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U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chairman Gary Gensler, testifies before the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee during an oversight hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, September 15, 2022.

Evelyn Hockstein | Reuters

U.S. regulators on Tuesday announced a combined $549 million in penalties against Wells Fargo and a raft of smaller or non-U.S. firms that failed to maintain electronic records of employee communications.

The Securities and Exchange Commission disclosed charges and $289 million in fines against 11 firms for “widespread and longstanding failures” in record-keeping, while the Commodity Futures Trading Commission also said it fined four banks a total of $260 million for failing to maintain records required by the agency.

It was regulators’ latest effort to stamp out the pervasive use of secure messaging apps like Signal, Meta‘s WhatsApp or Apple‘s iMessage by Wall Street employees and managers. Starting in late 2021, the watchdogs secured settlements with bigger players including JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Citigroup. Fines related to the issue total more than $2 billion, according to the SEC and CFTC.

“Today’s actions stem from our continuing sweep to ensure that regulated entities, including broker-dealers and investment advisers, comply with their recordkeeping requirements, which are essential for us to monitor and enforce compliance with the federal securities laws,” Sanjay Wadhwa, deputy director of enforcement at the SEC, said in the release.

The firms admitted that from at least 2019, employees used side channels like WhatsApp to discuss company business, failing to preserve records “in violation of federal securities laws,” the SEC said Tuesday.

Wells Fargo biggest offender

Wells Fargo, the fourth-biggest U.S. bank by assets and a relatively small player on Wall Street, racked up the most fines on Tuesday, with $200 million in penalties.

“We are pleased to resolve this matter,” said Wells Fargo spokeswoman Laurie Kight.

French banks BNP Paribas and Societe Generale were fined $110 million each, while the Bank of Montreal was fined $60 million. The SEC also fined Japanese firms Mizuho Securities and SMBC Nikko Securities and boutique U.S. investment banks including Houlihan Lokey, Moelis and Wedbush Securities.

Bank of Montreal has “made significant enhancements to our compliance procedures in recent years” and is pleased to have the matter behind it, said spokesman Jeff Roman.

The other banks penalized Tuesday declined to comment.

Apart from the fines, banks were ordered to “cease and desist” from future violations and hire consultants to review bank policies, the SEC said.

On Wall Street, company records of emails and other communications via official channels are often automatically generated to adhere to requirements that clients are treated fairly. But after some of the industry’s biggest scandals of the past decade hinged on incriminating messages preserved in chatrooms, workers often leaned on side channels to conduct business.

A widespread practice

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Technology

YouTube agrees to pay Trump $24.5 Million to settle lawsuit over suspended account

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YouTube agrees to pay Trump .5 Million to settle lawsuit over suspended account

U.S. President Donald Trump reacts, as he arrives at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, U.S., September 26, 2025.

Elizabeth Frantz | Reuters

YouTube has agreed to pay $24.5 million to settle a lawsuit involving the suspension of President Donald Trump’s account following the U.S. Capitol riots on Jan. 6, 2021.

The settlement “shall not constitute an admission of liability or fault,” on behalf of the defendants or related parties, according to a filing on Monday from the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

Trump sued YouTube, Facebook and Twitter in mid-2021, after the companies suspended his accounts on their platforms over concerns related to the incitement of violence.

Since Trump won a second term in November and returned to the White House in January, the tech companies have been settling their disputes with the president. Facebook-parent Meta said in January that it would pay $25 million to settle its lawsuit with Trump. The following month, Elon Musk’s X, formerly Twitter, agreed to settle its Trump-related case for roughly $10 million.

In August, several Democratic senators, including Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, sent a letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai and YouTube CEO Neal Mohan expressing their concern over a possible settlement with the president.

The senators said in the letter that they worried such an action would be part of a “quid-pro-quo arrangement to avoid full accountability for violating federal competition, consumer protection, and labor laws, circumstances that could result in the company running afoul of federal bribery laws.”

WATCH: President Trump signs TikTok deal.

President Trump signs TikTok deal: Here's what to know

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EA going private in $55 billion deal that will pay shareholders $210 a share

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EA going private in  billion deal that will pay shareholders 0 a share

Electronic Arts to be taken private by PIF, Silver Lake and Affinity Partners for $55B

Electronic Arts said Monday that it has agreed to be acquired by the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia, Silver Lake and Affinity Partners in an all-cash deal worth $55 billion.

Shareholders of the company will receive $210 per share in cash.

EA stock climbed 5% Monday. Shares gained about 15% Friday, closing at $193.35, after the Wall Street Journal reported that the company was nearing a deal to go private.

PIF is rolling over its existing 9.9% stake in the company and will, by far, be the majority investor in the new structure, people close to the deal told CNBC’s David Faber.

Affinity CEO Jared Kushner, who is President Donald Trump‘s son-in-law, touted EA’s “bold vision ​for ​the ​future” in a release announcing the deal.

“I’ve admired their ​ability to create iconic, lasting experiences, ​and ​as ​someone ​who ​grew up playing their ​games ​- and now enjoys them with his ​kids – I couldn’t be ​more ​excited about ​what’s ​ahead,” Kushner said in a statement.

The group of companies is making a total $36 billion equity investment, with $20 billion in debt financing from JPMorgan, according to the release. JPMorgan was brought in a couple of weeks ago, people familiar with the deal told Faber.

Read more CNBC tech news

The take-private deal for the maker of popular games like Battlefield, The Sims and the Madden series of NFL games, among others, is set to be the largest leveraged buyout in Wall Street history.

In a note to employees, EA CEO Andrew Wilson said he is “excited to continue as CEO.”

“Our new partners bring deep experience across sports, gaming, and entertainment,’ he wrote. “They are committed with conviction to EA – they believe in our people, our leadership, and the long-term vision we are now building together.”

The deal is expected to close in the first quarter of fiscal year 2027.

There is a 45-day window to allow for other proposals, people familiar with the terms of the deal told Faber. The deal talks started in the spring, the people said.

Silver Lake, which is led by co-CEOs Egon Durban and Greg Mondre, is also one of the key investors in Trump’s push to get TikTok under U.S. control.

CNBC has reached out to EA for further comment and information on the deal.

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A look at OpenAI’s tangled web of dealmaking

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A look at OpenAI's tangled web of dealmaking

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speaks to media following a Q&A at the OpenAI data center in Abilene, Texas, U.S., Sept. 23, 2025.

Shelby Tauber | Reuters

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is everywhere.

His artificial intelligence startup, now valued at $500 billion, has been inking deals valued in the tens to hundreds of billions of dollars with infrastructure partners, even as it continues to burn mounds of cash.

Those expenditures are driving the market.

The Nasdaq and S&P 500 rose to record highs this week after Nvidia agreed to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI. That followed a $300 billion deal between OpenAI and Oracle in July as part of the the Stargate program, a $500 billion infrastructure project that’s also being funded by SoftBank.

Its commitments don’t stop there. CoreWeave on Thursday said it’s agreed to provide OpenAI up to $22.4 billion in AI infrastructure, an increase from the $11.9 billion it initially announced in March. Earlier this month, chipmaker Broadcom said it had secured a new $10 billion customer, and analysts were quick to point to OpenAI. 

While OpenAI says that scaling is key to driving innovation and future AI breakthroughs, investors and analysts are beginning to raise their eyebrows over the mindboggling sums, as well as OpenAI’s reliance on an increasingly interconnected web of infrastructure partners. 

OpenAI took a $350 million stake in CoreWeave ahead of its IPO in March, for instance. Nvidia formalized its financial stake in OpenAI by participating in a $6.6 billion funding round in October. Oracle is spending about $40 billion on Nvidia chips to power one of OpenAI’s Stargate data centers, according to a May report from the Financial Times. Earlier this month, CoreWeave disclosed an order worth at least $6.3 billion from Nvidia. 

And through its $100 billion investment in OpenAI, Nvidia will get equity in the startup and earn revenue at the same time.

OpenAI is only expected to generate $13 billion in revenue this year, according to the company’s CFO Sarah Friar. She told CNBC that technology booms require bold bets on infrastructure. 

“When the internet was getting started, people kept feeling like, ‘Oh, we’re over-building, there’s too much,'” Friar said. “Look where we are today, right?”

Altman told CNBC in August that he’s willing to run the company at a loss in order to prioritize growth and its investments. 

‘Troubling signal’

But some analysts are raising red flags, arguing that OpenAI’s deal with Nvidia is reminiscent of vendor financing patterns that helped burst the dot-com bubble in the early 2000s.

Nvidia has been the biggest winner of the AI boom so far because it produces the graphics processing units (GPUs) that are necessary to train models and run large AI workloads. Nvidia’s investment in OpenAI, which will be paid out in installments over several years, will help the startup build out data centers that are based around its GPUs. 

“You don’t have to be a skeptic about AI technology’s promise in general to see this announcement as a troubling signal about how self-referential the entire space has become,” Bespoke Investment Group wrote in a note to clients on Tuesday. “If NVDA has to provide the capital that becomes its revenues in order to maintain growth, the whole ecosystem may be unsustainable.” 

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI (L), and Jensen Huang CEO of Nvidia.

Reuters

Peter Boockvar, chief investment officer at One Point BFG Wealth Partners, said names of companies from the late 1990′s were ringing in his ears after the OpenAI-Nvidia deal was announced. 

A key difference, however, is that this transaction is “so much bigger in terms of dollars,” he wrote in a note.

“For this whole massive experiment to work without causing large losses, OpenAI and its peers now have got to generate huge revenues and profits to pay for all the obligations they are signing up for and at the same time provide a return to its investors,” Boockvar said.

An OpenAI spokesperson referred CNBC to comments from Altman and Friar this week, adding that the company is pursuing “a once-in-a-century opportunity that demands ambition equal to the moment.”

The total amount of demand for compute could reach a staggering 200 gigawatts by 2030, according to Bain & Company’s 2025 Technology Report. Building enough data centers to meet this anticipated demand would cost about $500 billion a year, meaning AI companies would have to generate a combined $2 trillion in annual revenue to cover those costs.

Even if companies throw their whole weight behind investing in the cloud and data centers, “the amount would still fall $800 billion short of the revenue needed to fund the full investment,” Bain said.

There’s a clear uphill battle ahead, but OpenAI’s Altman brushed off concerns on Tuesday, rejecting the idea that the infrastructure spending spree is overkill.

“This is what it takes to deliver AI,” Altman told CNBC. “Unlike previous technological revolutions or previous versions of the internet, there’s so much infrastructure that’s required, and this is a small sample of it.”

–CNBC’s Yun Li and MacKenzie Sigalos contributed to this report

WATCH: OpenAI’s Sam Altman defends Stargate expansion as demand for AI soars

OpenAI's Sam Altman defends Stargate expansion as demand for AI soars

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