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Components manufactured by Arm sit inside a demonstration ARMmbed parking meter on display on the second day of Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Feb. 28, 2017.

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Apple has struck a deal with Arm through 2040 and “beyond,” Arm said in a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing Tuesday.

The news indicates that Apple has secured access to a core piece of intellectual property, the Arm architecture, used in its iPhone and Mac chips, for the foreseeable future.

Arm, owned by SoftBank, is set to debut on the Nasdaq stock exchange in the coming weeks at a total valuation that could be as high as $52 billion, which would be the biggest technology initial public offering this year.

For Arm, its note about the Apple deal indicates that at least one of its most important partners will continue to use the company’s technology for years, quelling some fears that the change in Arm’s corporate structure could prompt some of its customers into looking for technological alternatives.

“Further, we have entered into a new long-term agreement with Apple that extends beyond 2040, continuing our longstanding relationship of collaboration with Apple and Apple’s access to the Arm architecture,” Arm said in its updated SEC filing.

Arm’s architecture is used in nearly every smartphone chip, including Apple’s A-series for iPhones. Arm’s instruction set outlines how a central processor works at its most basic level, such as how to do arithmetic or access computer memory. Switching large software projects to other instruction sets is expensive, difficult and time consuming.

Arm, originally founded in 1990, started growing fiercely after the iPhone came out in 2007 and smartphone makers needed chips that were geared for low-power usage, especially compared with the x86 architecture used in PC and server chips by Intel and AMD.

Cornerstone investors

One reason firms such as Apple use Arm’s architecture is because it has not been owned by a competitor. Arm, a British company, licensed its technology to all comers, and its customers could plan to invest billions in developing Arm chips without worrying that their access to the technology could be curtailed.

The company said 230 billion chips have shipped using Arm’s architecture, although about half the company’s royalties revenue comes from products released between 1990 and 2012, according to the filing.

Concerns over access to Arm technology is one of the main reasons regulators blocked Nvidia’s bid to buy Arm early last year, leading to this fall’s IPO.

Apple, Google, Nvidia, Samsung, AMD, Intel, Cadence, Synopsis, Samsung and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company have expressed interest in buying some Arm shares as part of the offering, as much as $735 million in total according to the filing, which would give those companies a stake in Arm’s ownership and some say in how it is managed. They’re referred to as “cornerstone investors.”

An Arm representative declined to comment and referred to the SEC filing. Apple representatives didn’t immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.

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AI startup Cursor raises $2.3 billion funding round at $29.3 billion valuation

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AI startup Cursor raises .3 billion funding round at .3 billion valuation

Emilija Manevska | Moment | Getty Images

Artificial intelligence startup Cursor on Thursday announced it has closed a $2.3 billion funding round at a $29.3 billion post-money valuation, nearly triple what it was worth as of its last raise in June.

Tune in at 4:30 p.m. ET as Cursor CEO Michael Truell joins “Closing Bell: Overtime” to discuss the funding round. Watch in real time on CNBC+ or the CNBC Pro stream.

Cursor built a popular AI coding tool that helps software developers generate, edit and review code. Its parent company, Anysphere, is an applied research lab that was founded in 2022.

Cursor is one of just a handful of AI startups, including OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Safe Superintelligence and Thinking Machines, that are valued at over $10 billion.

Investors including Accel, Thrive Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, DST Global, Coatue, Nvidia and Google participated in its latest funding round, according to a blog post.

“This funding will allow us to invest deeply in our research and build Cursor’s next magical moments,” Cursor said.

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Since the tool first launched in 2023, Cursor said it has crossed $1 billion in annualized revenue and swelled to more than 300 employees.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang called the company his “favorite enterprise AI service” in an interview on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” in October.

The company said its in-house models generate more code than “almost” any other large language models in the world.

The coding tool market has grown more crowded in recent months as it’s proved to be a lucrative AI use case. Cursor competes with companies like OpenAI, Anthropic and Cognition, which acquired the AI coding startup Windsurf in July.

OpenAI approached Anysphere earlier this year about potentially purchasing Cursor, but the deal failed to gain traction, as CNBC previously reported. OpenAI was also briefly in talks to acquire Windsurf before ultimately introducing its own coding tool called Codex in May.

In September, Anthropic said its coding tool Claude Code has already generated more than $500 million in run-rate revenue for the company since its full launch in May. As of July, Windsurf was generating $82 million in annual recurring revenue, Cognition said in a blog post at the time.

“Internally, we often talk about how high the ceiling is for how great Cursor can become, and how much work still remains to get there,” Cursor said.

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Verizon chairman Mark Bertolini says the board ‘needed to act’ to revive company

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Verizon chairman Mark Bertolini says the board 'needed to act' to revive company

Mark Bertolini on new role as Verizon chairman: Losing 30% share over the last 8 years is an issue

Verizon chairman Mark Bertolini said Thursday that the company’s new CEO, former PayPal boss Dan Schulman, is working to revive Verizon from its period of share losses under former CEO Hans Vestberg.

Bertolini, who is also the Oscar Health CEO and who was named Verizon chairman last month, told CNBC’s Becky Quick on “Squawk Box” that the company needs to “do something different” as it undergoes its leadership change.

“Verizon has gone from number one in market cap, bond ratings and market share to number three. And the network isn’t as differentiated as it used to be, in large part because everybody’s been spending money to put these 5G networks in place,” Bertolini said. “So losing 30% share over the last eight years is an issue, and we have to do something different.”

In October, the company announced Schulman would be replacing Vestberg, who had led the company since 2018. In a statement at the time, Schulman said Verizon was at a “critical juncture” and that he believed the company had a “clear opportunity to redefine our trajectory.”

Schulman previously led PayPal through significant revenue growth and has served on Verizon’s board of directors since 2018.

Vestberg is remaining on the the board of directors until the 2026 annual meeting and serving as a special advisor through Oct. 4, 2026.

Bertolini said Thursday that Schulman is evaluating underlying cost structures and other aspects of the company to ensure its success.

“We believe that once we have that plan in place, we’ll have a good story,” Bertolini said. “The Street reacted early on that there’s going to be a price war; I think it’s less about price war than the value of what we’re offering to people through the product.”

Bertolini added that Schulman will be revealing his plan for turning around the company “sooner rather than later.”

“The board needed to act, and we acted,” Bertolini said.

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Musk’s xAI raises $15 billion in latest funding round

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Musk's xAI raises  billion in latest funding round

Elon Musk announced his new company xAI, which he says has the goal to understand the true nature of the universe.

Jaap Arriens | Nurphoto | Getty Images

Elon Musk‘s artificial intelligence company xAI has raised $15 billion from investors, sources familiar with the matter told CNBC’s David Faber.

The funding adds another $5 billion to the $10 billion round CNBC reported on in September that valued the startup at $200 billion. Sources told CNBC that a lot of the money will fund graphic processing units that underpin large language models.

Artificial intelligence startups have reached sky high valuations in recent months as they raise massive amounts of capital to power seemingly endless demand for foundational models.

In September, AI startup Anthropic closed a $13 billion funding round that roughly tripled its valuation from March. Sam Altman’s OpenAI in October closed a $6.6 billion share sale at a $500 billion valuation.

Last last week, Tesla shareholders voted to approve Musk’s massive pay package worth nearly $1 trillion, and voted on a proposal for the company to invest in xAI.

Brandon Ehrhart, general counsel at Tesla, said there were more votes for than against, but noted the abstentions and said the company is considering next steps on the issue.

This is breaking news. Please refresh for updates.

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