Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is headed to South Korea, one of the company’s most important markets, ahead of meeting there between U.S. President Donald Trump and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping.

For Huang, it’s expected to be a trip that mixes business and politics with a meeting with Trump on the cards as well as execs from South Korea’s biggest firms such as Samsung and SK Group.

Market watchers will also be looking out for clues as to Nvidia’s future in China.

Here’s what might happen this week with Nvidia.

Among the execs that Huang is expected to meet is SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won, Yonhap reported. SK Group is SK Hynix’s parent company.

The meeting could be a chance to discuss future HBM development. Rival Samsung also develops HBM but its product has not been certified by Nvidia for use. A discussion about the progress on Samsung’s HBM could be on the cards as Huang said Tuesday he would meet with the company.

On the sidelines of the Nvidia developers’ conference held in Washington on Tuesday, Huang said his company is partnering with with Samsung and autoamker Hyundai “in many ways” including investing in “AI factories” — a term used to describe data centers.

SK Telecom, another subsidiary of SK Group, is currently building data centers in South Korea. Nvidia is planning to supply its chips to SK Group, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

Other areas where Nvidia may announce plans could be driverless cars and robotics, a major area of focus for South Korea’s tech industry.

This week could be crucial for providing insights on Nvidia’s future in China. The tech giant was previously banned from exporting its AI chips to China until earlier this year when the Trump administration ended the restrictions. While Nvidia is permitted to export its downgraded H20 chip to China, Beijing has reportedly pushed local companies not to purchase it. Instead, China is pushing its local firms to buy domestic Nvidia alternatives.

Trump on Wednesday signaled that Nvidia’s Blackwell AI processors could be up for discussion with Xi.The Blackwell chip is Nvidia’s most advanced product and is not currently allowed to be exported to China.

“Trump wants to do business with China and he considers almost everything is business including Nvidia,” George Chen, partner and co-chair of the digital practice at The Asia Group, told CNBC on Wednesday.

“We may see China wants some sort of guarantee that the U.S. will not add location trackers into U.S. chips to be sold to China … The U.S. may also have its own demands in return, hence Nvidia now becomes one of the bargains for the two presidents in Korea.”

Chinese regulators in July raised concerns about the security of Nvidia chips in July. The world’s second-largest economy is a lucrative market for Nvidia and being shut out has already cost the tech giant billions of dollars in lost sales. Any opening up of the China market will be positive for the chip maker.

Investors can’t get enough of artificial intelligence, despite worries over the sector’s excessively high valuations.

The S&P 500, Dow Jones Industrial Average and Nasdaq Composite rose Tuesday stateside, with all three notching new intraday highs. The major averages were juiced by gains in tech. Nvidia popped nearly 5%, while Microsoft climbed roughly 2%.

Both Apple and Microsoft reached a market capitalization of over $4 trillion after their shares rose. It was the first time Apple hit that milestone, though it closed just shy of that level.

Tech companies can’t get enough of each other, either.

Nvidia announced a $1 trillion investment in Nokia, which the Finnish company said will go toward developing its AI plans. For those, like me, who remember Nokia as a company that made the most desirable and bullet-proof phones: It primarily produces cellular equipment now.

Meanwhile, with its 27% stake in OpenAI’s for-profit business, Microsoft is potentially sitting on a goldmine — provided AI finds its footing as a sustainable, revenue-generating business in the long run. OpenAI on Tuesday announced it had completed its restructuring as a nonprofit with a controlling stake in its for-profit arm.

It’s not just Microsoft. Investors who have poured money into tech could potentially gain big — as Cathie Wood of Ark Invest says, “If our expectations for AI … are correct, we are at the very beginning of a technology revolution.”

The Fed has a rate cut plus a bunch of other things on its plate this week. Here’s what to expect

Markets are assigning a nearly 100% probability that the Federal Open Market Committee will approve a second consecutive quarter percentage point, or 25 basis point, reduction in the federal funds rate. The overnight lending benchmark is currently targeted between 4%-4.25%.

Beyond that, policymakers are likely to debate, among other things, the future path of reductions, the challenges posed by a lack of economic data and the timetable for ending the reduction in the Fed’s asset portfolio of Treasurys and mortgage-backed securities.

— Jeff Cox

A major cyberattack on Jaguar Land Rover, considered the most expensive security breach in British history, has prompted experts to question whether the U.K. is equipped to handle a rapidly growing cyber threat.

The Cyber Monitoring Centre, a cybersecurity body, recently estimated the hack of Britain’s biggest automaker to have cost the U.K. a whopping £1.9 billion ($2.5 billion), a figure that represents the substantial disruption caused to JLR’s manufacturing.

The company is currently in the midst of a phased restart to operations after the incident forced it to halt production at factories around the world.

“The threat profile is changing,” Edward Lewis, director at the Cyber Monitoring Centre, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” on Friday.

“What JLR now shows is that things have pivoted quite dramatically, much more towards economic security at an organizational level and national economic security,” he continued. “Let’s make no mistake here … this isn’t just another cyber headline. This was a macro economic event, and a very serious one for the U.K.”

The Department for Business and Trade did not directly respond to a CNBC question on how prepared the government is for this threat.

JLR first reported it had been victim of a “cyber incident” on Sept. 2. As the U.K.’s largest automotive employer, with nearly 33,000 people employees nationwide — and a further 104,000 working across its vast supply chain. Early figures from the company suggest the attack dealt a heavy blow, with wholesale deliveries down nearly 25% on the year in its fiscal second quarter.

On Tuesday, figures from the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association, or ACEA, showed Jaguar sales to the EU by September year-to-date were down nearly 80% on an annual basis.

That impact is being felt on links all along the value chain. In a survey of businesses across the West Midlands region, the Black Country Chamber of Commerce found that nearly eight in 10 firms were negatively impacted by the cyberattack, with 14% already making redundancies by late September.

The cyberattack also comes amid years of decline for Britain’s car industry, with September’s production figure coming in at the lowest level since 1952, according to the lobby group Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders.

JLR is such a pivotal player that its plant shutdown was singled out in S&P’s manufacturing PMI release for September, which fell to a six-month low of 46.2, below the 50-mark that separates growth from contraction.

The hack itself is understood to be the work of a criminal gang calling itself Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters: apparently a collaboration between three collectives, including one named Scattered Spider — which the National Crime Agency indicated it was investigating in connection with the cyberattack on British retailers Co-op and Marks and Spencer earlier this year.

The U.K.’s National Cyber Security Centre says cybercrime is on the rise, warning the country faces four “nationally significant” cyberattacks every week. That’s a record, and reflects a surge of more than 100% on previous levels.

In mid-October, the NCSC co-signed a letter with the National Crime Agency and government ministers —including Finance Minister Rachel Reeves — to the leaders of every company in the FTSE 350, calling on businesses to take steps toward protecting themselves from cyberattacks. The group’s message was clear: “Don’t wait for the breach, act now.”

Government attention has also turned to JLR’s parent company, Tata Group, whose subsidiary Tata Motors bought the Jaguar and Land Rover brands from Ford in 2008.

JLR is one of the more than 200 U.K.-based companies which outsources some or all of their IT management to another Tata subsidiary: Tata Consulting Services, with which JLR expanded its partnership in late 2023 to help it “create a simplified and leading-edge IT infrastructure,” in a deal worth more than £800 million.

Other companies in that roster include fellow cyberattack victims Marks and Spencer — which outsourced more than half of its IT team in 2018 — and the Co-op, which did the same for some of its IT roles two years later.

The Telegraph reported on Sunday that Marks and Spencer ended its business relationship with TCS in July in the aftermath of the attack, which TCS denies. “Some current reports are misleading,” a spokesperson for the firm told CNBC, “with inaccuracies including the size of the contract and the continuity of TCS’ work for Marks & Spencer.”

Spokespeople for both TCS and Marks & Spencer confirmed to CNBC that the bidding process for the service desk contract began in January, months before the hack.

Liam Byrne, chair of the U.K.’s Business and Trade Committee, wrote to TCS CEO Krithi Krithivasan in late September asking for information amid British media reporting that the attack on Marks and Spencer was apparently linked to one of TCS’ employees. TCS said there were “no indicators of compromise” within its network — and that the cyberattacks at all three firms took place within those clients’ own systems.

A TCS spokesperson expanded on this letter to CNBC, saying “while in none of these cases did the attack originate from TCS or our networks, our priority has been to help our clients during this period … TCS has reviewed our own networks systems and been able to conclude that the vulnerabilities have not originated from there.”

JLR says it makes up 4% of all U.K. goods exports. That’s a significant chunk. Therefore, it’s unsurprising that the government scrambled into action to try and support the company and the firms that rely on it to function — with ITV reporting that the U.K. mulled becoming a “buyer of last resort” for those companies, planning to sell components on to JLR once it resumed production.

The Department for Business and Trade wasn’t able to confirm the ITV report, but a government spokesperson told CNBC: “We acted swiftly to provide cyber security expertise and made a loan guarantee available at a critical moment to help stabilise the the situation. We continue to work closely with JLR, the industry and major banks to keep a close eye on the supply chain.”

JLR reportedly didn’t have cyber insurance at the time of the incident, leading some to question the precedent set by — and sustainability of — the government having to step in to prevent catastrophe. CNBC asked the automaker if this was the case, to which a a spokesperson for the firm said it does not comment on commercial matters.

As it happened, the government has said it will partially guarantee £1.5 billion in loans from a consortium of commercial lenders — meaning the taxpayer will only foot the bill if JLR defaults.

But, the Confederation of British Metalforming, which represents many businesses within JLR’s supply chain, called for further long-term support options — saying “the price of saving good companies is a lot cheaper than losing them.”

The Cyber Monitoring Centre’s Lewis told CNBC that while it’s “still a moral hazard if public intervention removes the incentive to invest in resilience,” it’s unlikely any policy “would even have touched the sides of the financial exposure” JLR has experienced.

Lewis said the conversation should focus more on turning resilience into value. “Emphasis can’t be on admonishment … it should be about encouraging a collective national understanding of the scale of this threat, what resilience really means day to day.”