Google‘s popular online and mobile calendars no longer include reference to the first day of Black History Month or Women’s History month, among other holidays and events.

The company’s calendar previously had those days marked at the start of February and March, respectively, but they don’t appear for 2025.

The Verge first reported on the removals from Google Calendar late last week, which followed comments from users.

A Google spokesperson said the changes took place in the middle of last year.

“Some years ago, the Calendar team started manually adding a broader set of cultural moments in a wide number of countries around the world,” the spokesperson said in an email. “We got feedback that some other events and countries were missing — and maintaining hundreds of moments manually and consistently globally wasn’t scalable or sustainable,” the spokesperson added.

Google has made numerous changes lately that align with an altered political environment in the U.S. The company recently began scrapping its diversity hiring goals, becoming the latest tech giant to change its approach to hiring and promotions following the election of President Donald Trump. One of Trump’s first acts as president after taking office in January was to sign an executive order ending the government’s DEI programs and putting federal officials overseeing those initiatives on leave.

In late January, the company said it would change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America” in Google Maps after the Trump administration updates its “official government sources.” Google also said it would follow Trump and start using the name “Mount McKinley” for the mountain in Alaska currently called Denali.

On Google Calendar, the company has removed other events as well. It previously had Nov. 1 as the first day of Indigenous Peoples Month and June 1 as the start of LGBTQ+ Pride month.

The company spokesperson said that in mid-2024, the company “returned to showing only public holidays and national observances from timeanddate.com globally, while allowing users to manually add other important moments.” The timeanddate.com website says its company has 40 employees and is based in Norway.

Google Calendar users noticed the changes and left comments in the user support web pages and on social media. The user support site previously received comments from people upset about the company adding such observances.

WATCH: Google kills diversity hiring targets

Jyoti Bansal knows about weird acquisitions.

Eight years ago, his software company, AppDynamics, was on the doorstep of a blockbuster IPO. A day before the offering, Cisco swooped in and bought the company for $2.7 billion

Now Bansal is at the center of an equally unconventional combination.

Since 2020, Bansal has been running two startups as co-founder and CEO: Harness and Traceable. The former’s technology helps companies manage code and the latter’s software observes where companies are unintentionally letting out sensitive data.

Late this month or early next, Harness and Traceable will merge. The resulting company will have 1,100 employees, $250 million in expected 2025 annualized revenue, a 50% growth rate and a valuation of about $5 billion.

“It’s about the same size that AppDynamics was when we were about to go public,” Bansal told CNBC in an interview last week.

Through the combination, Bansal said, Harness will be able to sell more products to customers, and Traceable will be better insulated from competitors like HashiCorp, which IBM has agreed to buy, and Akamai, which acquired security startup Noname last year.

This time, Bansal wants an active stock ticker.

In an interview last year with CNBC’s Make It, Bansal said he was unfulfilled after selling AppDynamics and that he didn’t finish what he had started.

“Everyone told me, ‘You should retire. Go on the beach. What else do you need to do?'” Bansal said. “That was my first instinct, as well. I wanted to trek in the Himalayas, hike Machu Picchu, do a safari in Africa, see the fjords in Norway. In six months, my bucket list was done. And I started to realize: That’s not it for me.”

Bansal got back to work and set up Big Labs, a studio for exploring startup ideas. Big Labs spawned Harness in 2017 and then Traceable in 2020. Sanjay Nagaraj, Traceable’s other co-founder, recalled working on the security startup in a dedicated Big Labs room at Harness’ San Francisco headquarters.

The arrangement was unorthodox.

“I’ve never done this before, backed a CEO to run two companies simultaneously,” said Harrick, who joined Institutional Venture Partners in 2001 and sits on the boards of Harness and Traceable. “But Jyoti is that good. He’s not only a great executive, but he hires well and he delegates well, and so I just talked to Jyoti. I said, ‘This is a major risk.’ I got his assurance he wouldn’t do a third one.”

Establishing Harness and Traceable as separate companies made sense to Bansal at the time, because their products would typically get sold to different buyers within an organization. But that’s changed in the past year or two, he said, as engineering and technology leaders have started to also make decisions on procuring tools for securing code and data.

Employees took notice of the shift and, during all-hands meetings at both companies, would repeatedly ask Bansal about a consolidation, he said. Questions also came from clients.

“The Harness team would go set up a meeting with an executive at a bank or some of our customers,” Bansal said. “I would go into the meeting and the executive would say, ‘It’s a one-hour meeting. Can we save the last 15 minutes? Because I also want to talk about Traceable.'”

Bansal was effectively the first IT person at both companies, setting up the same Google productivity apps and Carta equity management software as each got started. A spokesperson said 70% of Traceable’s largest customers are Harness customers as well.

The cultures were also similar. As Harness and Traceable matured, Bansal picked a general manager to run each distinctive new product, or module. When examining revenue for the modules, executives at both startups rely on a theory that Battery Ventures investor Neeraj Agrawal calls “triple, triple, double, double, double,” or T2D3. The model, which Agrawal wrote about in TechCrunch in 2015, describes the annualized revenue growth that cloud software startups can target.

In November, Bansal told the two boards that his companies were on converging paths and that it would be difficult to keep them from competing with each other. He got clearance for a merger.

Initially, Traceable will operate as as its own unit within Harness, the parent company, and Nagaraj will be general manager. Bansal said the structure may change in the future.

He’s confident that the technologies will pair well together and can benefit from tighter integrations. Harness will be able to help clients understand the origin of their source code, and Traceable can show how people are using it.

Harrick calls it’s a good outcome, and said he’s excited to consolidate his bet on Bansal.

“I think it’s a benefit for all investors for him to focus on operating one company instead of two,” Harrick said.

WATCH: AppDynamics founder is building a new start-up

France’s artificial intelligence sector will receive 109 billion euros ($112.6 billion) of private investment in the “coming years,” President Emmanuel Macron announced Sunday ahead of the country’s global AI summit.

Speaking with French broadcaster TF1, Macron described the multibillion-euro pledge as “the equivalent for France of what the United States announced with Stargate,” referring to U.S. President Donald Trump’s massive $500 billion private AI investment project.

The U.S. joint venture, dubbed Stargate, will see OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank spend up to $500 billion on AI infrastructure in America over the next four years.

Meanwhile, the French financing will include commitments from the United Arab Emirates, American and Canadian investments funds and French companies like telecommunications firms Iliad and Orange, and aerospace and defense group Thales.

A few days before France’s AI Action Summit, which kicked off on Monday, the UAE said it would invest between 30 billion euros and 50 billion euros in the construction of a one-gigawatt AI data center in France as part of a campus focused on the technology’s development.

Iliad committed to spending 3 billion euros on AI infrastructure, while Paris-based AI firm Mistral announced plans to invest billions to build its own data center in France.

Victor Riparbelli, CEO of British AI startup Synthesia, said Macron’s 109-billion-euro investment plan was a “great” thing for the European AI ecosystem — but added that more is needed to ensure the continent is able to compete with tech heavyweights like the U.S. and China.

“We need to set the right foundations for Europe to thrive as an ecosystem,” Riparbelli told CNBC’s Arjun Kharpal Monday.

“It’s great that we invest more in infrastructure. I don’t think it’s the sole solution to the problem. There’s lots of other things we need to worry about as well. But what I think is really great, is there’s political will to actually do something,” he added.

Big-name attendees include U.S. Vice President JD Vance, EU President Ursula von der Leyen, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Microsoft President Brad Smith, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei.

Elon Musk is currently not slated to attend.

On Saturday, Axios reported that OpenAI’s Altman will this week warn world leaders they need to widen their AI mindset so that, rather than just focusing on risk — as has often been the case in Europe — leaders will instead look to embrace growth and opportunity.

The emergence of Chinese firm DeepSeek’s breakthrough open-source AI model R1 in recent weeks has stirred debates in the industry around the huge capital expenditures companies are committing toward computing infrastructure to train their systems.

DeepSeek said total training costs for its newest AI model amounted to $5.6 million. However, doubts have been raised about DeepSeek’s claims.

Last month, semiconductor research firm SemiAnalysis estimated that DeepSeek’s hardware spend is higher than $500 million over the company’s history, adding that the startup’s research and development and ownership costs are significant.

On Sunday, Google DeepMind’s Hassabis said DeepSeek’s AI model is “probably the best work” he’s seen out of China — but added that, from a technology point of view, it was not a big change.

“Despite the hype, there’s no actual new scientific advance … it’s using known techniques [in AI],” Hassabis said, adding that the hype around Deepseek has been “exaggerated a little bit.”

Nevertheless, with companies spending billions on data centers filled with advanced semiconductors from U.S. chipmaker Nvidia, DeepSeek’s new model has led to worries of a potential bubble in the AI space.

Ahead of the AI summit, Mike Capone, CEO of U.S. software firm Qlik, told CNBC that DeepSeek is likely to be a major discussion point this week as world governments grapple with China’s AI advances.

“This summit isn’t just about AI—it’s about influence,” Capone told CNBC on Friday. “Expect a strategic messaging war as U.S., French, and UK AI leaders downplay DeepSeek’s relevance while China works to prove it’s not just catching up — it’s setting the pace.”

“AI diplomacy is now as critical as AI development. The power struggle won’t be about who builds the best model; it’ll be about who controls the AI narrative,” he added.

– CNBC’s Arjun Kharpal contributed to this report