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Cryptocurrencies fell Tuesday evening as Asia futures pointed lower, triggering a wave of liquidations on the Bybit exchange.

The price of bitcoin was last lower by 6.2% at $59,504.68, according to Coin Metrics. Ether tumbled more than 8% to $2,457.61.

“Crypto markets moved down sharply, triggering a leverage driven liquidation,” said Steven Lubka, head of private clients and family offices at Swan Bitcoin. “The move appears to have been kicked off by a material drop by Ethereum, which has been struggling all year versus bitcoin.”

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Bitcoin falls under $60,000

According to CoinGlass, the futures market has seen $93.52 million in long ether liquidations, which forces traders to sell their assets at market price to settle their debts, across centralized exchanges. Some $85.93 million in bitcoin liquidations have occurred.

“Leverage-driven flushes typically are great buying opportunities,” Lubka added. “And while I expect markets to buy the dip on bitcoin, Ethereum may continue to struggle until investors have a reason to be positive on the asset again.”

For the year, bitcoin is still up 39%. Ether is holding onto a more modest 7% gain.

“This is exactly the type of whipsaw liquidations and price action we see in bull markets,” said Ryan Rasmussen, an analyst at Bitwise Asset Management. “Bulls get over their skis and get wiped out, then it happens to bears, and so on. When you zoom out, a 5% move in the price of bitcoin is a blip on the radar.”

August, a typically quiet month for crypto and risk assets at large, has been particularly volatile this year. However, cryptocurrencies aren’t strangers to big pullbacks in bull markets. Bitcoin is still safely in the range its been sitting in since April – between $55,000 and $70,000.

Some market participants noted that the crypto retracement Tuesday accelerated when news broke that a federal grand jury returned a revised indictment against former President Donald Trump in his criminal election interference case in Washington, D.C.

Trump has positioned himself as the pro-crypto candidate in the upcoming U.S. presidential election. Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidate, has yet to share a public view on the industry.

“Traders don’t like instability, and often go risk-off to cash in such environments,” said Bartosz Lipiński, CEO at crypto trading platform Cube.Exchange. “That is probably the case for today.”

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Nvidia’s new ‘robot brain’ goes on sale for $3,499 as company targets robotics for growth

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Nvidia's new 'robot brain' goes on sale for ,499 as company targets robotics for growth

Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, is seen on stage next to a small robot during the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, France, on June 11, 2025.

Gonzalo Fuentes | Reuters

Nvidia announced Monday that its latest robotics chip module, the Jetson AGX Thor, is now on sale for $3,499 as a developer kit.

The company calls the chip a “robot brain.” The first kits ship next month, Nvidia said last week, and the chips will allow customers to create robots.

After a company uses the developer kit to prototype their robot, Nvidia will sell Thor T5000 modules that can be installed in production-ready robots. If a company needs more than 1,000 Thor chips, Nvidia will charge $2,999 per module.

CEO Jensen Huang has said robotics is the company’s largest growth opportunity outside of artificial intelligence, which has led to the Nvidia’s overall sales more than tripling in the past two years.

“We do not build robots, we do not build cars, but we enable the whole industry with our infrastructure computers and the associated software,” said Deepu Talla, Nvidia’s vice president of robotics and edge AI, on a call with reporters Friday.

The Jetson Thor chips are based on a Blackwell graphics processor, which is Nvidia’s current generation of technology used in its AI chips, as well as its chips for computer games.

Nvidia said that its Jetson Thor chips are 7.5 times faster than its previous generation. That allows them to run generative AI models, including large language models and visual models that can interpret the world around them, which is essential for humanoid robots, Nvidia said. The Jetson Thor chips are equipped with 128GB of memory, which is essential for big AI models.

Companies including Agility Robotics, Amazon, Meta and Boston Dynamics are using its Jetson chips, Nvidia said. Nvidia has also invested in robotics companies such as Field AI.

However, robotics remains a small business for Nvidia, accounting for about 1% of the company’s total revenue, despite the fact that it has launched several new robot chips since 2014. But it’s growing fast.

Nvidia recently combined its business units to group its automotive and robotics divisions into the same line item. That unit reported $567 million in quarterly sales in May, which represented a 72% increase on an annual basis.

The company said its Jetson Thor chips can be used for self-driving cars as well, especially from Chinese brands. Nvidia calls its car chips Drive AGX, and while they are similar to its robotics chips, they run an operating system called Drive OS that’s been tuned for automotive purposes.

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Intel says Trump deal has risks for shareholders, international sales

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Intel says Trump deal has risks for shareholders, international sales

Intel’s CEO Lip-Bu Tan speaks at the company’s Annual Manufacturing Technology Conference in San Jose, California, U.S. April 29, 2025.

Laure Andrillon | Reuters

Intel on Monday warned of “adverse reactions” from investors, employees and others to the Trump administration taking a 10% stake in the company, in a filing citing risks involved with the deal.

A key concern area is international sales, with 76% of Intel’s revenue in its last fiscal year coming from outside the U.S., according to the filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company had $53.1 billion in revenue for fiscal year 2024, down 2% from the year prior.

For Intel’s international customers, the company is now directly tied to President Donald Trump‘s ever-shifting tariff and trade policies.

“There could be adverse reactions, immediately or over time, from investors, employees, customers, suppliers, other business or commercial partners, foreign governments or competitors,” the company wrote in the filing. “There may also be litigation related to the transaction or otherwise and increased public or political scrutiny with respect to the Company.”

Intel also said that the potential for a changing political landscape in Washington could challenge or void the deal and create risks to current and future shareholders.

The deal, which was announced Friday, gives the Department of Commerce up to 433.3 million shares of the company, which is dilutive to existing shareholders. The purchase of shares is being funded largely by money already awarded to Intel under President Joe Biden‘s CHIPS Act.

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Intel has already received $2.2 billion from the program and is set for another $5.7 billion. A separate federal program awarded $3.2 billion, for a total of $11.1 billion, according to a release.

Trump called the agreement “a great Deal for America” and said the building of advanced chips “is fundamental to the future of our Nation.” 

Shares of Intel rallied as momentum built toward a deal in August, with the stock up about 25%.

The agreement requires the government to vote with Intel’s board of directors. In the Monday filing, the company noted that the government stake “reduces the voting and other governance rights of stockholders and may limit potential future transactions that may be beneficial to stockholders.”

Furthermore, the company acknowledged in the filing that it has not completed an analysis of all “financial, tax and accounting implications.”

Intel’s tumultuous fiscal year 2024 included the exit of CEO Pat Gelsinger in December after a four-year tenure during which the stock price tanked and the company lost ground to rivals in the artificial intelligence boom.

CEO Lip-Bu Tan took the helm in March.

NEC Director Kevin Hassett on Intel deal: It's possible government will take stake in more companies

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Nvidia faces Wall Street’s high expectations two years into AI boom

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Nvidia faces Wall Street's high expectations two years into AI boom

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang attends the “Winning the AI Race” Summit in Washington D.C., U.S., July 23, 2025.

Kent Nishimura | Reuters

It’s been two years since the explosion of generative artificial intelligence started to transform Nvidia’s business. Since then, the chipmaker’s revenue has more than tripled and profits have quadrupled.

Nvidia‘s fiscal second-quarter earnings report, scheduled for Wednesday, will mark the second anniversary of growth, as the company shifted from being known as a maker of gaming chips to its current position at the heart of the technology industry.

Last month, Nvidia became the first company to hit a $4 trillion market cap, and it’s continued to appreciate in value. Since the end of 2022, around the time OpenAI launched ChatGPT and sparked the generative AI boom, Nvidia’s stock price is up twelvefold. It’s up 33% this year, closing on Friday at $177.99.

Growth is still substantial for a company Nvidia’s size, but it has slowed dramatically. After five straight quarters of triple-digit expansion in 2023 and 2024, revenue growth dipped to 69% in the fiscal first quarter this year. Nvidia is expected to report a year-over-year jump of 53% to $45.9 billion in its second-quarter report, according to LSEG’s consensus of analyst estimates.

Data center revenue in the first quarter accounted for 88% of Nvidia’s total sales, the clearest sign of how significant AI has become to its business. The company said that 34% of total sales last year came from three unnamed customers. Analysts say Nvidia’s top end users are major internet companies and cloud providers such as Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta.

“The assumptions and performance of Nvidia really dictates what the market is going to start to price into the AI trade, and that whole AI trade has essentially been driving the market this past year,” said Melissa Otto, head of Visible Alpha Research at S&P Global, which aggregates Wall Street research.

Nvidia makes up about 7.5% of the S&P 500.

Tech’s megacap companies, other than Nvidia, reported quarterly results in late July, updating Wall Street on their investment plans. In all, they’re looking to spend roughly $320 billion on AI technology and data center buildouts this year.

OpenAI, which is still private but has a valuation in the hundreds of billions of dollars, says it will team up with SoftBank and Oracle to spend $500 billion over the next four years on the Stargate project, which President Donald Trump announced in January.

Jensen Huang, co-founder and CEO of Nvidia, displays the new Blackwell GPU chip during the Nvidia GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California, on March 18, 2024.

David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Analysts say about half of AI capital spending ends up with Nvidia. The company’s reliance on the so-called hyperscalers leaves it vulnerable to changes in the macroeconomic environment and in the artificial intelligence industry, which remains hard to predict.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said last week that he believes “investors as a whole are overexcited about AI,” and even said it could be a “bubble.”

But don’t expect a pullback yet. OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar told CNBC on Wednesday that the company “constantly” doesn’t have enough computing power.

As always, Wall Street will be paying close attention to Nvidia’s guidance and other forward-looking commentary from CEO Jensen Huang. For the fiscal third quarter, analysts are expecting revenue growth of 50% to $52.7 billion, according to LSEG. If Nvidia guides higher and tops estimates for the second quarter, analysts say that kind of “beat and raise” could drive AI optimism even higher.

Blackwell ramp

One visible sign of Nvidia’s rise is Huang’s worldwide fame. He’s regularly name-checked by Trump and during the quarter traveled to meet with business leaders and officials in Taiwan, China, Germany, England and Saudi Arabia.

Huang recently struck a deal with Trump to regain access to the Chinese market. Nvidia will pay 15% of its China chip revenue to the U.S. government in exchange for licenses to export its China-focused AI chip called the H20, Trump said this month. The president added that he’d asked for 20%, but Huang bargained him down.

The H20 is worth a lot to Nvidia. The chip would have contributed about $8 billion in sales in the second quarter, Nvidia said in May, before the U.S. government said it would require a license to ship it to China, effectively shutting off sales.

Nvidia did not include any H20 sales in its guidance for the second quarter, and analysts doubt that it will include any in its forecast for the current period, partially because the Chinese government is pressuring its cloud providers to use homegrown chips from companies such as Huawei.

If H20 is included in guidance, it could boost revenue expectations by about $2 billion to $3 billion, according to analysts at KeyBanc, who recommend buying the stock. But they said they expect Nvidia to completely exclude it, following Advanced Micro Devices’ lead from early August.

“Additionally, given a potential 15% tax on AI exports and pressure from the China government for its AI providers to use domestic AI chips, we expect management to guide conservatively,” the KeyBanc analysts wrote.

Nvidia is working on a new China AI chip based on Blackwell that would also likely need the president’s approval.

“I’m sure he’s pitching the president all the time,” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said about Huang last week on CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street.” 

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