David Wadhwani, senior vice president of digital media for Adobe, speaks during the launch of Adobe Creative Cloud and CS6 in San Francisco, April 23, 2012.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Britain’s top competition watchdog said Tuesday that Adobe‘s proposed $20 billion acquisition of Figma could harm the U.K.’s digital design sector, findings that could mean a major setback for the merger.
The Competition and Markets Authority said the deal could “eliminate competition,” “reduce innovation” and “remove Figma as a threat to Adobe’s flagship Photoshop and Illustrator products,” according to a release. The findings are provisional, but the regulator said it will investigate potential remedies, “which could include blocking the deal outright.”
Adobe announced plans to buy Figma, which allows users to collaborate on app and website design, for $20 billion in September last year. In addition to regulatory probes in the U.K., the deal has been under scrutiny from the U.S. Department of Justice and the European Union.
“Our provisional conclusion is therefore that the Merger would remove competition between close competitors and an important competitive constraint on Figma, in a market in which Figma is already the strongest player by far and there are few other competitive constraints,” the CMA wrote in the release.
A representative for Figma told CNBC the company is “disappointed” by the CMA’s findings and that they “strongly disagree” with the idea that Figma competes with Adobe or will do so in the future.
“The facts are Figma operates in a dynamic and highly-competitive market for product design and development, and Figma has not spent a single dollar or hired a single engineer to build creative tools,” the spokesperson said. “We remain committed to the deal, confident in the facts, and convinced our proposed combination with Adobe is a win for consumers and should be approved.”
Adobe said it is “disappointed” and disagrees with the CMA’s perspective.
“Adobe and Figma will deliver significant value to customers,” Adobe told CNBC in a statement. “We are reviewing the provisional findings and will reengage with the CMA on the facts and merits of the case.”
David Wadhwani, a key Adobe executive behind the Figma deal, expressed frustration in October over the slow pace of regulatory approval. The company has previously said it expects to close the deal this year, and Adobe has agreed to pay Figma $1 billion if either the merger is not completed by March 2024 or it is rejected by regulators.
The CMA requested responses from Adobe and Figma by Dec. 19. The regulator said a final decision will be issued by Feb. 25 next year.
–CNBC’s Jordan Novet contributed to this report.
Watch: CNBC’s interview with Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman (L) speaks with Microsoft Chief Technology Officer and Executive VP of Artificial Intelligence Kevin Scott during the Microsoft Build conference at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington, on May 21, 2024.
Jason Redmond | AFP | Getty Images
Investors can’t get enough of artificial intelligence, despite worries over the sector’s excessively high valuations.
Both Apple and Microsoft reached a market capitalization of over $4 trillion after their shares rose. It was the first time Apple hit that milestone, though it closed just shy of that level.
Tech companies can’t get enough of each other, either.
Nvidia announced a $1 trillion investment in Nokia, which the Finnish company said will go toward developing its AI plans. For those, like me, who remember Nokia as a company that made the most desirable and bullet-proof phones: It primarily produces cellular equipment now.
Meanwhile, with its 27% stake in OpenAI’s for-profit business, Microsoft is potentially sitting on a goldmine — provided AI finds its footing as a sustainable, revenue-generating business in the long run. OpenAI on Tuesday announced it had completed its restructuring as a nonprofit with a controlling stake in its for-profit arm.
It’s not just Microsoft. Investors who have poured money into tech could potentially gain big — as Cathie Wood of Ark Invest says, “If our expectations for AI … are correct, we are at the very beginning of a technology revolution.”
What you need to know today
And finally…
Jerome Powell, chairman of the US Federal Reserve, during the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank Fall meetings at the IMF headquarters in Washington, DC, US, on Thursday, Oct. 16, 2025.
Markets are assigning a nearly 100% probability that the Federal Open Market Committee will approve a second consecutive quarter percentage point, or 25 basis point, reduction in the federal funds rate. The overnight lending benchmark is currently targeted between 4%-4.25%.
Beyond that, policymakers are likely to debate, among other things, the future path of reductions, the challenges posed by a lack of economic data and the timetable for ending the reduction in the Fed’s asset portfolio of Treasurys and mortgage-backed securities.
A man walks past a logo of SK Hynix at the lobby of the company’s Bundang office in Seongnam on January 29, 2021.
Jung Yeon-Je | AFP | Getty Images
South Korea’s SK Hynix on Wednesday posted record quarterly revenue and profit, boosted by a strong demand for its high bandwidth memory used in generative AI chipsets.
Here are SK Hynix’s third-quarter results versus LSEG SmartEstimates, which are weighted toward forecasts from analysts who are more consistently accurate:
Revenue: 24.45 trillion won ($17.13 billion) vs. 24.73 trillion won
Operating profit: 11.38 trillion won vs. 11.39 trillion won
Revenue rose about 39% in the September quarter compared with the same period a year earlier, while operating profit surged 62%, year on year.
On a quarter-on-quarter basis, revenue was up 10%, while operating profit grew 24%.
SK Hynix makes memory chips that are used to store data and can be found in everything from servers to consumer devices such as smartphones and laptops.
The company has benefited from a boom in artificial intelligence as a key supplier of high-bandwidth memory or HBM chips used to power AI data center servers.
“As demand across the memory segment has soared due to customers’ expanding investments in AI infrastructure, SK Hynix once again surpassed the record-high performance of the previous quarter due to increased sales of high value-added products,” SK Hynix said in its earnings release.
HBM falls into the broader category of dynamic random access memory, or DRAM — a type of semiconductor memory used to store data and program code that can be found in PCs, workstations and servers.
SK Hynix has set itself apart in the DRAM market by getting an early lead in HBM and establishing itself as the main supplier to the world’s leading AI chip designer, Nvidia.
However, its main competitors, U.S.-based Micron and South Korean-based tech giant Samsung, have been working to catch up in the space.
“With the innovation of AI technology, the memory market has shifted to a new paradigm and demand has begun to spread to all product areas,” SK Hynix Chief Financial Officer Kim Woohyun said in the earnings release.
“We will continue to strengthen our AI memory leadership by responding to customer demand through market-leading products and differentiated technological capabilities,” he added.
The HBM market is expected to continue to boom over the next few years to around $43 billion by 2027, giving strong earnings leverage to memory manufacturers such as SK Hynix, MS Hwang, research director at Counterpoint Research, told CNBC.
“[F]or SK Hynix to continue generating profits, it’ll be important for the company to maintain and enhance its competitive edge,” he added.
A report from Counterpoint Research earlier this month showed that SK Hynix held a leading 38% share of the DRAM market by revenue in the second quarter of the year, increasing its shares after having overtaken Samsung in the first quarter.
The report added that the global HBM market grew 178% year over year in the second quarter, and SK Hynix dominated the space with a 64% share.
Celestica CEO Rob Mionis explained how his company designs and manufactures infrastructure that enables artificial intelligence in a Tuesday interview with CNBC’s Jim Cramer.
“If AI is a speeding freight train, we’re laying the tracks ahead of the freight train,” Mionis said.
He pushed back against the notion that the AI boom is a bubble, saying that the technology has gone from a “nice to have” to a “must have.”
Celestica reported earnings Monday after close, managing to beat estimates and raise its full-year outlook. The stock hit a 52-week high during Tuesday’s session and closed up more than 8%. Celestica has had a huge run over the past several months, and shares are currently up 253.68% year-to-date.
Mionis described some of Celestica’s business strategies, including how the Canadian outfit chose to move away from commodity markets and into design and manufacturing. He told Cramer that choice “has paid off in spades” for his company.
Celestica’s focus on design and manufacturing enables the company to “consistently execute at scale,” he added.
He detailed Celestica’s data center work, saying the company makes high-speed networking and storage system for hyperscalers, digital native companies and other enterprise names.
Mionis praised the company’s partnership with semiconductor maker Broadcom, saying Celestica uses Broadcom’s silicon in a lot of its designs.
“What it means for us is when they launch a new piece of silicon — so the Tomahawk 6 is their 1.6 terabyte silicon — when they launch that into the marketplace, they’ll work with us to develop products, and those products end up in the major hyperscalers.”
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Disclaimer The CNBC Investing Club Charitable Trust owns shares of Broadcom.