After posting almost 200 videos, amassing hundreds of thousands of followers and racking up millions of views, Carla Lalli Music is quitting YouTube. Substack is her new focus.
Music is a cookbook author and food content creator, and she is shifting her focus to Substack, a subscription platform that lets creators charge users subscriptions for access to their content. Music told CNBC she came to that decision after earning more in one year of using Substack, nearly $200,000 in revenue, than she did by posting videos on YouTube since 2021.
Music is the exact kind of content creator that Substack is trying to lure to its platform as TikTok’s future in the U.S. remains in limbo.
San Francisco-based Substack launched in 2017 as a tool for newsletter writers to charge readers a monthly fee to read their content. The platform allows creators to connect to their followers directly without having to navigate algorithmic models that control when their content is shown, as is the case on TikTok, Google’s YouTube and other social platforms. Substack has raised about $100 million, most recently at a post-money valuation of more than $650 million, the company told CNBC.
This year, Substack has broadened its focus beyond newsletters, and on Thursday, it announced that creators can now post video content directly through the Substack app and monetize these videos.
“There’s going to be a world of people who are much more focused on videos,” Substack Co-founder Hamish McKenzie told CNBC. “That is a huge world that Substack is only starting to penetrate.”
Substack began this push after the social media landscape was thrown into flux as a result of the effective ban of TikTok in January that caused the popular Chinese-owned service to go offline for a few hours. TikTok was also removed from Apple and Google’s app stores for nearly a month.
The disruption to TikTok in January happened as a result of a law signed by former President Joe Biden to force a sale of the Chinese-owned app or have it effectively banned in the U.S. On his first day in office, President Donald Trump signed an executive order extending TikTok’s ability to operate in the U.S., but that order expires on April 5.
Days after TikTok went offline, Substack launched a $20 million fund to court creators to its platform.
“If TikTok gets banned for political reasons, there’s nothing to do with the work you’ve done, but it really affects your life,” McKenzie said. “The only and surefire guard against that is if you don’t place your audience in the hands of some other volatile system who doesn’t care about what happens to your livelihood.”
Moving beyond newsletters
McKenzie says that they are going after creators on competing social media platforms to start sharing their video content on Substack.
“Video-first creators, people who are mobile oriented, there’s a whole lot of new possibility waiting to be unlocked once they meet this model in the right place,” McKenzie said.
Already, Substack has more than 4 million paid subscriptions with over 50,000 creators who make money on the platform, the company said. Substack says that 82% of its top 250 revenue-generating creators have already integrated audio or video into their content, reflecting a growing emphasis on multimedia content.
Prior to the video announcements, Substack allowed creators to post videos on the app to Notes, which is the platform’s front-facing feed format. But the feature did not allow creators to publish video content behind Substack’s paywalls.
The update enables creators to put video content behind a paywall and it provides data on estimated revenue impact. It also allows them to track viewership and new subscribers.
Carla Lalli Music is a cookbook writer and food creator.
Carla Lalli Music
The push by Substack into video is a welcomed development for creators like Music, who was losing money from making videos for YouTube.
Music said each video costs her $3,500 to produce despite filming at home. If she published four videos a month on YouTube, she’d earn about $4,000 in revenue. Music was losing about $10,000 a month, she said.
“It’s really depressing to operate at a loss,” said Music.
Even with brand deals, which is an agreement where brands pay creators to post content that promotes their products, the earnings were barely enough to recoup the costs of posting on YouTube, Music said.
More than half of the $290 billion creator economy comes from direct-to-fan value. That includes ticket sales, courses, livestreams and paid memberships, according to a survey conducted by Patreon, a Substack competitor.
With her shift to Substack, Music said she’s now focused on writing another book, posting recipes behind the platform’s paywall and sprinkling in occasional videos.
“I have a lot more to benefit from focused attention on a smaller group of people than I ever did on throwing stuff and seeing what was going to stick with billions of potential audience members,” Music said. “It’s more sustainable.”
At the Meta Connect developer conference, Mark Zuckerberg, head of the Facebook group Meta, shows the prototype of computer glasses that can display digital objects in transparent lenses.
Andrej Sokolow | Picture Alliance | Getty Images
Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday unveiled the $799 Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses, the social media company’s first consumer-ready smart glasses with a built-in display.
The glasses, which costs $799, contain a small digital display that can be controlled via hand gestures through a wristband powered by neural technology, confirming a CNBC report in August. A promotional video of the new smart glasses appeared on Meta’s YouTube page on Monday but was later removed.
Tune in Thursday at 11:00 a.m. ET: Meta Chief Product Officer Chris Cox joins CNBC TV to discuss with Julia Boorstin the highlights of Meta’s annual Connect event, live from the company’s HQ in Menlo Park CA.
The new smart glasses are a bridge between the company’s audio-only Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses and the experimental Orion augmented reality glasses that the company revealed at last year’s Connect event. Orion can overlay 3D visuals over a person’s real-world field of view with the help of a wireless computing puck, but the glasses are expensive to make and not yet available to consumers.
The Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses come with the Meta Neural Band, an EMG wristband that allows users to control the device using hand gestures.
“These are glasses with the classic style that you’d expect from Ray-Ban, but they’re the first AI glasses with a high resolution display and a fully weighted Meta neural band,” Zuckerberg said.
With the new glasses, people can do tasks like watch videos through the display or see and respond to text messages, Zuckerberg said. The display doesn’t block a person’s view, and it disappears when not being used, he said.
The glasses go on sale in the U.S. on Sept. 30.
During a demo, Zuckerberg repeatedly attempted to call Meta tech chief Andrew Bosworth unsuccessfully.
“This is uh — you know, it happens,” Zuckerberg said.
Meta has been developing its smart glasses with eyewear giant EssilorLuxottica since 2019, and last year renewed a long-term partnership agreement to continue making the products.
The company on Wednesday also debuted the Oakley Meta Vanguard smart glasses, intended for athletes who participate in high-intensity sports like snowboarding and mountain biking. The Oakley-branded glasses will cost $499 when they launch on Oct. 21, making it $100 more expensive than the Oakley Meta HSTN glasses that went on sale in June.
The Oakley Meta Vanguard smart glasses have a sportier look than the Oakley Meta HSTN glasses thanks to a wraparound design that extends its colorful lenses around a person’s temples. Unlike the Oakley Meta HSTN glasses, the new model contains a button on the underside of its frames so that athletes who wear helmets can more easily capture photos and videos.
The new sports-centric smart glasses have up to nine hours of battery life, can capture 3K video and contain speakers that are louder than their predecessors. The glasses can connect with Garmin-branded fitness watches to track certain stats like their heart rates using the Meta AI assistant. Preorders start today.
Meta also debuted the Ray-Ban Meta (Gen 2), the latest version of the company’s original smart glasses. The Ray-Ban Meta (Gen 2) costs $379, up from $299 for the version released in 2023. The Ray-Ban Meta (Gen 2) has double the battery life of the previous model, lasting 8 hours on a single charge, and a more powerful camera that can capture 3K Ultra HD video. The new glasses go on sale today.
Zuckerberg also announced Horizon TV, pitching it as a way to watch television shows, sporting events and movies using the company’s Quest VR headsets. Some of Meta’s partners who will be contributing content to the app include Disney and Universal Pictures, Zuckerberg said.
Thomas Fuller | SOPA Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images
Cybersecurity company Netskope is eying a $7.3 billion valuation after pricing shares at $19 for its upcoming IPO, at the top end of its expected range.
Netskope will start trading on Thursday on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “NTSK.” The share sale raised $908.2 million.
Earlier this week, Netskope lifted its expected pricing range to between $17 and $19 a share, up from an original range of $15 to $17. The company revealed plans to go public last month.
Netskope’s offering comes amid a hot period for IPO activity after a years-long lull spurred by step inflation and soaring interest rates. The long-overdue resurgence has fueled optimism on Wall Street and in a venture capital industry eager for return on investment.
Ticket reseller StubHub slid 6% it its first day of trading Wednesday, but a lackluster start may not be reason for concern. CoreWeave went public in March and closed flat in its first day, with shares going on to triple.
Swedish buy now, pay later firm Klarna jumped 15% in its debut this month. Peter Thiel-backed cryptocurrency exchangeBullish, design software company Figma and stablecoin issuer Circle have also jumped since their recent market debuts.
Read more CNBC tech news
The cybersecurity sector is also undergoing a busy stretch for dealmaking fueled by ongoing artificial intelligence advancements and a shifting threat landscape.
Santa Clara, California-based Netskope was founded in 2012 and is led by co-founder and CEO Sanjay Beri. At the end of July, the company said it had 2,910 employees and 4,317 customers across 90 countries.
Annual recurring revenues rose 33% to $707 million at the end of July and revenues reached $328 million for the six months ended July 31. The company also reported a net loss of $170 million during that period.
Some of Netskope’s significant backers include Accel, Iconiq and Lightspeed Venture Partners.
Nscale, the UK-headquartered AI infrastructure provider.
Courtesy: Nscale
Two years ago, Nscale was a brand new startup in the U.K. that had yet to raise any outside funding or officially announce its existence.
Last year the London-based company came out of stealth, and in December announced that it had raised its Series A fundraising, totaling $155 million.
Now, Nscale finds itself at the center of the action in the hottest market on the planet: artificial intelligence. And it has close to $700 million in fresh capital from Nvidia, the world’s most valuable company.
In press releases on Tuesday, Nscale was named as an AI infrastructure partner for Nvidia, Microsoft and OpenAI, as the companies expand their buildouts in the U.K. Nscale then said it signed a five-year $6.2 billion agreement with Microsoft and Aker to develop “hyperscale AI infrastructure” in Europe, specifically Norway, where Aker is headquartered.
OpenAI made prior headlines with Nscale, announcing plans in July for a data center in Norway for a Stargate-branded AI data center. Nscale agreed to commit $1 billion for the project, with the goal of racking up 100,000 Nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs) at the site before 2027.
It’s a remarkably quick rise for a company that wasn’t even around when OpenAI kicked off the generative AI boom with the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022. At that time, what’s now Nscale was part of Arkon Energy, which was established a year earlier to provide infrastructure for cryptocurrency mining. Nscale was spun out to address soaring demand for data centers capable of handling AI workloads.
Read more CNBC tech news
Like CoreWeave, which went public this year and now sports a market cap of $58 billion, Nscale is combining data center space, power and lots of GPUs with its own software in order to an provide end-to-end service for AI infrastructure.
CoreWeave, which supplies infrastructure to Microsoft, Google, Nvidia and OpenAI, also has roots in crypto. Founded in 2017, the company built up its initial fleet of Nvidia GPUs for ethereum mining before pivoting to AI.
Nscale didn’t respond to a request for comment following this week’s announcements, but CEO Josh Payne, who previously founded Arkon, told CNBC in late July that the company was targeting two big problems in Europe. One is a lack of sufficient computing capacity and the other is a “very fragmented market.”
“What the continent needs is large AI infrastructure projects deploying compute [power],” Payne said, after the announcement with OpenAI for the Norway buildout. “The ecosystem can consume from the project to build AI products, to generate productivity growth and economic benefit.”
Payne wrote in a LinkedIn post on Wednesday that the agreement with Microsoft and Aker is a “huge win for European-owned AI infrastructure.”
Europe has been pushing the concept of “sovereign AI,” requiring data centers and AI workloads to be located and processed on European soil. Nscale has quickly emerged as an important player in the U.K.’s bid to evolve into a global leader in AI. In January, Britain laid out an AI “action plan,” promising to reduce bureaucracy to help its domestic AI sector thrive.
While Nscale is addressing the European market, many of its early partners are big U.S. AI vendors. They timed their announcements on Tuesday to President Donald Trump’s state visit to the U.K.
On Wednesday, Trump visited Windsor Castle and met with King Charles, Queen Camilla and other members of the royal family. His trip comes at a contentious moment for U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who is under pressure to bring stability to the country after the exit of Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner over a house tax scandal and a major cabinet reshuffle.
Microsoft headlined the U.K. announcements, committing $15.5 billion of new investment to computing equipment. The software giant said it plans to work with Nscale to construct what will become the U.K.’s largest supercomputer in Loughton, a suburban town in the English county of Essex.
The site will initially house 23,040 Nvidia Blackwell GPUs to be delivered in the first quarter of 2027. When it goes live, it will generate 50 megawatts of AI capacity, scalable to 90 megawatts, according to a statement from Nscale.
“No one can make that kind of capital investment unless they’ve got somebody already committed to spend the money once the work is complete, and that’s the role we’re playing,” Microsoft President Brad Smithsaid Tuesday, adding the deal represents a major vote of confidence in Nscale.
OpenAI said it would launch a U.K. version of Stargate through a partnership with Nscale and Nvidia. OpenAI will deploy 8,000 GPUs in the project’s first phase early next year, with the option to expand capacity to approximately 31,000 GPUs over time.
Stargate U.K. will operate across a number of sites in the country — one of the early ones being Cobalt Park, an industrial state in the Northern English city Newcastle. Stargate was initially spawned in the U.S. in January as part of President Trump’s effort to push investments in AI infrastructure.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang attends the “Winning the AI Race” Summit in Washington D.C., U.S., July 23, 2025.
Kent Nishimura | Reuters
Nvidia’s announcement on Tuesday included an investment of up to £11 billion ($15 billion) with Nscale and CoreWeave to boost U.K. AI infrastructure.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang separately revealed on Wednesday that the chipmaker had made a £500 million ($683 million) equity investment into Nscale.
“We convinced ourselves that Nscale could be a national champion for AI infrastructure in the U.K.,” Huang told journalists at a press conference in London.
Nick Patience, AI practice lead at the Futurum Group, told CNBC that Nscale is “a key part of Nvidia’s push in the U.K. market and an acknowledgment by the government that it has to do something to get the AI infrastructure built here, which has been a long slog.”
Rapid growth
After exiting stealth in May of last year, Nscale’s first public announcement came two months later, when the company partnered with UAE’s Open Innovation AI to deploy 30,000 GPUs. Around the same time, Nscale said it was acquiring Kontena, which was founded in 2018 and specialized in high-performance computing data centers.
The next month, Nscale announced an agreement with Asian telecom company Singtel to offer a “GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaaS),” and serve customers in Europe and Southeast Asia. Initially, Nscale’s infrastructure relied on GPUs from Advanced Micro Devices. Today, the startup promotes various offerings from market leader Nvidia.
Nscale’s big financing landed in December, when the company said it raised $155 million in a round led by Sandton Capital Partners, with participation from Kestrel0x1, Blue Sky Capital Managers and Florence Capital.
Sandton co-founder Rael Nurick said in the press release that with its “unique vertically integrated approach, Nscale is building the hyperscale AI platform to power AI at scale.”
Nscale said at the time that it had grown its AI data center pipeline to 1.3 gigawatts from 300 megawatts the prior year to and that it was aiming to have 350,000 GPUs running by the end of 2027.
By comparison, CoreWeave said at a banking conference last week that its portfolio consists of “about 2.2 gigawatts of capacity that’s coming online.” The company said in its IPO prospectus in March that its 32 data centers were running 250,000 GPUs.
It’s been a whirlwind few years for Payne, Nscale’s founder. While he was serving as executive chairman of Arkon, he was also operating chief at Australia’s Battery Future Acquisition Corp., a blank check company that says it’s “targeting critical battery minerals and related supply chains.”
He’s got a lot of work in front of him.
Building out AI data centers with costly GPUs is a capital intensive process that’s historically required a hefty amount of debt. CoreWeave had raised a total of $12.4 billion in debt through the end of 2024, in addition to well over $1 billion in equity financing before its IPO. It announced a $1.5 billion bond sale in July after a $2 billion debt offering in May.
Nscale was trying to raise $1.8 billion earlier this year through a private credit deal led by bankers at Goldman Sachs, according to Bloomberg.
In the December video tied to Nscale’s equity fundraising, Payne called it “one of the largest Series As raised in U.K., European history.” He said the company would use the cash to deploy up to another 4,000 GPUs in its data center in Norway and to develop up to 180 megawatts of capacity in the company’s portfolio.
The aim, Payne said, was to deploy 50,000 GPUs by the end of 2025 and 150,000 by the end of next year.
“The key challenges that we see in the market is the significant increase in density at the GPU level,” he said. “This funding allows us to scale up materially” he said, and to become “one of the largest players in Europe.”