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Brian Armstrong, chief executive officer of Coinbase Global Inc., speaks during the Messari Mainnet summit in New York, on Thursday, Sept. 21, 2023.

Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong is unhappy with JPMorgan Chase’s decision to block crypto-related transactions at its U.K. digital banking subsidiary, Chase UK.

Chase UK earlier this week put out a notice to customers saying it will no longer allow its customers to purchase cryptocurrencies using its debit cards or through bank transfers, citing concerns over the risk of fraud to users from digital tokens.

The bank, which has operated as a standalone entity in the U.K. since 2021, said it was taking the step because “fraudsters are increasingly using crypto assets to steal large sums of money from people.”

“Once in a while we see a bank in the world that decides they want to de-platform this whole industry,” Armstrong said in an interview with CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Thursday.

“I don’t think that’s OK. I don’t think that’s the rule of things in our society. I think the government should decide what is allowed and what’s not.”

The move from Chase UK has not happened in a vacuum. Other British lenders have taken similar steps to bar crypto transactions, citing the risk of fraud.

Examples include NatWest, which placed limits on the amount of cash that can be sent to crypto exchanges, and HSBC, which banned crypto purchases altogether.

Crypto fraud concerns

In its note to customers Tuesday, Chase UK said that it was blocking the use of crypto by its customers due to concerns over a rise in fraud.

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Data from Action Fraud, the U.K. fraud reporting agency, shows that U.K. consumer losses to crypto fraud increased by over 40% in the last year, surpassing £300 million for the first time.

Bitcoin, ether, XRP and other cryptocurrencies are not legal currency.

Originally created as an alternative, online form of money meant to bypass the need for bank accounts and other financial middlemen, they have increasingly been embraced by mainstream financial institutions such as PayPal, Visa, and Mastercard.

But they have long been associated with illicit activities such as money laundering, terrorist financing and illegal gambling, not least due to their pseudonymous nature.

The people transacting in bitcoin and other digital currencies don’t disclose their real identity, making it harder for banks to trace them for suspicious payments versus digital fiat currency transactions.

Legitimizing crypto

Nevertheless, crypto’s proponents say that the industry has matured a great deal in the wake of the collapse of FTX and numerous other scandals. They say it can become part of everyday payments and trading in a way that is legitimate.

For its part, the U.K. has been working to develop legislation that would regulate retail trading in crypto assets.

The Financial Services and Markets Bill is one example of legislation that already includes some provisions on cryptocurrency. That specific law aims to bring crypto assets into the regulatory fold. But it is not a comprehensive law addressing crypto through tailored laws.

In an interview with CNBC’s Arjun Kharpal, Economic Secretary to the Treasury Andrew Griffith said the U.K. could pass a crypto-specific law by April 2024.

Jurisdictions around the world from Dubai to Singapore have been trying to position themselves as crypto-friendly places to encourage firms to set up shop there.

The U.S., meanwhile, has taken a hard line on cryptocurrency firms with its regulators stepping up enforcement action against companies.

Armstrong suggested that the U.K. government should take heed of Chase UK’s move to ban crypto payments — though he acknowledged the country’s ambition to become a “Web3 and crypto hub.”

“The government in the U.K. through [U.K. PM] Rishi Sunak and Andrew Griffith the city minister in London have it made clear they want to make the U.K. a Web3 and crypto hub,” Armstrong said.

“They are trying to attract businesses there. I was disappointed to see Chase UK’s stance on that. I hope that was a misunderstanding that will be clarified in the coming weeks.”

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Amazon Web Services is building equipment to cool Nvidia GPUs as AI boom accelerates

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Amazon Web Services is building equipment to cool Nvidia GPUs as AI boom accelerates

The letters AI, which stands for “artificial intelligence,” stand at the Amazon Web Services booth at the Hannover Messe industrial trade fair in Hannover, Germany, on March 31, 2025.

Julian Stratenschulte | Picture Alliance | Getty Images

Amazon said Wednesday that its cloud division has developed hardware to cool down next-generation Nvidia graphics processing units that are used for artificial intelligence workloads.

Nvidia’s GPUs, which have powered the generative AI boom, require massive amounts of energy. That means companies using the processors need additional equipment to cool them down.

Amazon considered erecting data centers that could accommodate widespread liquid cooling to make the most of these power-hungry Nvidia GPUs. But that process would have taken too long, and commercially available equipment wouldn’t have worked, Dave Brown, vice president of compute and machine learning services at Amazon Web Services, said in a video posted to YouTube.

“They would take up too much data center floor space or increase water usage substantially,” Brown said. “And while some of these solutions could work for lower volumes at other providers, they simply wouldn’t be enough liquid-cooling capacity to support our scale.”

Rather, Amazon engineers conceived of the In-Row Heat Exchanger, or IRHX, that can be plugged into existing and new data centers. More traditional air cooling was sufficient for previous generations of Nvidia chips.

Customers can now access the AWS service as computing instances that go by the name P6e, Brown wrote in a blog post. The new systems accompany Nvidia’s design for dense computing power. Nvidia’s GB200 NVL72 packs a single rack with 72 Nvidia Blackwell GPUs that are wired together to train and run large AI models.

Computing clusters based on Nvidia’s GB200 NVL72 have previously been available through Microsoft or CoreWeave. AWS is the world’s largest supplier of cloud infrastructure.

Amazon has rolled out its own infrastructure hardware in the past. The company has custom chips for general-purpose computing and for AI, and designed its own storage servers and networking routers. In running homegrown hardware, Amazon depends less on third-party suppliers, which can benefit the company’s bottom line. In the first quarter, AWS delivered the widest operating margin since at least 2014, and the unit is responsible for most of Amazon’s net income.

Microsoft, the second largest cloud provider, has followed Amazon’s lead and made strides in chip development. In 2023, the company designed its own systems called Sidekicks to cool the Maia AI chips it developed.

WATCH: AWS announces latest CPU chip, will deliver record networking speed

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Bitcoin rises to fresh record above $112,000, helped by Nvidia-led tech rally

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Bitcoin rises to fresh record above 2,000, helped by Nvidia-led tech rally

The logo of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin can be seen on a coin in front of a Bitcoin chart.

Silas Stein | Picture Alliance | Getty Images

Bitcoin hit a fresh record on Wednesday afternoon as an Nvidia-led rally in equities helped push the price of the cryptocurrency higher into the stock market close.

The price of bitcoin was last up 1.9%, trading at $110,947.49, according to Coin Metrics. Just before 4:00 p.m. ET, it hit a high of $112,052.24, surpassing its May 22 record of $111,999.

The flagship cryptocurrency has been trading in a tight range for several weeks despite billions of dollars flowing into bitcoin exchange traded funds. Bitcoin purchases by public companies outpaced ETF inflows in the second quarter. Still, bitcoin is up just 2% in the past month.

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Bitcoin climbs above $112,000

On Wednesday, tech stocks rallied as Nvidia became the first company to briefly touch $4 trillion in market capitalization. In the same session, investors appeared to shrug off the latest tariff developments from President Donald Trump. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite notched a record close.

While institutions broadly have embraced bitcoin’s “digital gold” narrative, it is still a risk asset that rises and falls alongside stocks depending on what’s driving investor sentiment. When the market is in risk-on mode and investors buy growth-oriented assets like tech stocks, bitcoin and crypto tend to rally with them.

Investors have been expecting bitcoin to reach new records in the second half of the year as corporate treasuries accelerate their bitcoin buying sprees and Congress gets closer to passing crypto legislation.

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Perplexity launches AI-powered web browser for select group of subscribers

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Perplexity launches AI-powered web browser for select group of subscribers

Dado Ruvic | Reuters

Perplexity AI on Wednesday launched a new artificial intelligence-powered web browser called Comet in the startup’s latest effort to compete in the consumer internet market against companies like Google and Microsoft.

Comet will allow users to connect with enterprise applications like Slack and ask complex questions via voice and text, according to a brief demo video Perplexity released on Wednesday.

The browser is available to Perplexity Max subscribers, and the company said invite-only access will roll out to a waitlist over the summer. Perplexity Max costs users $200 per month.

“We built Comet to let the internet do what it has been begging to do: to amplify our intelligence,” Perplexity wrote in a blog post on Wednesday.

Perplexity is best known for its AI-powered search engine that gives users simple answers to questions and links out to the original source material on the web. After the company was accused of plagiarizing content from media outlets, it launched a revenue-sharing model with publishers last year.

In May, Perplexity was in late-stage talks to raise $500 million at a $14 billion valuation, a source familiar confirmed to CNBC. The startup was also approached by Meta earlier this year about a potential acquisition, but the companies did not finalize a deal.

“We will continue to launch new features and functionality for Comet, improve experiences based on your feedback, and focus relentlessly–as we always have–on building accurate and trustworthy AI that fuels human curiosity,” Perplexity said Wednesday.

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