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In this photo illustration, the Robinhood Markets Inc. website is shown on a computer on June 06, 2024 in Chicago, Illinois. 

Scott Olson | Getty Images

Online brokerage platform Robinhood on Wednesday launched a share lending program in the U.K. that would allow consumers there to earn passive income on stocks they own, in the company’s latest bid to grow market share abroad.

The stock trading app, which launched in the U.K. last November after two previous attempts to enter the market, said that its new feature would enable retail investors in the U.K. to lend out any stocks they own outright in their portfolio to interested borrowers.

You can think of stock lending like “renting” out your stocks for extra cash. It’s when you allow another party — typically a financial institution — to temporarily borrow stocks that you already own. In return, you get paid a monthly fee.

Institutions typically borrow stocks for trading activities, like settlements, short selling and hedging risks. The lender still retains ownership over their shares and can sell them anytime they want. And, when they do sell, they still realize any gains or losses on the stock.

In Robinhood’s case, shares lent out via the app are treated as collateral, with Robinhood receiving interest from borrowers and paying it out monthly to lenders. Customers can also earn cash owed on company dividend payments — typically from the person borrowing the stock, rather than the company issuing a dividend.

Customers are able to sell lent stock at any time and withdraw proceeds from sales once the trades settle, Robinhood said. It is not guaranteed stocks lent out via its lending program will always be matched to an individual borrower, however.

“Stock Lending is another innovative way for our customers in the UK to put their investments to work and earn passive income,” Jordan Sinclair,  president of Robinhood U.K., said in a statement Wednesday.

Robinhood's deal with Bitstamp 'big step forward' for international expansion: Johann Kerbrat

“We’re excited to continue to give retail customers greater access to the financial system, with the product now available in our intuitive mobile app.”

Niche product

Share lending isn’t unheard of in the U.K. — but it is rare.

Several firms offer securities lending programs, including BlackRock, Interactive Brokers, Trading 212, and Freetrade, which debuted its stock lending program just last week.

Most companies that offer such programs in the U.K. pass on 50% of the interest to clients. That is higher than the 15% Robinhood is offering to lenders on its platform.

Share lending is risky — not least due to the prospect that a borrower may end up defaulting on their obligation and be unable to return the value of the share to the lender.

But Robinhood says on its lander page for stock lending that it aims to hold cash “equal to a minimum of 100% of the value of your loaned stocks at a third-party bank,” meaning that customers should be covered if either Robinhood or the institution borrowing the shares suddenly couldn’t return them.

Robinhood keeps cash collateral in a trust account with Wilmington Trust, National Association, through JP Morgan Chase & Co acting as custodian, a spokesperson for the firm told CNBC.

Simon Taylor, head of strategy at fintech firm Sardine.ai, said that the risk to users of Robinhood’s share lending program will be “quite low” given the U.S. firm is behind the risk management and selecting which individuals and institutions get to borrow customer shares.

“I doubt the consumer understands the product but then they don’t have to,” Taylor told CNBC via email.

“It’s a case of, push this button to also make an additional 5% from the stock that was sitting there anyway. Feels like a no brainer.”

“It’s also the kind of thing that’s common in big finance but just not available to the mainstream,” he added.

The new product offering might be a test for Robinhood when it comes to gauging how open local regulators are to accepting new product innovations.

Financial regulators in the U.K. are strict when it comes to investment products, requiring firms to provide ample information to clients to ensure they’re properly informed about the risk attached to the products they’re buying and trading activities they’re practicing.

Under Britain’s Financial Conduct Authority’s consumer duty rules, firms must be open and honest, avoid causing foreseeable harm, and support investors’ ability to pursue their financial goals, according to guidance published on the FCA website in July last year.

Still, the move is also a chance for Robinhood to try to build out its presence in the U.K. market, which —apart from a select number of European Union countries — is its only major international market outside of the U.S.

It comes as domestic U.K. trading firms have faced difficulties over the years. Hargreaves Lansdown, for example, last month agreed a £5.4 billion ($7.1 billion) acquisition by a group of investors including CVC Group.

The company has been battling issues including regulatory changes, new entrants into the market, including Revolut, and the expectation of falling interest rates.

Unlike Robinhood, which doesn’t charge commission fees, Hargreaves Lansdown charges a variety of different fees for consumers buying and selling shares on its platform.

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AI’s vibe-coding era: How the shift to apps changed the race

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AI's vibe-coding era: How the shift to apps changed the race

Value within the artificial intelligence industry is slowly shifting, from the companies developing models to the apps building on top of them. 

Early in the AI race, critics viewed apps like Perplexity, Replit, Sesame and Abridge as second-rate middlemen, slapping an interface on someone else’s technology. They were disparagingly known as AI wrappers: companies with entire apps or businesses wrapped around existing models. Companies like OpenAI, Google, Meta and Anthropic developed their own models.

The arrival of ultra-efficient models and increasing model commoditization accelerated the shift.

“There was an impression that the only way to compete in AI would be to raise hundreds of millions of dollars to pre-train these web-scale models that could solve every problem underneath the sun, and that was the only game in town for AI,” said Shiv Rao, founder and CEO of the healthcare AI startup Abridge. “Very quickly, people figured out that actually, value moves up the stack.” 

Megacaps like Microsoft poured billions into the first stage of the AI arms race, focusing on the infrastructure and model layer. But models are now increasingly looking commoditized, narrowing the advantage that any model-builder had. While they focused on delivering raw capability and intelligence, app companies looked at real-world uses and solutions.

“[Wrapper] just sort of means that it feels less thoughtful. It feels like you’re giving this little package around what was built. As opposed to what it really means is, ‘I’m going to understand the customer’s problem,’ ” said Andreessen Horowitz partner Bryan Kim. “I’m going to marry this and deliver a solution to what you’re trying to achieve.”

Wrappers have even changed the way Silicon Valley builds, ushering in the era of vibe-coding. With an app like Cursor, one of the fastest-growing startups ever, anyone can develop an app without a degree or years of coding expertise.

“I love the phrase vibe-coding because, actually, I think it points to … this new way that we’re going to interact with these systems where we’re not necessarily going to interrogate all of what they do in process,” said E14 Fund Managing Partner Calvin Chin. “Over time as the models improve and these products built on top of them improve, we’re going to get other kinds of vibe-activities in the economy. So maybe it’s vibe-lawyering, vibe-accounting, and we’re going to trust the models more and more.”

Watch the video to learn more.

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CoreWeave shares slump nearly 10% in second day of trading

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CoreWeave shares slump nearly 10% in second day of trading

Michael Intrator, Founder & CEO of CoreWeave, Inc., Nvidia-backed cloud services provider, attends his company’s IPO at the Nasdaq Market, in New York City, U.S., March 28, 2025. 

Brendan McDermid | Reuters

CoreWeave‘s stock sank nearly 10% on Monday, falling well below its initial public offering price.

The artificial intelligence cloud provider sold shares at $40 and the stock opened at $39 in its market debut Friday. Shares closed at $40.

CoreWeave’s offering marked the biggest tech IPO since 2021 and the first pure-play AI company to go public. The initial share sale raised $1.5 billion. It was also the largest U.S. IPO since automation software maker UiPath‘s $1.57 billion debut in 2021.

CoreWeave’s public offering also served as a major test for an IPO market that has largely dried up since early 2022 as inflation and rising interest rates deterred investors from riskier bets.

Read more CNBC tech news

Many had hoped that President Donald Trump’s victory would usher in a more favorable setup for IPOs, but new tariffs have triggered economic uncertainty and sapped interest in technology stocks. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite was down more than 10% year to date. The company, however, joins a growing list of tech-related companies that have recently filed to go public, including Klarna and ticket reseller StubHub.

CoreWeave had initially set its price target on shares at $47 to $55, which would have raised about $2.5 billion at the middle of the range. The company downsized the offering to 37.5 million shares from 49 million.

“There’s a lot of headwinds in the macro,” CoreWeave CEO Michael Intrator said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Friday. “And we definitely had to scale or rightsize the transaction for where the buying interest was.”

CoreWeave rents out access to hundreds of thousands of Nvidia graphics processing units to other large tech and AI companies including MetaIBM and Cohere. Its most significant customer is Microsoft, which accounted for 62% of the company’s revenue last year. Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Oracle are among the company’s most significant competitors.

The company was originally known as Atlantic Crypto when it was founded in 2017. It previously offered infrastructure for mining the ethereum cryptocurrency but snatched up additional graphics processing units and changed its name and focus toward artificial intelligence as digital asset prices fell.

CoreWeave said revenues grew over 737% last year to $1.92 billion in its prospectus filed earlier this month. The company also reported a net loss of $863 million last year.

CNBC’s Jordan Novet contributed reporting

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Huawei 2024 revenue surges to near-record high as China smartphone comeback takes hold

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Huawei 2024 revenue surges to near-record high as China smartphone comeback takes hold

The Huawei booth at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, 2025.

Arjun Kharpal | CNBC

Huawei on Monday reported a sharp jump in 2024 revenue as its core telecommunications and consumer businesses accelerated.

Huawei reported revenue for 2024 of 862.1 billion Chinese yuan ($118.2 billion), a 22.4% year-on-year rise.

It is the company’s second-highest revenue figure ever, according to CNBC calculations, just shy of the record 891.4 billion yuan reported for 2020.

Net profit fell, however, to 62.6 billion yuan, a decline of 28% versus 2023. Huawei said this was a result of increasing investments.

It comes as the Chinese technology giant tries to adapt its business to deal with U.S. sanctions that have restricted its access to key technologies like semiconductors.

“In 2024, the entire team at Huawei banded together to tackle a wide range of external challenges, while further improving product quality, operations quality, and operational efficiency,” Huawei’s rotating chairwoman Meng Wanzhou said in the company’s annual report.

Huawei spent 179.7 billion yuan on research and development, equating to 20.8% of its revenue. That’s higher than 2023’s 164.7 billion R&D figure. Huawei has been diversifying its business in areas including data centers for AI, cloud computing and automotive technology.

“Over the next three years, despite an economic downturn, we will increase investment in strategic depth, particularly in building foundational technologies, and seek growth opportunities through differentiation,” Meng said.

Huawei’s sales last year were driven by its two biggest businesses — ICT infrastructure and consumer — which together account for around 82% of the company’s total revenue.

Revenue at the ICT infrastructure division, which includes its carrier business, rose 4.9% year-on-year to 369.9 billion yuan. This is the Shenzhen headquartered-firm’s biggest business by revenue. Huawei is one of the world’s largest telecommunications equipment companies and the company said large-scale deployment of next-generation 5G networks had helped drive growth.

The company also said that 2024 was the first year of commercial deployment of next-generation networks, dubbed 5.5G or 5G advanced, which also helped give sales a boost.

China smartphone revival

An acceleration in Huawei’s consumer business also aided its revenue figures. The consumer business raked in sales of 339 billion yuan, a 38.3% rise and a sharp acceleration from the growth seen last year.

Huawei, once the world’s biggest smartphone player, saw its smartphone business in particular crushed by U.S. sanctions that restricted its access to key chips and Google software.

From the end of 2023, however, a semiconductor breakthrough in China allowed Huawei to regroup and release high-end phones that have sold very well domestically.

In 2024, Huawei’s smartphone shipments in China jumped 37% year-on-year, while its market share rose to 16% from 12% in 2023, according to data from Canalys. This came at the expense of Apple, which saw its market share decline and shipments fall.

Huawei has aggressively launched premium smartphones, including the first-ever trifold handset, and has also begun to slowly relaunch devices overseas.

Meanwhile, Huawei also released HarmonyOS 5 in 2024, the first version of its self-developed mobile operating system that reportedly no longer uses any open-source code from Google Android.

Still, analysts have told CNBC that Huawei’s overseas prospects remain a challenge given its lack of access to Android, which runs on the majority of the world’s smartphones, and continued restrictions in accessing the most cutting-edge chips, such as those found in Apple and Samsung devices.

New business focus

To mitigate some of the effects of U.S. sanctions over the past few years, Huawei has been pushing into new areas such as its digital power division, which includes a focus on energy infrastructure in areas such as electric cars and renewables.

This segment — still a very new business — saw revenue rise 24.4% to 68.7 billion yuan.

Cloud computing revenue came in at 38.5 billion yuan, up 8.5% year-on-year. Huawei said that when cloud sales to its own business units are taken into account, the total revenue for the division is 68.8 billion.

Huawei’s smallest business, called Intelligent Automotive Solution, reported a 474.4% year-on-year rise in revenue to 26.4 billion yuan. Huawei develops in-car software as well as driver assistance systems for third-party automakers.

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