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Bitcoin jumped with stocks on Wednesday after the April consumer price index showed inflation eased from the previous month.

The price of the cryptocurrency rose more than 7% to $66,124.59, according to Coin Metrics, and its best day since March 25. It also traded above its 50-day moving average for the first time since April 13.

“The slightly lighter than expected CPI number modestly increased the chance of a rate cut, which is still a strong influencer to bitcoin price,” Owen Lau, an analyst at Oppenheimer, told CNBC. “After the ETFs and halving, the next major catalyst is a rate cut. Bitcoin is likely to remain rangebound and trade along with macro data points, until we see a clearer path for rate cut.”

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Bitcoin jumps on report of easing U.S. inflation

The consumer price index, a broad measure of how much goods and services cost at the cash register, increased 0.3% from March, the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Wednesday. That was slightly below the Dow Jones estimate of 0.4%. Consumer prices are still rising 3.4% from a year ago.

“With the U.S. core CPI cooling down for the first time in six months, we could be seeing a recovery of investors’ appetite for risk-on assets like crypto, instigating more flows into bitcoin spot ETFs, which have been especially quiet over the past week,” said Leena ElDeeb, an analyst at 21Shares.

“Although with the rate cuts still in question, recovery might be slow,” she added. “Typically, higher interest rates make risk-on assets like tech stocks and bitcoin less appealing, as investors can secure substantial yields from safer options such as U.S. Treasurys.”

Bitcoin holds a unique position as both a risk-on and a risk-off asset, and many investors hold a long-term view of the crypto asset, ElDeeb explained, adding that while Fed policies may induce bitcoin volatility in the short term, it does not fundamentally change bitcoin’s long-term trajectory.

Lately, bitcoin has been more heavily influenced by macro factors, with industry catalysts such as the launch of bitcoin exchange-traded funds and the halving in the rearview mirror. Earlier this week, bitcoin also sat out a two-day revival of the meme stock craze.

With Wednesday’s gain, bitcoin is now up 8.92% for the week — its best week since March 29 — and on pace to break a six-week slide.

Bitcoin has been holding between $60,000 and $70,000 — minus a couple blips above and below that range — since March, when it ran up to new all-time highs and quickly pulled back. Investors and analysts have been expecting the cryptocurrency to remain rangebound for several months longer, absent strong catalysts.

— CNBC’s Jeff Cox and Nick Wells contributed reporting.

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Ray-Ban maker EssilorLuxottica says Meta smart glasses are boosting growth

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Ray-Ban maker EssilorLuxottica says Meta smart glasses are boosting growth

Meta Ray-Ban Gen 2 AI glasses during the Meta Connect event in Menlo Park, California, US, on Wednesday, Sept. 17, 2025.

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EssilorLuxottica said a healthy amount of its revenue growth in the third quarter was due to its partnership with Meta, primarily from its Ray-Ban brand, to develop and sell smart glasses.

“Clearly there is a lift coming from Ray-Ban Meta wearables as a product category,” CFO Stefano Grassi said on the company’s third-quarter earnings call.

The European eyewear company said sales in in the quarter grew 11.7% year-over-year to 6.9 billion euros (about $8 billion) from 6.44 billion euros a year earlier. Of that growth, more than 4 percentage points came from wearables, which includes the Meta products, the company said.

In 2019, Meta and Luxottica inked a deal for Ray-Ban Meta branded smart glasses. Most recently, Luxottica’s Oakley brand has joined the partnership, with the debut in June of the Oakley Meta HSTN smart glasses. The companies are also working on a version of the smart glasses to be released under the Prada brand, CNBC reported in June.

Luxottica, which also oversees several popular brands like Vogue Eyewear and Persol, has been heavily pushing internet-connected glasses that work with Meta’s AI-powered digital assistant. The technology allows users to play music, take photos and perform other actions similar to how they would use smartphones.

“We believe that glasses will be the future,” Grassi said, adding that the wearables business is profitable. “Glasses will materially replace most of the functionality that today we have embedded into our phones.”

Grassi’s statement echoes sentiments expressed by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who said in July that “Personal devices like glasses that understand our context because they can see what we see, hear what we hear, and interact with us throughout the day will become our primary computing devices.”

A couple weeks into the fourth quarter, Grassi said he has “a good degree of optimism” for the period, in part because of the rollout of “all the new products that have been recently presented at the Meta Connect,” which will “all play a role in our fourth-quarter profile.”

At the Connect event in September, Zuckerberg revealed the $799 Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses, which have a small digital display that can be manipulated with an accompanying wristband powered by neural technology.

The company also unveiled new smart glasses, including the $499 Oakley Meta Vanguard glasses and the $379 Ray-Ban Meta (Gen 2) glasses.

Grassi said that Luxottica’s sales growth in North America in the third quarter had more to do with the Ray-Ban Meta glasses than the effects of tariffs, which led to higher prices for its products.

He said the company will be able to reach the 10 million unit capacity that it had originally planned to hit by the end of 2026 earlier than anticipated.

“The overall ecosystem of wearables is going to bring not only revenue associated with the hardware but also the revenue associated with lenses” and over time from services tied to AI.

EssilorLuxottica shares rose 2.4% on Thursday.

Meta isn’t the only tech giant getting into the burgeoning smart glasses market.

Alphabet announced in May a $150 million partnership with Warby Parker to develop smart glasses powered by Google’s Gemini AI digital assistant, while China’s Alibaba unveiled its smart glasses in July that utilize its Quark AI assistant. Apple and OpenAI are also reportedly developing smart glasses.

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Oracle stock rises as company confirms Meta cloud deal

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Oracle stock rises as company confirms Meta cloud deal

Oracle CEO Clay Magouyrk, center, speaks on a media tour of the Stargate data center in Abilene, Texas, on Sept. 23, 2025. Stargate is a collaboration of OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank, with promotional support from President Donald Trump, to build data centers and other infrastructure for artificial intelligence throughout the US.

Kyle Grillot | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Oracle shares ended Thursday trading up 3% as it called for more business in core categories and confirmed a cloud-computing deal with social media company Meta.

The maker of database software sees $20 billion in artificial intelligence-powered database and AI data platform revenue in the 2030 fiscal year, up from $2.4 billion in fiscal 2025 and $3 billion in fiscal 2026.

“You see the change in these numbers that it’s a little bit easier for us to find supply, not this year or next year, but in subsequent years,” Clay Magouyrk, one of Oracle’s two new CEOs, told analysts Thursday at the company’s AI World conference in Las Vegas. “So as we’re able to find that supply, customers contract for it, we see immense demand, and then we go about delivering that to customers.”

Magouyrk said that in 30 days during the current quarter, Oracle contracted $65 billion in new cloud infrastructure commitments.

“It was across seven different contracts from four different customers,” Magouyrk said. “None of those customers are OpenAI. I know some people are questioning sometimes, ‘Hey, is it just OpenAI? The reality is, we think OpenAI is a great customer, but we have many customers.”

Meta which operates Facebook and Insatgram is one of the four customers, he said. Bloomberg reported in September that the two companies were discussing a $20 billion deal.

The deal with Meta comes amid a flurry of spending by tech companies to invest in the infrastructure for their AI initiatives. Meta in July said that it expects to spend between $66 billion and $72 billion this year in capital expenditures.

In recent years, Oracle has expanded its cloud infrastructure division that competes with the likes of Amazon and Google. At the same time, Oracle has started offering its database in clouds other than its own.

Oracle secured a commitment from OpenAI in excess of $300 billion in July.

AI infrastructure has an adjusted gross margin of 30% to 40% after land, data center, power and computing equipment costs, Oracle said. Earlier this month, The Information reported that Oracle saw a 14% gross margin on renting out Nvidia AI chips in the August quarter.

“I’ve read a lot of stories that are speculating that Oracle is chasing revenue for revenue’s sake, but let’s be crystal clear,” said Doug Kehring, the company’s principal financial officer. “We only pursue opportunities where we have a clear line of sight to attractive market margins that reward us for intellectual property and the activity we bring to customers.”

After market close, Oracle said it’s now targeting $21 in adjusted earnings per share on $225 billion in revenue for fiscal 2030, representing a 31% compound annual growth rate. Analysts polled by LSEG were looking for $18.92 per share on $198.39 billion in revenue. The stock slipped 2% in extended trading.

WATCH: Oracle kicks off its analyst day to outline deliverables and margin profile

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Cybersecurity firm F5’s stock sinks 12% after disclosing nation-state hack

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Cybersecurity firm F5's stock sinks 12% after disclosing nation-state hack

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U.S. cybersecurity company F5 fell 12% on Thursday after disclosing a system breach in which a “highly sophisticated nation-state threat actor” gained long-term access to some systems.

F5 shares were pacing for the worst day since April 27, 2022, when the stock fell 12.8%.

The company disclosed the breach in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing on Wednesday and said the hack affected its BIG-IP product development environment. F5 said the attacker infiltrated files containing some source code and information on “undisclosed vulnerabilities” in BIG-IP.

The breach was later attributed to state-backed hackers from China, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

F5, which was made aware of the attack in August, said they have not seen evidence of any new unauthorized activity.

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“We have no knowledge of undisclosed critical or remote code vulnerabilities, and we are not aware of active exploitation of any undisclosed F5 vulnerabilities,” F5 said in a statement.

The cybersecurity giant told customers that hackers were in the network for at least 12 months and that the breach used a malware called Brickstorm, according to Bloomberg.

F5 would not confirm the information.

Brickstorm is attributed to a suspected China-nexus threat dubbed UNC5221, Google Threat Intelligence Group said in a blog post. The malware is used for maintaining “long-term stealthy access” and can remain undetected in victim systems for an average of 393 days, according to Mandiant.

The attack prompted an emergency directive from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency on Wednesday, telling all agencies using F5 software or products to apply the latest update.

“The alarming ease with which these vulnerabilities can be exploited by malicious actors demands immediate and decisive action from all federal agencies,” CISA Acting Director Madhu Gottumukkala said. “These same risks extend to any organization using this technology, potentially leading to a catastrophic compromise of critical information systems.”

The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre also issued guidance for the F5 attack, advising customers to install security updates and continue monitoring for threats.

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