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A satellite dish in a ground network of satellites at Eutelsat’s Madeira office. Photographer: /Bloomberg via Getty Images

Zed Jameson | Bloomberg via Getty Images

Shares of French satellite operator Eutelsat skyrocketed almost 390% last week — and a potential change of tack in European defense has been helping the rally.

The firm’s stock price saw wildly volatile moves last week, up by as much as 77% on Tuesday and by another 120% on Wednesday. From its closing price on Feb. 28 to last Friday’s close, shares have risen an eyewatering 387%.

Eutelsat’s shares continued to climb on Monday, jumping more than 22% as of 1:00 p.m. local time in Paris.

What’s behind Eutelsat’s huge share price gains? CNBC runs through all you need to know.

What is Eutelsat?

Eutelsat is a French company that produces satellites for data connectivity. The business sends its satellites to space using rockets from the likes of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, deploying them into both low earth orbit (LEO) and into geostationary orbit (GEO).

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Following a deal to combine its operations with British satellite firm OneWeb in 2023, Eutelsat became the world’s third largest satellite operator in terms of revenues. It competes with Musk’s Starlink satellite internet venture, a subsidiary of SpaceX.

Why are shares skyrocketing?

Last week, reports surfaced suggesting that Eutelsat was in the running to potentially replace Musk’s Starlink in the embattled Ukraine. For years, Starlink has offered Ukraine’s military satellite its internet services to assist with the war effort amid Russia’s ongoing invasion.

However, relations between the U.S. and Ukraine have soured recently following the election of President Donald Trump. Musk serves as head of the newly instated Department of Government Efficiency, an advisory body assisting the administration.

Last week, Trump paused all military aid to Ukraine following a clash with the country’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The confrontation happened after Trump shifted U.S. policy on Ukraine and Russia by reopening talks with Moscow.

In February, reports said that U.S. negotiators had raised the possibility of cutting Ukraine’s access to Starlink if the two countries aren’t able to successfully negotiate a deal for the U.S. to secure access to Ukraine’s rare earth minerals.

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On March 4, Eutelsat said that it was in talks with the European Union to supply additional internet access to Ukraine.

The French company’s shares had already begun surging the day prior, on the back of speculation that Eutelsat could serve as a replacement for Starlink in Ukraine if negotiations with the U.S. fracture further.

Will Eutelsat replace Starlink?

For now, it’s not entirely clear. The company is discussing an expansion of its services in Ukraine with the EU.

“Everyone is asking us today, ‘Can you replace the large number of terminals of Starlink in Ukraine,’ and we are looking at that,” Eutelsat CEO Eva Berneke told Bloomberg in an interview last week.

Eutselsat arguably has the scale to offer additional support for Ukraine in terms of satellite-based connectivity. The firm says it currently has a fleet of 35 GEO satellites, in addition to an LEO constellation of more than 600 satellites.

Over the weekend, Musk and U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio had a spat with Poland’s foreign minister on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, which Musk owns.

The tech billionaire said that Ukraine’s “entire front line” would collapse if he were to switch off Starlink.

In response, Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski said his country pays Starlink for services to Ukraine, which Warsaw has supported in its battle against Moscow’s invasion since 2022. Sikorski added Poland may have to seek alternative suppliers if Starlink proves to be an “unreliable provider.”

Rubio disputed Sikorski’s claims, saying “no one has made any threats about cutting Ukraine off from Starlink” and urging gratitude — while Musk dubbed the Polish politician a “small man.”

On Monday, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk defended his foreign minister, saying Sikorski “calmly” explained the “Polish raison d’état to officials from another country.”

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AWS’ custom chip strategy is showing results, and cutting into Nvidia’s AI dominance

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AWS' custom chip strategy is showing results, and cutting into Nvidia's AI dominance

AWS announces new CPU chip: Here's what to know

Amazon Web Services is set to announce an update to its Graviton4 chip that includes 600 gigabytes per second of network bandwidth, what the company calls the highest offering in the public cloud.

Ali Saidi, a distinguished engineer at AWS, likened the speed to a machine reading 100 music CDs a second.

Graviton4, a central processing unit, or CPU, is one of many chip products that come from Amazon’s Annapurna Labs in Austin, Texas. The chip is a win for the company’s custom strategy and putting it up against traditional semiconductor players like Intel and AMD.

But the real battle is with Nvidia in the artificial intelligence infrastructure space.

At AWS’s re:Invent 2024 conference last December, the company announced Project Rainier – an AI supercomputer built for startup Anthropic. AWS has put $8 billion into backing Anthropic.

AWS Senior Director for Customer and Project Engineering Gadi Hutt said Amazon is looking to reduce AI training costs and provide an alternative to Nvidia’s expensive graphics processing units, or GPUs.

Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4 AI model is trained on Trainium2 GPUs, according to AWS, and Project Rainier is powered by over half a million of the chips – an order that would have traditionally gone to Nvidia.

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Hutt said that while Nvidia’s Blackwell is a higher-performing chip than Trainium2, the AWS chip offers better cost performance.

“Trainium3 is coming up this year, and it’s doubling the performance of Trainium2, and it’s going to save energy by an additional 50%,” he said.

The demand for these chips is already outpacing supply, according to Rami Sinno, director of engineering at AWS’ Annapurna Labs.

“Our supply is very, very large, but every single service that we build has a customer attached to it,” he said.

With Graviton4’s upgrade on the horizon and Project Rainier’s Trainium chips, Amazon is demonstrating its broader ambition to control the entire AI infrastructure stack, from networking to training to inference.

And as more major AI models like Claude 4 prove they can train successfully on non-Nvidia hardware, the question isn’t whether AWS can compete with the chip giant — it’s how much market share it can take.

The release schedule for the Graviton4 update will be provided by the end of June, according to an AWS spokesperson.

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JPMorgan moves further into crypto with stablecoin-like token JPMD

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JPMorgan moves further into crypto with stablecoin-like token JPMD

Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase & Co., speaks to the Economic Club of New York in Manhattan, New York City, on April 23, 2024.

Mike Segar | Reuters

JPMorgan Chase is taking a step further into the cryptocurrency space with its own stablecoin-like token, called JPMD.

The U.S. banking giant told CNBC on Tuesday that it’s planning to launch a so-called deposit token on Coinbase’s public blockchain Base, which is built on top of the Ethereum network. Each deposit token is meant to serve as a digital representation of a commercial bank deposit.

JPMD will offer clients round-the-clock settlement as well as the ability to pay interest to holders. It is a so-called “permissioned token,” meaning it is only available to JPMorgan’s institutional clients — unlike many stablecoins, which are publicly available.

“We see institutions using JPMD for onchain digital asset settlement solutions as well as for making cross-border business-to-business transactions,” Naveen Mallela, global co-head of Kinexys, J.P. Morgan’s blockchain unit, told CNBC Tuesday.

“Given the fact that deposit tokens would eventually be interest bearing as well, this would provide better fungibility with existing deposit products that institutions currently use,” he added.

Deposit token vs. stablecoin

JPMorgan said the benefit of launching a deposit token over a stablecoin is that it gives institutional clients a way to move money around faster and easier while still having a close connection with traditional banking systems.

A stablecoin is a type of digital token that’s designed to be pegged 1:1 to the value of a fiat currency at all times. The most popular stablecoins are Tether’s USDT and Circle’s USDC. The entire stablecoin market is worth approximately $262 billion, according to data from CoinGecko.

In the U.S., stablecoins remain broadly unregulated — although this is likely to change soon. The Senate is set to vote Tuesday on the GENIUS Act, legislation that would introduce formal regulation for such tokens.

Elsewhere, the European Union regulates stablecoins under its Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation, or MiCA, while the U.K. has also laid out plans to regulate the crypto industry. Britain’s Financial Conduct Authority is currently consulting on proposals to require stablecoin issuers to ensure their tokens maintain their value against a given asset.

Read more CNBC tech news

JPMorgan’s digital asset chief told CNBC that the bank chose Coinbase as its blockchain partner since the crypto exchange is already a long-standing client and a leader in the crypto space.

JPMD has had “preliminary interest from large institutional players who want more native onchain cash solutions from pre-eminent and reputed financial institutions,” Mallela added.

Speculation had been building around JPMorgan’s new crypto offering after a trademark application filed by the bank for “JPMD” was made public Monday.

The trademark outlined a broad range of crypto services under the JPMD name, including trading, exchange, transfer and payment services for digital assets.

Various crypto media outlets had speculated whether the bank was about to launch its own stablecoin. However, JPMorgan says that, while its token may share some similarities with a stablecoin, it’s ultimately a different kind of product.

Watch CNBC’s full interview with JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon

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Canva expands from design into analytics with acquisition of MagicBrief

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Canva expands from design into analytics with acquisition of MagicBrief

From left, Cliff Obrecht, Canva’s co-founder and chief operating officer, and George Howes, co-founder and CEO of MagicBrief, pose for a photo at the Cannes Lions festival in Cannes, France, in June 2025.

Canva

Canva has grown into a $32 billion startup through its popular design tools used for easily creating images, marketing material and presentations.

Now the company, with its 12th acquisition, is buying its way into the analytics market.

Canva said on Tuesday that it’s buying MagicBrief, whose technology is used for analyzing ad performance, for an undisclosed sum. With MagicBrief, companies can track spending and engagement on their ads and see what’s working well for competitors.

Around 240 million people use Canva’s products, which compete with offerings from Adobe’s Creative Cloud. The company has been deepening its capabilities in artificial intelligence, incorporating it into photo editing, coding and by incorporating chatbots.

“We feel like, especially with AI, we can really democratize marketing and allow marketers to do a lot more with less,” Cliff Obrecht, Canva’s co-founder and chief operating officer, said in an interview.

Canva, which ranked fifth on CNBC’s latest Disruptor 50 list, has raised over $560 million, and was valued most recently at $32 billion, though that’s a step down from its peak of $40 billion in 2021, when private markets were at their frothiest. Obrecht said the company has $1 billion in the bank.

Canva plans to incorporate MagicBrief into a broader product that it will announce later this year, Obrecht said. In October, Adobe announced the availability of a tool for creating ads with AI and then tracking performance.

Meanwhile, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Reddit are all pushing generative AI systems to boost the reach of online ads. Some marketers have used Meta’s offerings to tweak the visual appearance of their ads with hopes of gaining traction with certain audiences, CNBC reported in December.

Founded in 2022, MagicBrief has 14 employees and is based in Canva’s hometown of Sydney, Australia. In 2023, the company announced a $2 million funding round, with investments from Archangel and Blackbird, which was Canva’s first investor. The startup has tens of millions of dollars in annualized revenue, Obrecht said.

Canva, which started up in 2013, has 5,500 employees, with over $3 billion in annualized revenue. It’s one of the companies that venture capitalists are most excited about as an IPO candidate, but Obrecht said there won’t be an offering this year.

The focus, he said, is winning “over the next 10 years,” and not just hitting quarterly numbers.

“We feel that’s very short-sighted, and public markets do gravitate you more to quarter-on-quarter performance,” he said.

— CNBC’s Jonathan Vanian contributed to this report.

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