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Jeffrey Katzenberg, film producer, at the Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference on July 06, 2022 in Sun Valley, Idaho.

David A. Grogan | CNBC

Media mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg is bullish on technology as he pulls in more money for startup investing. But he’s keeping his venture portfolio clear of digital media.  

Katzenberg, who three years ago had to contend with the the high-profile failure of short-form entertainment company Quibi, has just raised $460 million for investment firm WndrCo, which he started with former Dropbox finance chief Sujay Jaswa. 

WndrCo started as a holding company in 2016 with capital from private investors. Since then, the firm has grown to manage $1.5 billion, investing in companies across technology, including Dapper, Databricks, Gemini, and Robinhood. The firm has also built out businesses like digital protection companies Aura and Twingate. 

Quibi, which Katzenberg founded in 2018, shut down in 2020, just over six months after launching, despite having raised $1.75 billion from investors including Disney, Comcast’s NBCUniversal and AT&T’s WarnerMedia. The service counted only 500,000 subscribers six months after debuting following a projection it would have more than 7 million subscribers within a year.

Katzenberg previously was co-founder of DreamWorks and served as chair of Walt Disney Studios.

Now at WndrCo, Katzenberg is steering clear of the media market, telling CNBC that the big platforms are the winners. Rather, the firm is seeking opportunities in cybersecurity, the future of work and consumer technology.

Jaswa said the goal is to find up to seven venture investments and to build one or two companies each year. Katzenberg joked about his own imaginings for the portfolio: “the moon, the stars,” he said. Longer term, he said he hopes the companies the firm backs turn into “not just a great investment but actually made the world a better place.”

WndrCo has invested in low-code platform Airtable and payroll and compliance company Deel.

At Twingate, WndrCo is betting on a virtual private network (VPN) replacement. The company was founded by a WndrCo partner and is also backed by Joe Lonsdale’s 8VC. Identity theft protection company Pango is another cybersecurity business backed and built by WndrCo. Jaswa, who serves as chair of Pango, said the reason for those investments is that so much of tech innovation has come without guardrails.

“All sorts of amazing things happened,” Jaswa said. “And yet the other half of it, which is protecting people online, nobody did anything in that dimension.”

Katzenberg and Jaswa are waiting for guardrails in artificial intelligence, as well. Katzenberg said there’s a price for technological advancements like the internet and now AI.

“People are anxious about” what the price will be with AI, Katzenberg said. “We don’t know. So caution seems appropriate.”

Still, Jaswa is optimistic.

“Major advances in technology are often catalyzed by humans not wanting to do something that we have to do,” he said.

Disclosure: NBCUniversal is the parent company of CNBC.

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Amazon Kuiper second satellite launch postponed by ULA due to rocket booster issue

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Amazon Kuiper second satellite launch postponed by ULA due to rocket booster issue

A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket is shown on its launch pad carrying Amazon’s Project Kuiper internet network satellites as the vehicle is prepared for launch at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Cape Canaveral, Florida, U.S., April 28, 2025.

Steve Nesius | Reuters

United Launch Alliance on Monday was forced to delay the second flight carrying a batch of Amazon‘s Project Kuiper internet satellites because of a problem with the rocket booster.

With roughly 30 minutes left in the countdown, ULA announced it was scrubbing the launch due to an issue with “an elevated purge temperature” within its Atlas V rocket’s booster engine. The company said it will provide a new launch date at a later point.

“Possible issue with a GN2 purge line that cannot be resolved inside the count,” ULA CEO Tory Bruno said in a post on Bluesky. “We will need to stand down for today. We’ll sort it and be back.”

The launch from Florida’s Space Coast had been set for last Friday, but was rescheduled to Monday at 1:25 p.m. ET due to inclement weather.

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Amazon in April successfully sent up 27 Kuiper internet satellites into low Earth orbit, a region of space that’s within 1,200 miles of the Earth’s surface. The second voyage will send “another 27 satellites into orbit, bringing our total constellation size to 54 satellites,” Amazon said in a blog post.

Kuiper is the latest entrant in the burgeoning satellite internet industry, which aims to beam high-speed internet to the ground from orbit. The industry is currently dominated by Elon Musk’s Space X, which operates Starlink. Other competitors include SoftBank-backed OneWeb and Viasat.

Amazon is targeting a constellation of more than 3,000 satellites. The company has to meet a Federal Communications Commission deadline to launch half of its total constellation, or 1,618 satellites, by July 2026.

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Google issues apology, incident report for hourslong cloud outage

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Google issues apology, incident report for hourslong cloud outage

Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, speaks at a cloud computing conference held by the company in 2019.

Michael Short | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Google apologized for a major outage that the company said was caused by multiple layers of flawed recent updates.

The company released an incident report late on Friday that explained hours of downtime on Thursday. More than 70 Google cloud services stopped working properly across the globe, knocking down or disrupting dozens of third-party services, including Cloudflare, OpenAI and Shopify. Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Google Meet and other first-party products also malfunctioned.

“We deeply apologize for the impact this outage has had,” Google wrote in the incident report. “Google Cloud customers and their users trust their businesses to Google, and we will do better. We apologize for the impact this has had not only on our customers’ businesses and their users but also on the trust of our systems. We are committed to making improvements to help avoid outages like this moving forward.”

Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google’s cloud unit, also posted about the outage in an X post on Thursday, saying “we regret the disruption this caused our customers.”

Google in May added a new feature to its “quota policy checks” for evaluating automated incoming requests, but the new feature wasn’t immediately tested in real-world situations, the company wrote in the incident report. As a result, the company’s systems didn’t know how to properly handle data from the new feature, which included blank entries. Those blank entries were then sent out to all Google Cloud data center regions, which prompted the crashes, the company wrote.

Engineers figured out the issue in 10 minutes, according to the company. However, the entire incident went on for seven hours after that, with the crash leading to an overload in some larger regions.

As it released the feature, Google did not use feature flags, an increasingly common industry practice that allows for slow implementation to minimize impact if problems occur. Feature flags would have caught the issue before the feature became widely available, Google said.

Going forward, Google will change its architecture so if one system fails, it can still operate without crashing, the company said. Google said it will also audit all systems and improve its communications “both automated and human, so our customers get the information they need asap to react to issues.” 

— CNBC’s Jordan Novet contributed to this report.

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AMD shares rise 9% after analysts say they expect a ‘snapback’ for chipmaker

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AMD shares rise 9% after analysts say they expect a 'snapback' for chipmaker

AMD CEO Lisa Su unveils the AMD vision for Advancing Al.

Courtesy: AMD

Shares of Advanced Micro Devices rose nearly 9% on Monday after analysts at Piper Sandler lifted their price target on the stock on optimism about the chipmaker’s latest product announcement.

The analysts said they see a snapback for AMD’s graphics processing units, or GPUs, in the fourth quarter. That’s when they expect the chipmaker to be through the bulk of the $800 million in charges that AMD said it would incur as a result of a new U.S. license requirement that applies to exports of semiconductors to China and other countries. 

Last week, AMD revealed its next-generation artificial intelligence chips, the Instinct MI400 series. Notably, the company unveiled a full-server rack called Helios that enables thousands of the chips to be tied together. That chip system is expected to be important for AI customers such as cloud companies and developers of large language models. 

AMD CEO Lisa Su showed the products on stage at an event in San Jose, California, alongside OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who said they sounded “totally crazy.”

“Overall, we are enthused with the product launches at the AMD event this week, specifically the Helios rack, which we think is pivotal for AMD Instinct growth,” the analysts wrote in their note. 

Piper Sandler raised its price target for AMD’s share price from $125 to $140.

The stock jumped past $126 on Monday to close at its highest level since Jan. 7, before President Donald Trump announced sweeping new tariffs and AMD warned of the chip control charges.

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