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SHENZHEN, CHINA – 2020/10/05: Chinese coffee shop chain Luckin Coffee logo seen at a store. (Photo by Alex Tai/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images

Chinese coffee giant Luckin Coffee hit 10,000 stores in China in June, surpassing Starbucks as the largest coffee chain brand in the country following rapid nationwide expansion this year.

Founded in 2017, Luckin Coffee burst onto the Chinese coffee scene to challenge Starbucks through affordable coffee options and mobile ordering. China is Starbucks’ second-largest market after the U.S.

Luckin Coffee grew to 10,829 stores in China at the end of June, surpassing Starbucks as the largest coffee chain brand in the country following what one analyst calls an “aggressive” expansion. In comparison, Starbucks operated 6,480 stores in mainland China at the end of the second quarter.

“They are very aggressive in store expansion and in China, it is very common to buy a drink from Luckin for $2 or less after heavy discounts,” said Jianggan Li, founder and CEO of tech research company Momentum Works.

Luckin stores are also of a smaller format compared to Starbucks, which has much larger stores.

Rahul Maheshwari

Early-stage investor

China is traditionally a tea-drinking market, but over the last few years, coffee sales have been increasing steadily, especially in urban areas and among younger professionals.

China’s overall coffee sales will rise at an 8.7% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2022–2027, according to analytics firm GlobalData. CAGR is a measure of investment returns, which takes into account what an investment yields at an annual rate over a specified period.

Aggressive expansion

In the quarter ended June 30, Luckin Coffee opened 1,485 new stores, averaging 16.5 new stores daily. Of the 10,829 stores in China, 7,181 are self-operated and 3,648 are partnership stores, according to the company’s earnings transcript.

The Chinese coffee chain expanded to Singapore in March in its first international foray and has opened 14 stores in the city-state so far, according to a CNBC check.

Cumulative transacting customers surpassed 170 million, while average monthly transacting customers reached 43.07 million in the second quarter, according to the company.

“Luckin was able to expand so fast because of its operating model — which includes self-operated stores and franchises,” said Li of Momentum Works.

Meanwhile, Starbucks’ stores worldwide are company-owned and the American coffee chain does not franchise operations, according to its website. Instead, it sells licenses to operate. In the quarter ended July 2, the company opened 588 new stores — about 40% of Luckin’s count.

Vivian Leung, an office worker residing in Guangzhou, said that there are at least two Luckin Coffee outlets within 50 meters from her apartment.

TIANJIN, CHINA – 2023/07/24: Customers are waiting in front of the counter.

Zhang Peng | Lightrocket | Getty Images

“Franchising unlocks very fast growth because you don’t have to put that amount of capital. Otherwise you will always be limited from growth. The density of Luckin stores is so high where there’s a store in almost every neighborhood,” said Rahul Maheshwari, an early-stage investor in Asia. He previously worked in Beijing at a Chinese venture capital firm and as a general manager with a Chinese app.

Luckin found mass market appeal. Price wise, it is already differentiated from Starbucks. Quantity wise, it’s still better, compared to many of the low end brands, said Li of Momentum Works.

“Luckin stores are also of a smaller format compared to Starbucks, which has much larger stores,” said Maheshwari.

Luckin found mass market appeal. Price wise, it is already differentiated from Starbucks. Quantity wise, it’s still better, compared to many of the low end brands.

Jianggan Li

Founder and CEO at Momentum Works

“As you can imagine, the asset-heavy model is expensive to operate and slow to scale,” said Momentum Works in a report.

Luckin operates a grab-and-go model, where customers order from the app and pick up their orders at the store, unlike Starbucks which offers a cozy environment for people to work and socialize.

As a result, Luckin has lower operating costs and can “break even within a year,” said Maheshwari.

Mass market appeal

Moutai, sometimes called maotai, is a premium distilled Chinese liquor and has been dubbed the “national liquor of China.”

Moutai topped the list of spirits brands with a value of $42.9 billion, according to a 2022 study by valuation consultancy Brand Finance.

Shawn Yang, managing director at Blue Lotus Research Institute, said it was a strategic move to “offer premium products to offset the sense of cheapness from 9.9 yuan per cup.”

“Luckin [extended its] customer base by leveraging the influence of legacy Chinese brands, including Moutai and Coconut Palm,” said Yang in a report.

Other localized hits with the Chinese market include brown sugar boba latte, as well as cheese latte and coconut latte.

“Luckin Coffee has played an important role in deepening the coffee market in China by introducing products which would suit the Chinese customer,” said Maheshwari in a recent blog post.

Making a comeback?

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Trump to extend TikTok deadline for third time, pushing decision out another 90 days

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Trump to extend TikTok deadline for third time, pushing decision out another 90 days

Muhammed Selim Korkutata | Anadolu | Getty Images

For a third time since taking office in January, President Donald Trump plans to extend a deadline that would require China’s ByteDance to divest TikTok’s U.S. business.

“President Trump will sign an additional Executive Order this week to keep TikTok up and running,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement. “As he has said many times, President Trump does not want TikTok to go dark. This extension will last 90 days, which the Administration will spend working to ensure this deal is closed so that the American people can continue to use TikTok with the assurance that their data is safe and secure.”

ByteDance was nearing the deadline of June 19, to sell TikTok’s U.S. operations in order to satisfy a national security law that the Supreme Court upheld just a few days before Trump’s second presidential inauguration. Under the law, app store operators like Apple and Google and internet service providers would be penalized for supporting TikTok.

ByteDance originally faced a Jan. 19 deadline to comply with the national security law, but Trump signed an executive order when he first took office that pushed the deadline to April 5. Trump extended the deadline for the second time a day before that April mark.

Trump told NBC News in May that he would extend the TikTok deadline again if no deal was reached, and he reiterated his plans on Thursday.

Prior to Trump signing the first executive order, TikTok briefly went offline in the U.S. for a day, only to return after the president’s announcement. Apple and Google also removed TikTok from the Apple App Store and Google Play during TikTok’s initial U.S. shut down, but then reinstated the app to their respective app stores in February.

Multiple parties including Oracle, AppLovin, and Billionaire Frank McCourt’s Project Liberty consortium have expressed interest in buying TikTok’s U.S. operations. It’s unclear whether the Chinese government would approve a deal.

— CNBC’s Kevin Breuninger contributed to this report

WATCH: Project Liberty’s bid for TikTok is aligned with U.S. national security priorities.

Frank McCourt: Project Liberty's bid for TikTok is aligned with U.S. national security priorities

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AWS’ custom chip strategy is showing results, and cutting into Nvidia’s AI dominance

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AWS' custom chip strategy is showing results, and cutting into Nvidia's AI dominance

AWS announces new CPU chip: Here's what to know

Amazon Web Services is set to announce an update to its Graviton4 chip that includes 600 gigabytes per second of network bandwidth, what the company calls the highest offering in the public cloud.

Ali Saidi, a distinguished engineer at AWS, likened the speed to a machine reading 100 music CDs a second.

Graviton4, a central processing unit, or CPU, is one of many chip products that come from Amazon’s Annapurna Labs in Austin, Texas. The chip is a win for the company’s custom strategy and putting it up against traditional semiconductor players like Intel and AMD.

But the real battle is with Nvidia in the artificial intelligence infrastructure space.

At AWS’s re:Invent 2024 conference last December, the company announced Project Rainier – an AI supercomputer built for startup Anthropic. AWS has put $8 billion into backing Anthropic.

AWS Senior Director for Customer and Project Engineering Gadi Hutt said Amazon is looking to reduce AI training costs and provide an alternative to Nvidia’s expensive graphics processing units, or GPUs.

Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4 AI model is trained on Trainium2 GPUs, according to AWS, and Project Rainier is powered by over half a million of the chips – an order that would have traditionally gone to Nvidia.

Read more CNBC tech news

Hutt said that while Nvidia’s Blackwell is a higher-performing chip than Trainium2, the AWS chip offers better cost performance.

“Trainium3 is coming up this year, and it’s doubling the performance of Trainium2, and it’s going to save energy by an additional 50%,” he said.

The demand for these chips is already outpacing supply, according to Rami Sinno, director of engineering at AWS’ Annapurna Labs.

“Our supply is very, very large, but every single service that we build has a customer attached to it,” he said.

With Graviton4’s upgrade on the horizon and Project Rainier’s Trainium chips, Amazon is demonstrating its broader ambition to control the entire AI infrastructure stack, from networking to training to inference.

And as more major AI models like Claude 4 prove they can train successfully on non-Nvidia hardware, the question isn’t whether AWS can compete with the chip giant — it’s how much market share it can take.

The release schedule for the Graviton4 update will be provided by the end of June, according to an AWS spokesperson.

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Canva expands from design into analytics with acquisition of MagicBrief

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Canva expands from design into analytics with acquisition of MagicBrief

From left, Cliff Obrecht, Canva’s co-founder and chief operating officer, and George Howes, co-founder and CEO of MagicBrief, pose for a photo at the Cannes Lions festival in Cannes, France, in June 2025.

Canva

Canva has grown into a $32 billion startup through its popular design tools used for easily creating images, marketing material and presentations.

Now the company, with its 12th acquisition, is buying its way into the analytics market.

Canva said on Tuesday that it’s buying MagicBrief, whose technology is used for analyzing ad performance, for an undisclosed sum. With MagicBrief, companies can track spending and engagement on their ads and see what’s working well for competitors.

Around 240 million people use Canva’s products, which compete with offerings from Adobe’s Creative Cloud. The company has been deepening its capabilities in artificial intelligence, incorporating it into photo editing, coding and by incorporating chatbots.

“We feel like, especially with AI, we can really democratize marketing and allow marketers to do a lot more with less,” Cliff Obrecht, Canva’s co-founder and chief operating officer, said in an interview.

Canva, which ranked fifth on CNBC’s latest Disruptor 50 list, has raised over $560 million, and was valued most recently at $32 billion, though that’s a step down from its peak of $40 billion in 2021, when private markets were at their frothiest. Obrecht said the company has $1 billion in the bank.

Canva plans to incorporate MagicBrief into a broader product that it will announce later this year, Obrecht said. In October, Adobe announced the availability of a tool for creating ads with AI and then tracking performance.

Meanwhile, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Reddit are all pushing generative AI systems to boost the reach of online ads. Some marketers have used Meta’s offerings to tweak the visual appearance of their ads with hopes of gaining traction with certain audiences, CNBC reported in December.

Founded in 2022, MagicBrief has 14 employees and is based in Canva’s hometown of Sydney, Australia. In 2023, the company announced a $2 million funding round, with investments from Archangel and Blackbird, which was Canva’s first investor. The startup has tens of millions of dollars in annualized revenue, Obrecht said.

Canva, which started up in 2013, has 5,500 employees, with over $3 billion in annualized revenue. It’s one of the companies that venture capitalists are most excited about as an IPO candidate, but Obrecht said there won’t be an offering this year.

The focus, he said, is winning “over the next 10 years,” and not just hitting quarterly numbers.

“We feel that’s very short-sighted, and public markets do gravitate you more to quarter-on-quarter performance,” he said.

— CNBC’s Jonathan Vanian contributed to this report.

WATCH: The design space overall has a lot of room to run, says Bessemer Venture Partners’ Elliott Robinson

The design space overall has a lot of room to run, says Bessemer Venture Partners' Elliott Robinson

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