Microsoft-owned GitHub says that 90% of the world’s open-source projects are stored on its code repository platform.
Jonathan Raa | Nurphoto via Getty Images
Microsoft-owned developer platform GitHub on Tuesday said it is giving enterprise users the ability to limit the storage of their sensitive software code to data centers located in the European Union.
The move, which is part of a bid to meet the bloc’s strict data protection requirements, comes amid a broader political push for digital “sovereignty.”
The company said that it would offer customers of its GitHub Enterprise Cloud greater control over where their repository data is stored, with the option to hold it only in Microsoft Azure-owned severs within the EU, rather than in other countries where data protections may be less robust.
Firms will be able to control the “data residency” of software code stored on GitHub — effectively meaning they can decide which regions the data is kept in.
GitHub said enterprise users will be given the ability to manage and control user accounts and choose unique namespaces specific to their company that are separate from their open-source experience.
Business users will also be given enhanced business continuity support and disaster recovery, which could help in the event of any cyber breaches or outages affecting physical server equipment.
GitHub Enterprise Cloud is a paid product the firm only offers to businesses. Companies using its enterprise-focused tools tend to store closed-source — rather than open-source — software projects on the platform.
GitHub is primarily known as a destination for individual coders and teams to create and store open-source code. However, the firm has been increasingly pushing a business-to-business sales model, especially after its takeover by Microsoft in 2018.
For businesses storing closed-source projects, the ability to control where that sensitive programming is stored and controlled, as well as the level of access granted to users, is paramount — especially in the EU, according to GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke.
“Europe is the place where cutting-edge regulation and laws around privacy and data protection and many other things, like AI, were born,” Dohmke told CNBC on a video call. “Here there are exciting frameworks to transfer data back and forth around the world.”
“Data residency emerged as an important driver for any enterprise’s cloud strategy, and enterprises want to know where crucial assets like data is being stored,” he added.
Shelley McKinley, GitHub’s chief legal officer, said that closed-source code is today considered the “crown jewels” of a company’s digital strategy.
“European customers were demanding more from us in this area,” she told CNBC. “The EU has been in the center of this [data residency] movement since the beginning of the cloud days.”
Going forward, GitHub plans to roll out data residency within its GitHub Enterprise Cloud across other regions, including Australia, Asia, and Latin America.
EU push for digital ‘sovereignty’
GitHub’s data residency push ties into a broader political and regulatory theme within the EU around so-called digital “sovereignty.”
The EU is investing billions into what it believes are fundamental and core technologies to boost its tech sovereignty and reduce dependency on the U.S. and China. The region is currently heavily reliant on technologies that come from beyond its borders. Top officials are in the process of trying to change this.
“Europe must profoundly refocus its collective efforts on closing the innovation gap with the US and China, especially in advanced technologies. Europe is stuck in a static industrial structure with few new companies rising up to disrupt existing industries or develop new growth engines,” Draghi said in the report.
GitHub’s Dohmke said that Europe is currently lagging behind the U.S. and China when it comes to adoption of cloud computing.
According to figures from data center operator Stackscale, 45% of EU enterprises used cloud computing last year, up about 4 percentage points from 2021 to 2023. But it is particularly low in certain countries.
For example, in France, only 27% of enterprises in the EU use cloud technology, whereas in Nordic countries adoption rates are much higher, with 78% of enterprises using the cloud in Finland.
From a global perspective, though, Dohmke said he is optimistic about the future of tech advancements. In November last year, GitHub launched a new version of its “Copilot” programming assistant, called GitHub Copilot Enterprise, to give developers inside companies a way to more easily generate software code using AI technology.
According to Dohmke, developers using its Copilot assistant have been able to generate code 55% faster than programmers not using the AI software.
In the future, he envisages a world where AI automates an even greater share of the workload involved in writing code.
Developers will start to get “AI-native agents” to fulfil certain tasks in their coding journeys, he said, adding that it’ll also become easier for people who aren’t software programmers to be able to create their own software code thanks to artificial intelligence.
An AI assistant on display at Mobile World Congress 2024 in Barcelona.
Angel Garcia | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Artificial intelligence is shaking up the advertising business and “unnerving” investors, one industry leader told CNBC.
“I think this AI disruption … unnerving investors in every industry, and it’s totally disrupting our business,” Mark Read, the outgoing CEO of British advertising group WPP, told CNBC’s Karen Tso on Tuesday.
The advertising market is under threat from emerging generative AI tools that can be used to materialize pieces of content at rapid pace. The past couple of years has seen the rise of a number of AI image generators, including OpenAI’s DALL-E, Google’s Veo and Midjourney.
In his first interview since announcing he would step down as WPP boss, Read said that AI is “going to totally revolutionize our business.”
“AI is going to make all the world’s expertise available to everybody at extremely low cost,” he said at London Tech Week. “The best lawyer, the best psychologist, the best radiologist, the best accountant, and indeed, the best advertising creatives and marketing people often will be an AI, you know, will be driven by AI.”
Read said that 50,000 WPP employees now use WPP Open, the company’s own AI-powered marketing platform.
“That, I think, is my legacy in many ways,” he added.
Structural pressure on creative parts of the ad business are driving industry consolidation, Read also noted, adding that companies would need to “embrace” the way in which AI would impact everything from creating briefs and media plans to optimizing campaigns.
A report from Forrester released in June last year showed that more than 60% of U.S. ad agencies are already making use of generative AI, with a further 31% saying they’re exploring use cases for the technology.
‘Huge transformation’
Read is not alone in this view. Advertising is undergoing a “huge transformation” due to the disruptive effects of AI, French advertising giant Publicis Groupe’s CEO Maurice Levy told CNBC at the Viva Tech conference in Paris.
He noted that AI image and video generation tools are speeding up content production drastically, while automated messaging systems can now achieve “personalization at scale like never before.”
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However, the Publicis chief stressed that AI should only be considered a tool that people can use to augment their lives.
“We should not believe that AI is more than a tool,” he added.
And while AI is likely to impact some jobs, Levy ultimately thinks it will create more roles than it destroys.
“Will AI replace me, and will AI kill some jobs? I think that AI, yes, will destroy some jobs,” Levy conceded. However, he added that, “more importantly, AI will transform jobs and will create more jobs. So the net balance will be probably positive.”
This, he says, would be in keeping with the labor impacts of previous technological inventions like the internet and smartphones.
“There will be more autonomous work,” Levy added.
Still, Nicole Denman Greene, analyst at Gartner, warns brands should be wary of causing a negative reaction from consumers who are skeptical of AI’s impact on human creativity.
According to a Gartner survey from September, 82% of consumers said firms using generative AI should prioritize preserving human jobs, even if it means lower profits.
“Pivot from what AI can do to what it should do in advertising,” Greene told CNBC.
“What it should do is help create groundbreaking insights, unique execution to reach diverse and niche audiences, push boundaries on what ‘marketing’ is and deliver more brand differentiated, helpful and relevant personalized experiences, including deliver on the promise of hyper-personalization.”
Jensen Huang, co-founder and chief executive officer of Nvidia Corp., left, and Emmanuel Macron, France’s president at the 2025 VivaTech conference in Paris, France, on Wednesday, June 11, 2025.
Nathan Laine | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Nvidia boss Jensen Huang has been on a tour of Europe this week, bringing excitement and intrigue to everywhere he visited.
His message was clear — Nvidia is the company that can help Europe build its artificial intelligence infrastructure so the region can take control of its own destiny with the transformative technology.
I’ve been in London and Paris this week following Huang around as he met with U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, French President Emmanuel Macron, journalists, fans, analysts and gave a keynote at Nvidia’s GTC event in the capital of France.
Here’s the what I saw and the key things I learned.
At London Tech Week, the lines were long and the auditorium packed to hear him speak.
The GTC event in Paris was full too. It was like going to a music concert or sporting event. There were GTC Paris T-shirts on the back of every chair and even a merchandise store.
Nvidia GTC in Paris on 11 June 2025
Arjun Kharpal
The aura of Huang really struck me when, after a question-and-answer session with him and a room full of attendees, most people lined up to take pictures or selfies with him.
Macron and Starmer both wanted to be seen on stage with him.
Nvidia positions itself as Europe’s AI hope
Nvidia’s key product is its graphics processing units (GPU) that are used to train and execute AI applications.
But Huang has positioned Nvidia as more than a chip company. During the week, he described Nvidia as an infrastructure firm. He also said AI should be seen as infrastructure like electricity.
His pitch to all countries was that Nvidia could be the company that will help countries build out that infrastructure.
“We believe that in order to compete, in order to build a meaningful ecosystem, Europe needs to come together and build capacity that is joint,” Huang said during a speech at the Viva Tech conference in Paris on Wednesday.
Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, speaks during the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, France, June 11, 2025.
Gonzalo Fuentes | Reuters
One of the most significant partnerships announced this week is between French startup Mistral and Nvidia to build a so-called AI cloud using the latter’s GPUs.
Huang spoke a lot during the week about “sovereign AI” — the concept of building data centers within a country’s borders that services its population rather than relying on servers located overseas. Among European policymakers and companies, this has been an important topic.
Huang also heaped praise on the U.K., France and Europe more broadly when it came to their potential in the AI industry.
China still behind but catching up
On Thursday, Huang decided to do a tour of Nvidia’s booth and I managed to catch him to get a few words on CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe.”
A key topic of that discussion was China. Nvidia has not been able to sell its most advanced chips to China because of U.S. export controls and even less sophisticated semiconductors are being blocked. In its last quarterly results, Nvidia took a $4.5 billion hit on unsold inventory.
I asked Huang about how China was progressing with AI chips, in particular referencing Huawei, the Chinese tech giant that is trying to make semiconductor products to rival Nvidia.
Huang said Huawei is a generation behind Nvidia. But because there is lots of energy in China, Huawei can just use more chips to get results.
“If the United States doesn’t want to partake, participate in China, Huawei has got China covered, and Huawei has got everybody else covered,” Huang said.
In addition, Huang is concerned about the strategic importance of U.S. companies not having access to China.
“It’s even more important that the American technology stack is what AI developers around the world build on,” Huang said.
Just reading between the lines somewhat — Huang sees a world where Chinese AI tech advances. Some countries may decide to build their AI infrastructure with Chinese companies rather than American. That in turn could give Chinese companies a chance to be in the AI race.
Quantum, robotics and driverless is the future
Huang often uses public appearances to talk about the future.
I asked him about some of those areas he’s bullish on like robotics and driverless cars, technology that Nvidia’s products can power.
Huang told me this will be the “decade of” autonomous vehicles and robotics.
Nvidia boss Jensen Huang delivers a speech on stage talking about robotics.
Arjun Kharpal | CNBC
During his keynote at GTC Paris on Wednesday, he also address quantum computing, saying the technology is reaching “an inflection point.”
Quantum computers are widely believed to be able to solve complex problems that classic computers can’t. This could include things like discovering new drugs or materials.
In an aerial view, a Tesla showroom at 12845 N. US 183 Highway Service Road is seen after police were called for a suspicious device in Austin, Texas, on March 24, 2025.
Brandon Bell | Getty Images
With Elon Musk looking to June 22 as his tentative start date for Tesla’s pilot robotaxi service in Austin, Texas, protesters are voicing their opposition.
Public safety advocates and political protesters, upset with Musk’s work with the Trump administration, joined together in downtown Austin on Thursday to express their concerns about the robotaxi launch. Members of the Dawn Project, Tesla Takedown and Resist Austin say that Tesla’s partially automated driving systems have safety problems.
Tesla sells its cars with a standard Autopilot package, or a premium Full Self-Driving option (also known as FSD or FSD supervised), in the U.S. Automobiles with these systems, which include features like automatic lane keeping, steering and parking, have been involved in dozens of collisions, some fatal, according to data tracked by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
Tesla’s robotaxis, which Musk showed off in a video clip on X earlier this week, are new versions of the company’s popular Model Y vehicles, equipped with a future release of Tesla’s FSD software. That “unsupervised” FSD, or robotaxi technology, is not yet available to the public.
Tesla critics with The Dawn Project, which calls itself a tech-safety and security education business, brought a version of Model Y with relatively recent FSD software (version 2025.14.9) to show residents of Austin how it works.
In their demonstration on Thursday, they showed how a Tesla with FSD engaged zoomed past a school bus with a stop sign held out and ran over a child-sized mannequin that they put in front of the vehicle.
Dawn Project CEO Dan O’Dowd also runs Green Hills Software, which sells technology to Tesla competitors, including Ford and Toyota.
Stephanie Gomez, who attended the demonstration, told CNBC that she didn’t like the role Musk had been playing in the government. Additionally, she said she has no confidence in Tesla’s safety standards and said there’s been a lack of transparency from Tesla regarding how its robotaxis will work.
Another protester, Silvia Revelis, said she also opposed Musk’s political activity, but that safety is the biggest concern.
“Citizens have not been able to get safety testing results,” she said. “Musk believes he’s above the law.”
Tesla didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.