LONDON — Uruguayan payments firm dLocal has secured a U.K. payment institution license, adding to the company’s growing portfolio of regulatory authorizations as it furthers global expansion.

The emerging markets-focused fintech told CNBC it had acquired an authorized payment institution license from the Financial Conduct Authority, which is Britain’s financial services regulator. That would allow it to start onboarding U.K. merchants for the first time.

DLocal will onboard U.K. merchants through a local entity, Larstal Limited. The subsidiary, which trades in the U.K. as AstroPay, was previously unable to onboard clients locally because of restrictions placed on it by the FCA. DLocal said the restrictions were the result of the U.K.’s exit from the EU.

Pedro Arnt, dLocal’s CEO, told CNBC he expects the business to stand out from domestic payment tech rivals, such as Worldpay and Checkout.com, given its focus on emerging markets in places like Latin America, Africa and Asia.

“The differentiating factor for us when we think of our U.K. base of merchants is that the geographies where we serve them, and those are the only geographies we work,” Arnt said in an interview. He added that dLocal is also targeting global merchants that have a U.K. presence.

“The U.K. has become a hub for many global companies — even the American companies, some Asian companies — for their emerging market expansion, primarily in Africa, and in some cases LatAm,” Arnt told CNBC.

Still, dLocal will come up against some fierce competition. Britain already has an established fintech ecosystem with numerous well-capitalized players in the world of payments operating there, including PayPal, Stripe, Adyen, Checkout.com, Mollie and Revolut — to name a few.

Last month, Reuters reported dLocal was in the process of exploring a potential sale. When asked about buyout speculation by CNBC, Arnt said he didn’t want to comment on rumors, but clarified that dLocal isn’t currently for sale.

All in all, Arnt said, being a public company comes with a level of transparency and oversight that he sees as “positive commercially” for it. At times, he added, “rumors will emerge that someone’s interested in the asset — but I wouldn’t assume there’s too much to that.”

“While there would be a fiduciary duty to shareholders to entertain takeovers, Arnt said that for now, “the company is not for sale.”

Nvidia revealed new chips for desktop and laptop PCs on Monday that use the same Blackwell architecture underpinning the company’s fastest AI processors for servers and data centers.

The chips, called GeForce RTX 50-series, will come pre-installed in computers ranging from about $550 to $2,000, the company said. Laptops with the chips will start shipping in March.

Nvidia unveiled the processors at CES in Las Vegas, where CEO Jensen Huang delivered a keynote address on Monday.

“Can you imagine, you have this incredible graphics card, Blackwell, I’m going to shrink it and put it in there,” Huang said, holding up a laptop.

Nvidia, which has soared past $3.5 trillion in market cap by selling AI chips to giant cloud vendors and other tech companies, was until the last few years known for selling graphics processing units (GPUs) to power video games. Nvidia’s first chip in late 1999 was designed to draw triangles and polygons quickly for 3D games.

“Of course, back then, we were a gaming company, and these GPUs were created to accelerate games,” Justin Walker, senior director of product at Nvidia, said on a press call.

Wall Street is less enthused about Nvidia’s gaming business these days given the explosion in AI and ever-increasing demand for more processing power. In the quarter that ended in October, Nvidia’s gaming sales accounted for under 10% of total revenue, compared to 88% from data center chips.

Nvidia has the vast majority of the AI GPU market for data centers, outpacing rivals Advanced Micro Devices and Intel.

But CES, formerly known as the Consumer Electronics Show, is all about consumer products, and the new chips announced Monday are primarily intended for gaming.

Nvidia says the RTX 50-series chips will support a feature called DLSS 4 that uses AI to boost gaming frame rates. They also can display character faces with more details, and will generally provide users with better graphics and higher resolution.

Nvidia’s gaming business is growing, with revenue increasing 15% from a year earlier in the latest quarter. But data center sales have at least doubled for six straight quarters, topping $30 billion in the most recent period.

Nvidia says that technical improvements made for its massive AI business will trickle down into its graphics cards for games.

“While we are now an AI company as well as a gaming company, our gaming side still benefits tremendously from the fact that we are an AI company,” Walker said.

The Blackwell GPU architecture and core design that the 50-series chips use debuted in the company’s AI accelerators, which were announced in March and started shipping later last year. Nvidia said they were designed and optimized to run neural networks used by OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini.

The new chips for PCs and laptops will come in a number of different configurations. The company says the most expensive and powerful of the chips, the RTX 5090, will be sold individually for $1,999 and is twice as fast as its predecessor, the RTX 4090. Nvidia says it has 92 billion transistors, versus 208 billion transistors on the company’s B200 GPU for servers.

Nvidia says the chips will be optimized to run AI models and do computer graphics, not just run the latest games. The chips will be powerful enough for some game makers to integrate generative AI into their characters in games like “PUBG: Battlegrounds.”

The new processors will also will be powerful enough to to run large language models and image generation models from companies including Meta, Mistral and Stability AI, Nvidia said.

WATCH: Bernstein’s Rasgon says investors need Nvidia exposure

Samsung Electronics plans to ramp up its on-device AI business, with the aim of exceeding global market growth in the consumer electronics segment this year.

The global consumer electronics market for smartphone, TV and home appliances will grow roughly 3% in 2025, Jong-Hee Han, chief executive officer of Samsung Electronics, told CNBC’s Chery Kang.

Samsung, the world’s largest smartphone and TV maker, expects its mobile devices business to grow by 4%-5% this year, while growth in TV and home appliances unit is also likely to accelerate, said Han, also the head of device eExperience (DX) division of Samsung Electronics.

Samsung Electronics has been ramping up efforts to connect its devices to artificial intelligence, installing AI chips in its fridges, washing machines and robot vacuum cleaners.

It has also been bolstering its AI functions on its premium flagship smartphone models, such as the Galaxy S24 series, which has multiple AI-enabled features including real-time translation of certain foreign language phone calls.

This comes as Chinese brands such as Huawei and Xiaomi have emerged as serious competitors to Samsung by offering high-end smartphones at significantly lower prices.

Competition from Chinese companies is ‘helpful” for Samsung and the consumers, Han said during the interview, noting that the company aims to differentiate its products with more security and convenience, rather than lowering prices.

Samsung announced a major leadership reshuffle in November, putting Jun Young-hyun as co-CEO and head of the memory chip arm, sharing leadership duties with Han.

The South Korean tech giant, once the dominant force in the memory chip sector, has fallen behind SK Hynix in the race to supply high bandwidth memory chips, or HBM chips, that are a key component for AI leader Nvidia.

Samsung will reportedly issue its fourth-quarter revenue and operating profit forecasts on Wednesday, before releasing quarterly results in late January.

Samsung operating profit for the December quarter is expected to come in at 8.2 trillion won ($5.6 billion), according to Reuters estimates, a notable uptick from 2.8 trillion won it reported a year earlier, but down from 9.18 trillion won in the prior quarter.

In October, Jun, the semiconductor division head, issued a rare apology for the company’s disappointing third-quarter performance.

Last year, shares of the South Korean giant plunged 32%, according to LSEG data, lagging the broader benchmark Kospi’s 9.6% loss.

The share price has “never been this low before,” Han said during the interview, adding that the company has “value-up” plan, aimed at increasing shareholders’ returns. The plan will be announced “one by one when it’s in order,” he said, according to a CNBC translation of his statement in Korean.

Investors are hoping for Samsung to close the gap on HBM and get more serious about its “value-up” scheme, Phillip Wool, head of research at Rayliant Global Advisors said in a note Monday, while adding that the 10-trillion won share buyback plan may help stabilize the stock’s price.

The company unveiled a surprise plan in November to buy back about 10 trillion won worth of shares over the following 12 months.

Peter Lee, an analyst at Citi, cautioned in a note on Dec. 31, that a longer-than-expected delay in getting Nvidia’s approval for its HBM chips and weaker PC sales could continue to pose downside risks. He maintained a “buy” rating on the stock while trimming its target price to 83,000 won from 87,000 won.