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Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta Platforms, demonstrates the Meta Quest Pro during the virtual Meta Connect event in New York on Oct. 11, 2022.

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Meta continues to lose billions of dollars developing the virtual reality and augmented reality technologies needed to underpin the nascent metaverse.

The social media giant reported fourth-quarter earnings Wednesday and said its Reality Labs unit recorded an operating loss of $4.97 billion while generating $1.1 billion in sales. Analysts were projecting that unit to log a fourth-quarter operating loss of $5.4 billion on $1.1 billion in sales.

Reality Labs is Meta’s unit that makes the Quest family of virtual-reality headsets and Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg kick-started his company’s VR endeavors in 2014 when it acquired the startup Oculus for $2 billion. Since then, Zuckerberg has characterized VR and AR as central to his plans to develop the futuristic digital world known as the metaverse, which he has said represent the next major computing platform.

Wall Street has questioned Zuckerberg’s metaverse investment. Reality Labs has tallied an operating loss of more than $60 billion since 2020, as of Meta’s fourth-quarter earnings report.

Meta last week said it would invest between $60 billion and $65 billion in 2025 capital expenditures to expand its computing infrastructure related to artificial intelligence. Zuckerberg has previously said AI is core to the company’s metaverse efforts, including its Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses. Meta develops that device with France-based EssilorLuxottica.

The social media company last year also unveiled its Orion prototype AR headset that is capable of overlaying digital objects on top of a person’s real field of view.

Meta released its latest VR headset, the $299 Quest 3S, during its September Connect event and pitched the device as a way for people to watch movies, play games and workout in VR.

Other tech companies are also investing in VR and AR.

Apple’s Vision Pro headset went on sale in the U.S. in February 2024 with a starting price of $3,499, and in December, Google and Samsung said they were working on a VR and AR device dubbed Project Moohan that will be available to buy in 2025 for an undisclosed price.

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AI voice startup ElevenLabs pushes global expansion as it gears up for an IPO

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AI voice startup ElevenLabs pushes global expansion as it gears up for an IPO

Founded in 2022, ElevenLabs is an AI voice generation startup based in London. It competes with the likes of Speechmatics and Hume AI.

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LONDON — ElevenLabs, a London-based startup that specializes in generating synthetic voices through artificial intelligence, has revealed plans to be IPO-ready within five years.

The company told CNBC it is targeting major global expansion as it prepares for an initial public offering.

“We expect to build more hubs in Europe, Asia and South America, and just keep scaling,” Mati Staniszewski, ElevenLabs’ CEO and co-founder, told CNBC in an interview at the firm’s London office.

He identified Paris, Singapore, Brazil and Mexico as potential new locations. London is currently ElevenLabs’ biggest office, followed by New York, Warsaw, San Francisco, Japan, India and Bangalore.

Staniszewski said the eventual aim is to get the company ready for an IPO in the next five years.

“From a commercial standpoint, we would like to be ready for an IPO in that time,” he said. “If the market is right, we would like to create a public company … that’s going to be here for the next generation.”

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Fundraising plans

ElevenLabs was valued at $3.3 billion following a recent $180 million funding round. The company is backed by the likes of Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital and ICONIQ Growth, as well as corporate names like Salesforce and Deutsche Telekom.

Staniszewski said his startup was open to raising more money from VCs, but it would depend on whether it sees a valid business need, like scaling further in other markets. “The way we try to raise is very much like, if there’s a bet we want to take, to accelerate that bet [we will] take the money,” he said.

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U.S. lifts chip software curbs on China amid trade truce, Synopsys says

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U.S. lifts chip software curbs on China amid trade truce, Synopsys says

Synopsys logo is seen displayed on a smartphone with the flag of China in the background.

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The U.S. government has rescinded its export restrictions on chip design software to China, U.S.-based Synopsys announced Thursday. 

“Synopsys is working to restore access to the recently restricted products in China,” it said in a statement

The U.S. had reportedly told several chip design software companies, including Synopsys, in May that they were required to obtain licenses before exporting goods, such as software and chemicals for semiconductors, to China. 

The U.S. Commerce Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment from CNBC.

The news comes after China signaled last week that they are making progress on a trade truce with the U.S. and confirmed conditional agreements to resume some exchanges of rare earths and advanced technology.

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Datadog stock jumps 10% on tech company’s inclusion in S&P 500 index

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Datadog stock jumps 10% on tech company’s inclusion in S&P 500 index

The Datadog stand is being displayed on day one of the AWS Summit Seoul 2024 at the COEX Convention and Exhibition Center in Seoul, South Korea, on May 16, 2024.

Chris Jung | Nurphoto | Getty Images

Datadog shares were up 10% in extended trading on Wednesday after S&P Global said the monitoring software provider will replace Juniper Networks in the S&P 500 U.S. stock index.

S&P Global is making the change effective before the beginning of trading on July 9, according to a statement.

Computer server maker Hewlett Packard Enterprise, also a constituent of the index, said earlier on Wednesday that it had completed its acquisition of Juniper, which makes data center networking hardware. HPE disclosed in a filing that it paid $13.4 billion to Juniper shareholders.

Over the weekend, the two companies reached a settlement with the U.S. Justice Department, which had sued in opposition to the deal. As part of the settlement, HPE agreed to divest its global Instant On campus and branch business.

While tech already makes up an outsized portion of the S&P 500, the index has has been continuously lifting its exposure as the industry expands into more areas of society.

DoorDash was the latest tech company to join during the last rebalancing in March. Cloud software vendor Workday was added in December, and that was preceded earlier in 2024 with the additions of Palantir, Dell, CrowdStrike, GoDaddy and Super Micro Computer.

Stocks often rally when they’re added to a major index, as fund managers need to rebalance their portfolios to reflect the changes.

New York-based Datadog went public in 2019. The company generated $24.6 million in net income on $761.6 million in revenue in the first quarter of 2025, according to a statement. Competitors include Cisco, which bought Splunk last year, as well as Elastic and cloud infrastructure providers such as Amazon and Microsoft.

Datadog has underperformed the broader tech sector so far this year. The stock was down 5.5% as of Wednesday’s close, while the Nasdaq was up 5.6%. Still, with a market cap of $46.6 billion, Datadog’s valuation is significantly higher than the median for that index.

— CNBC’s Ari Levy contributed to this report.

CNBC: Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel on the cloud computing outlook

Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel on the cloud computing outlook

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