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Yuval Bachar knows data centers. He’s worked on them for Meta, Microsoft and Cisco, but now, his startup is looking to help Silicon Valley run data centers with lower carbon dioxide emissions.

ECL, Bachar’s startup, builds hydrogen-powered data centers. 

Hydrogen is a novel energy source for data centers that is more eco-friendly, and more importantly for tech companies that need to quickly expand their infrastructure, data centers running on hydrogen can be placed into service in half the time that it takes to construct data centers that connect to the grid, Bachar said.

There’s one of these hydrogen-powered data centers, with a measly 1-megawatt capacity, next to ECL’s headquarters in Mountain View, California. Twice a month, a diesel truck hauls in hydrogen in a tank from Southern California or northern Nevada. The hydrogen mainly derives from natural gas, which is the top energy source for electricity in the U.S.

Bachar and others developing technologies that can fuel data centers with minimal emissions discuss their work in a new CNBC documentary, which you can watch above.

Since OpenAI released ChatGPT in 2022, Amazon, Google, Microsoft and other companies have been racing to open data centers that can handle generative artificial intelligence. These buildings are typically filled with power-hungry Nvidia graphics processing units. GPUs are the standard for training and running large language models that produce impressive chunks of text with a few words of human input. Executives across industries have seen what ChatGPT can do, and now they want to infuse generative AI into their products and internal operations, sometimes with hopes of boosting productivity.

If your data center doesn’t have enough power for GPUs today, then executives will look elsewhere. Bachar knows that. It’s a big part of his pitch.

He likes to say that utilities in some places, such as California and Virginia, can’t help you right now if you want a lot of power for a data center. OpenAI’s Sam Altman has invested hundreds of millions in nuclear startups, but they won’t be ready to deliver energy for years, Bachar said.

After establishing ECL in 2021, Bachar has signed up two paying customers, with several other organizations that have placed orders for future delivery.

“It’s the Microsofts, Facebooks, Amazons and Googles of the world … which require all of this technology to be placed somewhere, and right now, somewhere is nowhere,” said Bachar, explaining that traditional data centers in the U.S. can’t be easily repurposed to work with AI.

ECL has plans to operate its sites efficiently, but as of now, it’s tiny, with 10 employees and 18 contractors. That’s much smaller than Altman’s nuclear fusion investment, Helion, and the fission startup he backed, Oklo. Together the two employ nearly 600 people, representatives said.

Microsoft has committed to working with Helion, and the software company also signed a power purchase agreement in September to restart a nuclear reactor at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island that shut down in 2019. 

Nuclear installations inherently prompt questions about safety and the handling of waste, but their carbon-free status makes them attractive. Amazon, Google and Oracle have all explored small modular reactors with lower capacity than the ones at Three Mile Island.

Last Energy Founder and CEO Bret Kugelmass shows CNBC a full-scale prototype of the start-up’s small modular reactor in Washington, DC, on January 8, 2025.

Magdalena Petrova

The big tech companies are carefully watching their emissions in the AI age.

By 2030, Google wants to have net-zero emissions while Microsoft’s goal is to be carbon negative by that year. Amazon has pledged to reach net-zero carbon by 2040.

“We’re working with major tech companies, as well as various industrial players, to help them integrate our plug and play solution for on-site power generation into data centers,” said Bret Kugelmass, founder and CEO of Last Energy, a Washington startup working on small modular reactors.

Bachar is fascinated with nuclear energy, but he said getting more of those facilities online will take time. 

“We have a problem that we have to solve right now,” he said.

In addition to his nuclear investments, OpenAI’s Altman has bet on solar startup Exowatt. It has partners developing data centers that are consuming more than half of the energy available in their states in some locations, co-founder and CEO Hannan Happi said.

Geothermal energy has also garnered fresh interest in the modern AI era, with Google collaborating with startup Fervo Energy in Nevada. Tim Latimer, the startup’s CEO, said Fervo has found a way to generate gigawatts of electricity in a single place by drilling horizontal holes underground, rather than the traditional vertical way.

Gigawatts are a serious quantity, but drilling holes for geothermal plants can be expensive, said Adrian Cockcroft, a former Amazon sustainability executive.

ECL intends to build a large-scale, 1-gigawatt data center in Texas over the next four years, with the help of hydrogen pipelines. It will probably take that long to move to zero-carbon green hydrogen using electrolyzers that convert water into hydrogen and oxygen, Bachar said.

But generating green hydrogen through electrolysis isn’t cheap, said Kittu Kolluri, managing director of Neotribe Ventures.

The price of green hydrogen is to be determined, especially now that Donald Trump is U.S. president again, Bachar said.

Still, every gigawatt matters. 

In 2028, U.S. data center demand could come in between 74 gigawatts and 132 gigawatts, according to a December report from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Data centers might account for 6.7% to 12% of total U.S. energy consumption in 2028, up from 4.4% in 2023, the report said.

“The concern we have is can we grow fast enough to address the unprecedented demand for AI data centers,” Bachar said.

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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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Ether and related stocks gain amid the latest crypto craze: Tokenization

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Ether and related stocks gain amid the latest crypto craze: Tokenization

A representation of cryptocurrency Ethereum is placed on a PC motherboard in this illustration taken on June 16, 2023.

Dado Ruvic | Reuters

Stocks tied to the price of ether, better known as ETH, were higher on Wednesday, reflecting renewed enthusiasm for the crypto asset amid a surge of interest in stablecoins and tokenization.

BitMine Immersion Technologies, a bitcoin miner that announced plans this week to make ETH its primary treasury reserve asset, jumped about 20%. It’s gained more than 1,000% since the announcement. Betting platform SharpLink Gaming, which has also initiated an ETH treasury strategy, added more than 11%. Bit Digital, which last week exited bitcoin mining to focus on its ETH treasury and staking plans, jumped more than 6%.

“We’re finally at the point where real use cases are emerging, and stablecoins have been the first version of that at scale but they’re going to open the door to a much bigger story around tokenizing other assets and using digital assets in new ways,” Devin Ryan, head of financial technology research at Citizens.

On Tuesday, as bitcoin ETFs snapped a 15-day streak of inflows, ether ETFs saw $40 million in inflows led by BlackRock’s iShares Ethereum Trust. ETH ETFs came back to life in June after much concern that they were becoming zombie funds.

The price of the coin itself was last higher by 5%, according to Coin Metrics, though it’s still down 24% this year.

Ethereum has been struggling with an identity crisis fueled by uncertainty about the network’s value proposition, weaker revenue since its last big technical upgrade and increasing competition from Solana. Market volatility, driven by geopolitical uncertainty this year, has not helped.

The Ethereum network’s smart contracts capability makes it a prominent platform for the tokenization of traditional assets, which includes U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoins. Fundstrat’s Tom Lee this week called Ethereum “the backbone and architecture” of stablecoins. Both Tether (USDT) and Circle‘s USD Coin (USDC) are issued on the network.

Fundstrat's Tom Lee on being named chairman of BitMine Immersion Technologies

BlackRock’s tokenized money market fund (known as BUIDL, which stands for USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund) also launched on Ethereum last year before expanding to other blockchain networks.

Tokenization is the process of issuing digital representations on a blockchain network of publicly traded securities, real world assets or any other form of value. Holders of tokenized assets don’t have outright ownership of the assets themselves.

The latest wave of interest in ETH-related assets follows an announcement by Robinhood this week that it will enable trading of tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs across Europe, after a groundswell of interest in stablecoins throughout June following Circle’s IPO and the Senate passage of its proposed stablecoin bill, the GENIUS Act.

Ether, which turns 10 years old at the end of July, is sitting about 75% off its all-time high.

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China’s Honor launches new challenge to Samsung with thin foldable smartphone and a big battery

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China's Honor launches new challenge to Samsung with thin foldable smartphone and a big battery

Honor launched the Honor Magic V5 on Wednesday July 2, as it looks to challenge Samsung in the foldable space.

Honor

Honor on Wednesday touted the slimness and battery capacity of its newly launched thin foldable phone, as it lays down a fresh challenge to market leader Samsung.

The Honor Magic V5 goes will initially go on sale in China, but the Chinese tech firm will likely bring the device to international markets later this year.

The company, which spun off from Chinese tech giant Huawei in 2020, is looking to stand out from rivals with key features of the Magic V5, like artificial intelligence, battery and size.

Honor said the Magic V5 is 8.8 mm to 9mm when folded, depending on the color choice. The phone’s predecessor, the Magic V3 — Honor skipped the Magic V4 name — was 9.2 mm when folded. Honor said the Magic V5 weighs 217 grams to 222 grams, again, depending on the color model. The previous version was 226 grams.

In China, Honor will launch a special 1 terabyte storage size version of the Magic V5, which it says will have a battery capacity of more than 6000 milliampere-hour — among the highest for foldable phones.

Honor has tried hard to tout these features, as competition in foldables ramps up, even as these types of devices have a very small share of the overall smartphone market.

Honor vs. Samsung

Foldables represented less than 2% of the overall smartphone market in 2024, according to International Data Corporation. Samsung was the biggest player with 34% market share followed by Huawei with just under 24%, IDC added. Honor took the fourth spot with a nearly 11% share.

Honor is looking to get a head start on Samsung, which has its own foldable launch next week on July 9.

Francisco Jeronimo, a vice president at the International Data Corporation, said the Magic V5 is a strong offering from Honor.

“This is the dream foldable smartphone that any user who is interested in this category will think of,” Jeronimo told CNBC, pointing to features such as the battery.

“This phone continues to push the bar forward, and it will challenge Samsung as they are about to launch their seventh generation of foldable phones,” he added.

The thinness of a foldable phone has become a battleground for smartphone makers to appeal to consumers who want the large screen size the device has to offer without extra weight.

At its event next week, Samsung is expected to release a foldable that is thinner than its predecessor and could come close to challenging Honor’s offering by way of size, analysts said. If that happens, then Honor will be facing more competition, especially against Samsung, which has a bigger global footprint.

“The biggest challenge for Honor is the brand equity and distribution reach vs Samsung, where the Korean vendor has the edge,” Neil Shah, co-founder of Counterpoint Research, told CNBC.

Honor’s push into international markets beyond China is still fairly young, with the company looking to build up its brand.

“Further, if Samsung catches up with a thinner form-factor in upcoming iterations, as it has been the real pioneer in foldables with its vertical integration expertise from displays to batteries, the differentiating factor might narrow for Honor,” Shah added.

Vertical integration refers to when a company owns several parts of a product’s supply chain. Samsung has a display and battery business which provides the components for its foldables.

Honor talks up AI

Smartphone players, including Honor, have also looked to stand out via the AI features available on their device.

In March, Honor pledged a $10 billion investment in AI over the next five years, with part of that going toward the development of next-generation agents that are seen as more advanced personal assistants.

Honor said its AI assistant Yoyo can interact with other AI models, such as those created by DeepSeek and Alibaba in China, to create presentation decks.

The company also flagged its AI agent can hail a taxi ride across multiple apps in China, automatically accepting the quickest ride to arrive? and cancelling the rest.

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