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The Wiz logo on a smartphone arranged in New York, US, on Tuesday, July 16, 2024.

Gabby Jones | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Seven months ago, Alphabet lost a marquee case against the Biden administration’s Justice Department, which accused the company of maintaining an illegal monopoly in search. Weeks earlier, Google’s pursuit of cybersecurity vendor Wiz, in what would have been its largest deal ever, fizzled in part because of antitrust concerns.

With Donald Trump’s return to the White House, Alphabet is back on the offensive.

Alphabet on Tuesday agreed to buy Wiz for $32 billion in cash, almost $10 billion more than the proposed price in mid-2024, and said it expects the deal to close next year, subject to regulatory approvals.

Wiz will sit in Google’s cloud division, which is far from the company’s dominant search business. Google is behind Amazon and Microsoft in cloud infrastructure, a standing that would make the regulatory case against a tie-up challenging for any administration.

The Federal Trade Commission under Lina Khan was notoriously prickly with respect to tech deals, aggressively scuttling transactions in ways that frustrated even notable Democrat supporters like Reid Hoffman and Mark Cuban. Google’s pursuit of Wiz may be the first big test for new FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson, as the tech industry gauges how Trump 2.0 will treat the industry that houses the six biggest U.S. companies by market value.

“It’s going to be a great litmus test and bellwether for M&A in 2025,” said Brad Haller, senior partner for mergers and acquisitions at consulting firm West Monroe. “This happening relatively early on this year means it can be used as a measuring stick.”

As a venture-backed company, the deal would be a major windfall for Silicon Valley venture capital firms, which have struggled to generate returns since the initial public offering market mostly shut down in early 2022 and large M&A went dormant. After peaking at $780 billion in 2021, VC exit value plummeted to $89.2 billion the following year and to $71.6 billion in 2023, according to an October report from PitchBook and the National Venture Capital Association. In the third quarter of 2024, the number hit a five-quarter low.

“Large acquisition strategy is back on the menu for VC-backed companies,” Haller said.

Index Ventures is the largest outside investor in Wiz, followed by firms including Sequoia Capital, Insight Partners and Cyberstarts.

Alphabet/Wiz deal will take a while to get approval, says Fmr. Assistant AG Jonathan Kanter

In walking away from a deal with Google in July, Wiz co-founder Assaf Rappaport wrote in a memo to employees that the company would instead pursue an IPO. There are some signs that the IPO market is heating up, as artificial intelligence infrastructure company CoreWeave, digital health startup Hinge Health and buy now, pay later lender Klarna have all filed prospectuses recently with the SEC.

Economic uncertainty represents the biggest headwind, as President Trump’s imposition of tariffs on top trading partners like China, Mexico and Canada, as well as massive cuts in government spending, have led to extreme market volatility and raised concerns about business and consumer confidence. The Nasdaq is on pace for its fifth straight weekly drop and worst quarterly performance since 2022.

For Google, the allure of acquiring Wiz appears to be worth the potential regulatory risk. Reuters reported, citing a source, that Wiz agreed to a termination fee of over $3.2 billion, which the publication called “one of the highest fees in M&A history.”

Google declined to comment.

Founded in 2020 Wiz hit $100 million in annual recurring revenue after just 18 months. The company’s cloud security products include prevention, active detection and response, and they’ve become increasingly essential as rapid advancements in AI have made attacks more sophisticated and potentially more damaging.

“That price tag tells us that Google was almost desperate to boost its security bona fides before the adoption of AI gathers even more speed,” Gordon Haskett analysts wrote in a Tuesday note.

Google said in a statement on Tuesday announcing the deal that, “The increased role of AI, and adoption of cloud services, have dramatically changed the security landscape for customers, making cybersecurity increasingly important in defending against emergent risks and protecting national security.”

In Wiz’s blog post, Rappaport said that, “Becoming part of Google Cloud is effectively strapping a rocket to our backs.”

The deal will face regulatory scrutiny, but “Google, in our view, would have a stronger case compared to consumer-focused acquisitions,” analysts at Bank of America wrote in a note after the announcement. The firm said Google has less than 15% of the cloud services market.

Industrywide scrutiny

Google’s biggest acquisition during the Biden presidency was its $5.4 billion purchase of cybersecurity company Mandiant. The search giant wasn’t the only Big Tech company feeling the regulatory heat.

For Microsoft to eventually close its $69 billion acquisition of video game publisher Activision Blizzard in late 2023, the company had to endure a 21-month battle with regulators, including an injunction effort by the FTC. The agency also sued to block Meta’s acquisition of virtual reality company Within, though a California district court scuttled the FTC’s efforts.

Beyond dealmaking challenges, Meta, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft have all been accused of monopolistic practices by either the Justice Department or the FTC. In Google’s case, both agencies pursued actions.

Watch CNBC's full interview with FTC Chair Lina Khan

Khan told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” in January that she hoped the incoming Trump administration wouldn’t let Amazon and Meta off the hook from pending antitrust suits with a “sweetheart deal.” Her comments came after numerous tech execs and companies, including Google, pledged money towards Trump’s inauguration fund.

Ferguson has suggested that his FTC will keep a keen eye on tech, though he hasn’t offered much by way of specifics. During Trump’s first administration, the president had a particularly hostile relationship with the industry, routinely slamming Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, notably for his ownership of The Washington Post, as well as taking aim at Meta and Google for their alleged biases towards his administration.

Those former foes have made extra efforts to change the tone this time around, whether that means ending diversity, equity and inclusion programs or trekking to Washington for Trump’s inauguration after previously making visits to his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.

In an interview on “Squawk Box” last week, Ferguson said “Big Tech is one of the main priorities” of the administration.

“President Trump appointed me to protect Americans in the marketplace,” Ferguson said. “And I’ve said since day one, Big Tech is one of our main priorities, and that remains true.”

Jonathan Kanter, former assistant attorney general for the Department of Justice’s antitrust division under Biden, said on CNBC’s “Power Lunch” on Tuesday that a hefty regulatory review is likely on the way for the Google-Wiz deal. He said it’s not just about Google’s position in cloud, but also the amount of data the company controls.

“I don’t think the Wiz deal is going to ease on down the road to quick approval,” said Kanter, who is now a CNBC contributor. “It’s going to be a long road. They’re going to have to look at a lot of documents, a lot of data and understand whether it’s really going to entrench Google’s market power in a lot of different markets.”

— CNBC’s Jordan Novet and Samantha Subin contributed to this report.

WATCH: CNBC’s full interview with FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson

Watch CNBC's full interview with FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson

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Google hires Windsurf CEO Varun Mohan, others in latest AI talent deal

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Google hires Windsurf CEO Varun Mohan, others in latest AI talent deal

Chief executive officer of Google Sundar Pichai.

Marek Antoni Iwanczuk | Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images

Google on Friday made the latest a splash in the AI talent wars, announcing an agreement to bring in Varun Mohan, co-founder and CEO of artificial intelligence coding startup Windsurf.

As part of the deal, Google will also hire other senior Windsurf research and development employees. Google is not investing in Windsurf, but the search giant will take a nonexclusive license to certain Windsurf technology, according to a person familiar with the matter. Windsurf remains free to license its technology to others.

“We’re excited to welcome some top AI coding talent from Windsurf’s team to Google DeepMind to advance our work in agentic coding,” a Google spokesperson wrote in an email. “We’re excited to continue bringing the benefits of Gemini to software developers everywhere.”

The deal between Google and Windsurf comes after the AI coding startup had been in talks with OpenAI for a $3 billion acquisition deal, CNBC reported in April. OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The move ratchets up the talent war in AI particularly among prominent companies. Meta has made lucrative job offers to several employees at OpenAI in recent weeks. Most notably, the Facebook parent added Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang to lead its AI strategy as part of a $14.3 billion investment into his startup. 

Douglas Chen, another Windsurf co-founder, will be among those joining Google in the deal, Jeff Wang, the startup’s new interim CEO and its head of business for the past two years, wrote in a post on X.

“Most of Windsurf’s world-class team will continue to build the Windsurf product with the goal of maximizing its impact in the enterprise,” Wang wrote.

Windsurf has become more popular this year as an option for so-called vibe coding, which is the process of using new age AI tools to write code. Developers and non-developers have embraced the concept, leading to more revenue for Windsurf and competitors, such as Cursor, which OpenAI also looked at buying. All the interest has led investors to assign higher valuations to the startups.

This isn’t the first time Google has hired select people out of a startup. It did the same with Character.AI last summer. Amazon and Microsoft have also absorbed AI talent in this fashion, with the Adept and Inflection deals, respectively.

Microsoft is pushing an agent mode in its Visual Studio Code editor for vibe coding. In April, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said AI is composing as much of 30% of his company’s code.

The Verge reported the Google-Windsurf deal earlier on Friday.

WATCH: Google pushes “AI Mode” on homepage

Google pushes "AI Mode" on homepage

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Nvidia’s Jensen Huang sells more than $36 million in stock, catches Warren Buffett in net worth

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Nvidia's Jensen Huang sells more than  million in stock, catches Warren Buffett in net worth

Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, holds a motherboard as he speaks during the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, France, on June 11, 2025.

Gonzalo Fuentes | Reuters

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang unloaded roughly $36.4 million worth of stock in the leading artificial intelligence chipmaker, according to a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing.

The sale, which totals 225,000 shares, comes as part of Huang’s previously adopted plan in March to unload up to 6 million shares of Nvidia through the end of the year. He sold his first batch of stock from the agreement in June, equaling about $15 million.

Last year, the tech executive sold about $700 million worth of shares as part of a prearranged plan. Nvidia stock climbed about 1% Friday.

Huang’s net worth has skyrocketed as investors bet on Nvidia’s AI dominance and graphics processing units powering large language models.

The 62-year-old’s wealth has grown by more than a quarter, or about $29 billion, since the start of 2025 alone, based on Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index. His net worth last stood at $143 billion in the index, putting him neck-and-neck with Berkshire Hathaway‘s Warren Buffett at $144 billion.

Shortly after the market opened Friday, Fortune‘s analysis of net worth had Huang ahead of Buffett, with the Nvidia CEO at $143.7 billion and the Oracle of Omaha at $142.1 billion.

Read more CNBC tech news

The company has also achieved its own notable milestones this year, as it prospers off the AI boom.

On Wednesday, the Santa Clara, California-based chipmaker became the first company to top a $4 trillion market capitalization, beating out both Microsoft and Apple. The chipmaker closed above that milestone Thursday as CNBC reported that the technology titan met with President Donald Trump.

Brooke Seawell, venture partner at New Enterprise Associates, sold about $24 million worth of Nvidia shares, according to an SEC filing. Seawell has been on the company’s board since 1997, according to the company.

Huang still holds more than 858 million shares of Nvidia, both directly and indirectly, in different partnerships and trusts.

WATCH: Nvidia hits $4 trillion in market cap milestone despite curbs on chip exports

Nvidia hits $4 trillion in market cap milestone despite curbs on chip exports

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Tesla to officially launch in India with planned showroom opening

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Tesla to officially launch in India with planned showroom opening

Elon Musk meets with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at Blair House in Washington DC, USA on February 13, 2025.

Anadolu | Anadolu | Getty Images

Tesla will open a showroom in Mumbai, India next week, marking the U.S. electric carmakers first official foray into the country.

The one and a half hour launch event for the Tesla “Experience Center” will take place on July 15 at the Maker Maxity Mall in Bandra Kurla Complex in Mumbai, according to an event invitation seen by CNBC.

Along with the showroom display, which will feature the company’s cars, Tesla is also likely to officially launch direct sales to Indian customers.

The automaker has had its eye on India for a while and now appears to have stepped up efforts to launch locally.

In April, Tesla boss Elon Musk spoke with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to discuss collaboration in areas including technology and innovation. That same month, the EV-maker’s finance chief said the company has been “very careful” in trying to figure out when to enter the market.

Tesla has no manufacturing operations in India, even though the country’s government is likely keen for the company to establish a factory. Instead the cars sold in India will need to be imported from Tesla’s other manufacturing locations in places like Shanghai, China, and Berlin, Germany.

As Tesla begins sales in India, it will come up against challenges from long-time Chinese rival BYD, as well as local player Tata Motors.

One potential challenge for Tesla comes by way of India’s import duties on electric vehicles, which stand at around 70%. India has tried to entice investment in the country by offering companies a reduced duty of 15% if they commit to invest $500 million and set up manufacturing locally.

HD Kumaraswamy, India’s minister for heavy industries, told reporters in June that Tesla is “not interested” in manufacturing in the country, according to a Reuters report.

Tesla is looking to recruit roles in Mumbai, job listings posted on LinkedIn . These include advisors working in showrooms, security, vehicle operators to collect data for its Autopilot feature and service technicians.

There are also roles being advertised in the Indian capital of New Delhi, including for store managers. It’s unclear if Tesla is planning to launch a showroom in the city.

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