coinbase. The major U.S. crypto exchange has been undergoing a period of hardship lately, under huge regulatory pressure from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Subsequent to BlackRock’s announcement, a litany of other asset management firms have filed their own applications for a bitcoin ETF, including WisdomTree.
Elsewhere, investors are keeping a close watch on macroeconomic indicators for a sense of movement in the crypto market.
Previously, digital coins have been tied to moves in financial markets more broadly, with bitcoin often tracking the price of U.S. equity markets. So investors have been watching data on inflation and the health of the economy for a sense of where bitcoin may end up trading next.
“Overall, crypto has also been lagging the traditional equity markets, hence this is also kind of a catchup move in a sense,” Ayyar said.
Thomas Fuller | SOPA Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images
Ambarella shares popped 19% after a report that the chip designer is currently working with bankers on a potential sale.
Bloomberg reported the news, citing sources familiar with the matter.
While no deal is imminent, the sources told Bloomberg that the firm may draw interest from semiconductor companies looking to improve their automotive business. Private equity firms have already expressed interest, according to the report.
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The Santa Clara, California-based company is known for its system-on-chip semiconductors and software used for edge artificial intelligence. Ambarella chips are used in the automotive sector for electronic mirrors and self-driving assistance systems.
Shares have slumped about 18% year to date. The company’s market capitalization last stood at nearly $2.6 billion.
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.
The sales are worth nearly $15 million at Tuesday’s opening price.
The transactions are the first sale in Huang’s plan to sell as many as 600,000 shares of Nvidia through the end of 2025. It’s a plan that was announced in March, and it’d be worth $873 million at Tuesday’s opening price.
The Nvidia founder still owns more than 800 million Nvidia shares, according to Monday’s SEC filing. Huang has a net worth of about $126 billion, ranking him 12th on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Nvidia stock is up more than 800% since December 2022 after OpenAI’s ChatGPT was first released to the public. That launch drew attention to Nvidia’s graphics processing units, or GPUs, which were needed to develop and power the artificial intelligence service.
The company’s chips remain in high demand with the majority of the AI chip market, and Nvidia has introduced two subsequent generations of its AI GPU technology.
Nvidia continues to grow. Its stock is up 9% this year, even as the company faces export control issues that could limit foreign markets for its AI chips.
In May, the company reported first-quarter earnings that showed the chipmaker’s revenue growing 69% on an annual basis to $44 billion during the quarter.
Dario Amodei, Anthropic CEO, speaking on CNBC’s Squawk Box outside the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Jan. 21st, 2025.
Gerry Miller | CNBC
Anthropic‘s use of books to train its artificial intelligence model Claude was “fair use” and “transformative,” a federal judge ruled late on Monday.
Amazon-backed Anthropic’s AI training did not violate the authors’ copyrights since the large language models “have not reproduced to the public a given work’s creative elements, nor even one author’s identifiable expressive style,” wrote U.S. District Judge William Alsup.
“The purpose and character of using copyrighted works to train LLMs to generate new text was quintessentially transformative,” Alsup wrote. “Like any reader aspiring to be a writer.”
The decision was a significant win for AI companies as legal battles play out over the use and application of copyrighted works in developing and training LLMs. Alsup’s ruling begins to establish the legal limits and opportunities for the industry going forward.
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A spokesperson for Anthropic said in a statement that the company was “pleased” with the ruling and that the decision was, “Consistent with copyright’s purpose in enabling creativity and fostering scientific progress.”
CNBC has reached out to the plaintiffs for comment.
The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, was brought by authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson in August. The suit alleged that Anthropic built a “multibillion-dollar business by stealing hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books.”
Alsup did, however, order a trial on the pirated material that Anthropic put into its central library of content, even though the company did not use it for AI training.
“That Anthropic later bought a copy of a book it earlier stole off the internet will not absolve it of liability for the theft, but it may affect the extent of statutory damages,” the judge wrote.