Lina Khan, chair of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, and Jonathan Kanter, assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s antitrust division, participate in a discussion on antitrust reforms at the Brookings Institution in Washington on Oct. 4, 2023. Khan assumed the role of FTC chair in June 2021 after being appointed by U.S. President Joe Biden and confirmed by the Senate.
Drew Angerer | Getty Images
Google had been in talks to acquire marketing software maker HubSpot earlier this year, but no deal took place. The company then made a run at cybersecurity startup Wiz. But that didn’t happen either.
Google took a different tactic in closing its one notable transaction of late. Following a model pursued by Amazon and Microsoft to lure experts in artificial intelligence, Google announced last month it was hiring the founders of generative AI startup Character.AI. Rather than buying Character outright and shutting it down — the standard acquihire playbook — Google kept the startup alive and entered into a licensing deal for its technology.
This is the new world of tech M&A. Under the Biden administration, and more specifically Federal Trade Commission head Lina Khan, the biggest companies have been thwarted from pursuing large deals. In some cases, they’ve even walked away from smaller deals. Amazon abandoned its $1.7 billion purchase of iRobot in January after the FTC and European regulators raised concerns.
Since peaking at $1.5 trillion in 2021, tech transaction volume has plummeted, dropping to $544 billion last year, according to Dealogic. So far in 2024, that number sits at $465 billion.
Within tech, private equity buyers are the ones keeping the market afloat. In July, BlackRock agreed to buy data provider Preqin for $3.2 billion, two months after Permira announced it was buying website-building platform Squarespace in a deal valued at almost $7 billion. Thoma Bravo, a leading tech buyout firm, said in July it was selling Instructure to KKR for $4.8 billion.
Don’t expect much to change for the rest of this year. With the presidential election coming in November, the regulatory environment could be poised for a shake-up, potentially leading to the removal of deal-making barriers.
However, neither party offers much clarity for what the future would bring. Sen. JD Vance, Donald Trump’s running mate on the Republican ticket, has praised Khan’s stricter rules on mergers, and he told CNBC last week that “there should be an antitrust solution” to some of the behaviors of large tech platforms.
“If Trump wins, I think that the regulatory environment will still be fairly challenging, and under a challenging regulatory environment, that just limits big deals,” said Andrew Luh, a partner at law firm Gunderson Dettmer who represents startups in mergers and acquisitions.
The Biden administration’s crackdown on Big Tech has gone well beyond squashing M&A.
Alphabet is in the midst of its second antitrust trial, following charges from the Justice Department that the company acted as a monopoly in search and advertising. The DOJ suedApple on antitrust grounds in March. The FTC has cases pending against Meta and Amazon.
Couple that with a similarly rigid environment in Europe, and no deal appears safe. In December, Adobe walked away from its $20 billion agreement to purchase design software startup Figma, and paid a $1 billion breakup fee. In a statement, the companies said, “there is no clear path to receive necessary regulatory approvals from the European Commission and the UK Competition and Markets Authority.”
In July, Figma said it had completed a tender offer valuing the design software startup at $12.5 billion. Figma is viewed as a strong IPO candidate when that market eventually reopens. But alongside a plummeting M&A market, initial public offerings are also in an extended drought as companies continue to adapt to drastically reduced valuations wrought by the economic slowdown starting in 2022.
A Figma spokesperson declined to comment on the company’s plans.
Dana Rao, who at the time was Adobe’s general counsel, announced his departure earlier this month after 12 years at the company. Rao said in a December interview that Adobe leadership felt justified in pursuing Figma after the failure of its competing product design program. But regulators were taking a different view.
“We’ve had a lot of interaction with the regulators, and they’ve been very focused on the newer doctrines of antitrust law that say that future competition is a critical part of the antitrust analysis,” he said.
Jonathan Kanter, head of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division, said in a statement after Adobe backed down that the move “ensures that designers, creators, and consumers continue to get the benefit of the rivalry between the two companies going forward.”
‘Very, very disciplined’
There are still deals taking place, outside the watchful eye of regulators.
In those cases, management was less concerned about regulators and much more focused on how shareholders would respond due to the growing obsession with profitability, following the 2022 downturn.
US company Hewlett Packard Enterprise President and Chief Officer Executive Antonio Neri gives a conference at the Mobile World Congress (MWC), the telecom industry’s biggest annual gathering, in Barcelona on February 27, 2024.
Pau Barrena | AFP | Getty Images
HPE CEO Antonio Neri told CNBC that Juniper would add to non-GAAP earnings in year one.
“We have been very, very disciplined on returning invested capital, meaning every dollar spent has to deliver value to our shareholders,” Neri said in an interview. “And that’s why, in the case of Juniper, for example, we committed to a series of synergies that then more than pay for the cost of capital to make this acquisition.”
Neri told analysts in January that the two companies do business in some of the same markets, but in different verticals, and said that he didn’t anticipate protracted battles with regulators. In August, the U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority approved the tie-up.
Sergio Letelier, HPE’s head of corporate development, said that when he and his team members advise Neri on a potential deal, they always discuss how regulators might treat it. While some transactions are taking longer to close than they would have previously, “the fundamentals of what is a problematic deal vs. what is not a problematic deal hasn’t changed,” Letelier said.
At Salesforce, CEO Marc Benioff said that Own should bolster free cash flow in the second year after the deal closed. It’s Benioff’s first billion-dollar-plus acquisition since 2021, when the cloud software vendor paid $27 billion for Slack, its largest purchase ever. The DOJ’s Antitrust Division asked for additional information on that deal before clearing it.
In an interview last week, Benioff called U.S. regulators “somewhat dysfunctional” but applauded Europe for recognizing where competition really is being harmed. He specifically pointed to a recent finding by the European Commission, the executive body of the European Union, that Microsoft had breached antitrust rules by tying Teams, its Slack competitor, to its core Office productivity applications.
“They’re the ones who are actually functional and who are doing serious work,” Benioff said, referring to the EU and U.K. “I think that it’s a big story that we’re following the Europeans in this regulatory environment.”
Since the Slack purchase, Salesforce has pursued only smaller deals, particularly after facing off with activist investors who pressured the company to put a renewed focus on profitability. Salesforce landed AI talent from buying Airkit and a Sales Cloud software add-on from Spiff.
“We’ve done more than 60 acquisitions,” Benioff said. “We’ve tried and failed a lot in M&A, but we have also succeeded in quite a few of them, especially the big ones.” Before Slack, Salesforce acquired Tableau Software and MuleSoft.
Hard to be confident
At Cisco, one of the first questions executives ask when evaluating a potential deal is how certain they are it will close, said Derek Idemoto, the networking hardware company’s head of corporate development.
“The question is, How much risk are you willing to take on the regulatory side, given how hard things are at this time and how litigious things could be,” said Idemoto, who’s worked on more than 100 deals in his nearly 17 years at the company.
Idemoto said that’s made Cisco more selective these days. Before the company announced its $27 billion purchase of data analytics software company Splunk last September, he said he viewed the risk as absolutely worth taking. Splunk sat comfortably outside Cisco’s core of networking equipment.
“Certainly it’s an offensive play for us,” Idemoto said.
The deal sailed through, even closing in March, six months ahead of schedule.
“Having a high confidence level when you sign something — that’s the Cisco way,” Idemoto said.
That level of confidence would be difficult for the megacap companies as long as the FTC and DOJ are aggressively watching them. Alphabet’s last big deal was its $5.4 billion purchase of cybersecurity company Mandiant in 2022. Microsoft closed its massive $75 billion purchase of Activision in October, but it took 20 months and a protracted fight with U.S. and European regulators. Amazon hasn’t had a billion-dollar-plus deal since closing the $3.9 billion acquisition of One Medical in early 2023.
Last month, Amazon announced it was hiring a quarter of staffers from Covariant, which builds AI models for robots. It was the company’s second AI deal in the acquihire vein, following a similar agreement with Adept in June. Even that deal attracted an informal FTC inquiry.
Amazon didn’t provide a specific comment for this story, but said acquisitions are still part of its growth strategy and “are a critical and healthy part of an innovation economy.” Microsoft and Google declined to comment.
HPE’s Letelier said that any tech company considering its acquisition strategy will have a difficult time forecasting for the future because it’s not clear what changes Vice President Harris might make if she wins in November or what Trump would do if he returns to the White House.
Trump as president blocked some deals on national security grounds, following recommendations from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. Regulators under President Joe Biden, meanwhile, have filed a record number of merger enforcement actions, Bloomberg reported.
“We’re at a crossroads here, and we don’t know which side of the fork the policy is going to go,” Letelier said.
Elon Musk announced his new company xAI, which he says has the goal to understand the true nature of the universe.
Jaap Arriens | Nurphoto | Getty Images
XAI, the artificial intelligence startup run by Elon Musk, raised a combined $10 billion in debt and equity, Morgan Stanley said.
Half of that sum was clinched through secured notes and term loans, while a separate $5 billion was secured through strategic equity investment, the bank said on Monday.
The funding gives xAI more firepower to build out infrastructure and develop its Grok AI chatbot as it looks to compete with bitter rival OpenAI, as well as with a swathe of other players including Amazon-backed Anthropic.
In May, Musk told CNBC that xAI has already installed 200,000 graphics processing units (GPUs) at its Colossus facility in Memphis, Tennessee. Colossus is xAI’s supercomputer that trains the firm’s AI. Musk at the time said that his company will continue buying chips from semiconductor giants Nvidia and AMD and that xAI is planning a 1-million-GPU facility outside of Memphis.
Addressing the latest funds raised by the company, Morgan Stanley that “the proceeds will support xAI’s continued development of cutting-edge AI solutions, including one of the world’s largest data center and its flagship Grok platform.”
xAI continues to release updates to Grok and unveiled the Grok 3 AI model in February. Musk has sought to boost the use of Grok by integrating the AI model with the X social media platform, formerly known as Twitter. In March, xAI acquired X in a deal that valued the site at $33 billion and the AI firm at $80 billion. It’s unclear if the new equity raise has changed that valuation.
xAI was not immediately available for comment.
Last year, xAI raised $6 billion at a valuation of $50 billion, CNBC reported.
Morgan Stanley said the latest debt offering was “oversubscribed and included prominent global debt investors.”
Competition among American AI startups is intensifying, with companies raising huge amounts of funding to buy chips and build infrastructure.
Musk has called Grok a “maximally truth-seeking” AI that is also “anti-woke,” in a bid to set it apart from its rivals. But this has not come without its fair share of controversy. Earlier this year, Grok responded to user queries with unrelated comments about the controversial topic of “white genocide” and South Africa.
Musk has also clashed with fellow AI leaders, including OpenAI’s Sam Altman. Most famously, Musk claimed that OpenAI, which he co-founded, has deviated from its original mission of developing AI to benefit humanity as a nonprofit and is instead focused on commercial success. In February, Musk alongside a group of investors, put in a bid of $97.4 billion to buy control of OpenAI. Altman swiftly rejected the offer.
— CNBC’s Lora Kolodny and Jonathan Vanian contributed to this report.
In recent years, the company has transformed from a competent private sector telecommunications firm into a “muscular technology juggernaut straddling the entire AI hardware and software stack,” said Paul Triolo, partner and senior vice president for China at advisory firm DGA-Albright Stonebridge Group.
Ramon Costa | SOPA Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images
Huawei has open-sourced two of its artificial intelligence models — a move tech experts say will help the U.S.-blacklisted firm continue to build its AI ecosystem and expand overseas.
The Chinese tech giant announced on Monday the open-sourcing of the AI models under its Pangu series, as well as some of its model reasoning technology.
Tech experts told CNBC that Huawei’s latest announcements not only highlight how it is solidifying itself as an open-source LLM player, but also how it is strengthening its position across the entire AI value chain as it works to overcome U.S.-led AI chip export restrictions.
In recent years, the company has transformed from a competent private sector telecommunications firm into a “muscular technology juggernaut straddling the entire AI hardware and software stack,” said Paul Triolo, partner and senior vice president for China at advisory firm DGA-Albright Stonebridge Group.
In its announcement Monday, Huawei called the open-source moves another key measure for Huawei’s “Ascend ecosystem strategy” that would help speed up the adoption of AI across “thousands of industries.”
The Ascend ecosystem refers to AI products built around the company’s Ascend AI chip series, which are widely considered to be China’s leading competitor to products from American chip giant Nvidia. Nvidia is restricted from selling its advanced products to China.
A Google-like strategy?
Pangu being available in an open-source manner allows developers and businesses to test the models and customize them for their needs, said Lian Jye Su, chief analyst at Omdia. “The move is expected to incentivize the use of other Huawei products,” he added.
According to experts, the coupling of Huawei’s Pangu models with the company’s AI chips and related products gives the company a unique advantage, allowing it to optimize its AI solutions and applications.
While competitors like Baidu have LLMs with broad capabilities, Huawei has focused on specialized AI models for sectors such as government, finance and manufacturing.
“Huawei is not as strong as companies like DeepSeek and Baidu at the overall software level – but it doesn’t need to be,” said Marc Einstein, research director at Counterpoint Research.
“Its objective is to ultimately use open source products to drive hardware sales, which is a completely different model from others. It also collaborates with DeepSeek, Baidu and others and will continue to do so,” he added.
Ray Wang, principal analyst at Constellation Research, said the chip-to-model strategy is similar to that of Google, a company that is also developing AI chips and AI models like its open-source Gemma models.
Huawei’s announcement on Monday could also help with its international ambitions. Huawei, along with players like Zhipu AI, has been slowly making inroads into new overseas markets.
In its announcement Monday, Huawei invited developers, corporate partners and researchers around the world to download and use its new open-source products in order to gather feedback and improve them.
“Huawei’s open-source strategy will resonate well in developing countries where enterprises are more price-sensitive as is the case with [Huawei’s] other products,” Einstein said.
As part of its global strategy, the company has also been looking to bring its latest AI data center solutions to new countries.
Digital illustration of a glowing world map with “AI” text across multiple continents, representing the global presence and integration of artificial intelligence.
Fotograzia | Moment | Getty Images
As artificial intelligence becomes more democratized, it is important for emerging economies to build their own “sovereign AI,” panelists told CNBC’s East Tech West conference in Bangkok, Thailand, on Friday.
In general, sovereign AI refers to a nation’s ability to control its own AI technologies, data and related infrastructure, ensuring strategic autonomy while meeting its unique priorities and security needs.
However, this sovereignty has been lacking, according to panelist Kasima Tharnpipitchai, head of AI strategy at SCB 10X, the technology investment arm of Thailand-based SCBX Group. He noted that many of the world’s most prominent large language models, operated by companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI, are based on the English language.
“The way you think, the way you interact with the world, the way you are when you speak another language can be very different,” Tharnpipitchai said.
It is, therefore, important for countries to take ownership of their AI systems, developing technology for specific languages, cultures, and countries, rather than just translating over English-based models.
Panelists agreed that the digitally savvy ASEAN region, with a total population of nearly 700 million people, is particularly well positioned to build its sovereign AI. People under the age of 35 make up around 61% of the population, and about 125,000 new users gain access to the internet daily.
Given this context, Jeff Johnson, managing director of ASEAN at Amazon Web Services, said, “I think it’s really important, and we’re really focused on how we can really democratize access to cloud and AI.”
Open-source models
According to panelists, one key way that countries can build up their sovereign AI environments is through the use of open-source AI models.
“There is plenty of amazing talent here in Southeast Asia and in Thailand, especially. To have that captured in a way that isn’t publicly accessible or ecosystem developing would feel like a shame,” said SCB 10X’s Tharnpipitchai.
Doing open-source is a way to create a “collective energy” to help Thailand better compete in AI and push sovereignty in a way that is beneficial for the entire country, he added.
Open-source generally refers to software in which the source code is made freely available, allowing anyone to view, modify and redistribute it. LLM players, such as China’s DeepSeek and Meta’s Llama, advertise their models as open-source, albeit with some restrictions.
The emergence of more open-source models offers companies and governments more options compared to relying on a few closed models, according to Cecily Ng, vice president and general manager of ASEAN & Greater China at software vendor Databricks.
AI experts have previously told CNBC that open-source AI has helped China boost AI adoption, better develop its AI ecosystem and compete with the U.S.
Access to computing
Prem Pavan, vice president and general manager of Southeast Asia and Korea at Red Hat, said that the localization of AI had been focused on language until recently. Having sovereign access to AI models powered by local hardware and computing is more important today, he added.
Panelists said that for emerging countries like Thailand, AI localization can be offered by cloud computing companies with domestic operations. These include global hyperscalers such as AWS, Microsoft Azure and Tencent Cloud, and sovereign players like AIS Cloud and True IDC.
“We’re here in Thailand and across Southeast Asia to support all industries, all businesses of all shapes and sizes, from the smallest startup to the largest enterprise,” said AWS’s Johnson.
He added that the economic model of the company’s cloud services makes it easy to “pay for what you use,” thus lowering the barriers to entry and making it very easy to build models and applications.
In April, the U.N. Trade and Development Agency said in a report that AI was projected to reach $4.8 trillion in market value by 2033. However, it warned that the technology’s benefits remain highly concentrated, with nations at risk of lagging behind.
Among UNCTAD’s recommendations to the international community for driving inclusive growth was shared AI infrastructure, the use of open-source AI models and initiatives to share AI knowledge and resources.