Connect with us

Published

on

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speaks at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Jan. 18, 2024.

Stefan Wermuth | Bloomberg | Getty Images

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman will be in a position to make millions after Reddit goes public, thanks to a series of bets on the online discussion board company that go back to 2014. Altman will hold 9.2% of voting power after Reddit’s initial public offering, according to information in the company’s prospectus.

Altman, who is now reportedly keen to raise trillions for chip development that could help meet Microsoft-backed OpenAI’s artificial intelligence computing demand, has invested in dozens of startups over the years. That includes Asana, which hit the New York Stock Exchange in 2020, and Instacart, which debuted on Nasdaq in September. Before OpenAI launched in 2015, Altman was president of Silicon Valley accelerator Y Combinator, giving him exposure to many small companies.

In 2014 Altman led Reddit’s $50 million Series B funding round, after using the service every day for nine years, he wrote in a blog post.

“reddit is an example of something that started out looking like a silly toy for wasting time and has become something very interesting,” he wrote. “It’s been an important community for me over the years—I can find like-minded people that I can’t always find in the real world.”

In the first half of 2021, Reddit was raising a Series E round, and Altman invested $50 million.

Then, in the second half of the year, Altman sunk another $10 million into Reddit, as the company raised some $512 million in funding. By that point, Altman’s $50 million investment from earlier in the year was up 45% in value.

The shares of Reddit’s Class A and Class B stock are spread across five different entities, and they will give Altman more shares than even CEO Steve Huffman, according to Thursday’s filing. Reddit has not yet told investors how many Class A shares it plans to sell in the IPO.

Altman sat on Reddit’s board as recently as 2021, according to the filing, but is no longer a director. Now he’s trying to increase adoption of OpenAI’s AI services, including the popular ChatGPT chatbot. Reddit said in its filing that it sees competition from large language models that can produce human-like text in response to a few words of written input. Among the LLMs listed are Google’s Gemini, startup Anthropic and ChatGPT.

As part of the IPO, Reddit will offer shares to some of its users and moderators, known colloquially as Redditors. For Altman, that’s likely to be a positive.

“It’s always bothered me that users create so much of the value of sites like reddit but don’t own any of it,” he wrote in his 2014 blog post.

He went on to say that investors in the Series B round would give 10% of shares to Reddit users.

“I hope we increase community ownership over time,” he wrote.

WATCH: Reddit is a litmus test for investor appetite for non-AI things, says FirstMark’s Heitzmann

Reddit is a litmus test for investor appetite for non-AI things, says FirstMark's Heitzmann

Continue Reading

Technology

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

Published

on

By

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

AWS announces latest CPU chip, will deliver record networking speed

Continue Reading

Technology

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

Published

on

By

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.

Stock Chart IconStock chart icon

hide content

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.

Don’t miss these cryptocurrency insights from CNBC Pro:

Continue Reading

Technology

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

Published

on

By

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.

WATCH: Perplexity CEO on AI race: The market of providing answers to questions will become a commodity

Perplexity CEO on AI race: The market of providing answers to questions will become a commodity

Continue Reading

Trending