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Jensen Huang, co-founder and CEO of Nvidia Corp., speaks during a news conference in Taipei on May 21, 2025. Cheng / AFP) (Photo by I-HWA CHENG/AFP via Getty Images)

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Nvidia on Wednesday announced a slew of partnerships with European countries and companies spanning infrastructure to software as it looks to keep itself at the center of the global artificial intelligence story.

Chief Executive Jensen Huang on Wednesday continued his tour of Europe with a keynote at Nvidia’s GTC event in Paris, France, where he laid out some key European partnerships.

Nvidia has been keen to position itself as an infrastructure company that can help countries and governments build data centers using its graphics processing units to unlock the potential of AI for local economies and populations. As part of that effort, Huang recently carried out a similar whirlwind trip to the Middle East, where Nvidia is planning to sell its latest chips as part of big data center buildouts in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

“Every industrial revolution begins with infrastructure. AI is the essential infrastructure of our time, just as electricity and the internet once were,” Huang said in a Wednesday press release.

“Europe has now awakened to the importance of these AI factories, the importance of this AI infrastructure,” Huang said during a separate presentation on Wednesday. AI factories is the term Nvidia uses for massive data centers containing its GPUs.

Huang added that AI computing capacity in Europe will grow by a factor of 10 in the next two years.

The tech giant seeks to expand its international footprint and embed itself in national level AI infrastructure. That push into new markets is even more critical as U.S. export restrictions on Nvidia’s most advanced chips have lost the company revenue in China.

Nvidia said it is working with country governments, regional cloud and telecommunications firms and technology centers in Europe.

One of the key partnerships announced is between Nvidia and French startup Mistral, which will build an “AI cloud” that will deploy 18,000 Nvidia Grace Blackwell chips. This will allow businesses to develop and use AI through Mistral’s models, Nvidia said.

Nvidia also announced infrastructure projects in Italy and Armenia.

Orange and Telefonica are among the telecommunications companies also working with Nvidia in areas such as deploying AI applications and large language models as part of the newly announced deals.

In Germany, Nvidia said it is building what it has dubbed as an “industrial cloud” that will feature 10,000 GPUs and will be specifically designed to provide services for European manufacturers.

The big focus from Nvidia in Europe is around so-called “sovereign AI,” the idea that data centers and servers that are providing services to users in the European Union, are actually located regionally rather than abroad.

Nvidia also announced so-called “tech centers” in Europe, which will focus on advanced research, upskilling workforces and accelerating scientific breakthroughs in countries including the U.K., France, Spain and Germany.

Nvidia also expanded a product called DGX Cloud Lepton — something of a marketplace for GPUs — with new cloud providers and integrated it with AI model repository Hugging Face. DGX Cloud Lepton works by allowing developers to access GPUs across the world to run AI applications.

Software push

While Nvidia is best-known for its hardware — its infamous GPUs — the technology giant has ramped up its focus on its software offering to help keep the company at the center of fast-moving AI development.

That software push has continued into Europe.

Last year, Nvidia announced a product called Nvidia NIM, which is effectively a pre-packaged AI model that can be quickly deployed and that lets developers build apps on it. Nvidia on Wednesday announced any large language model available on Hugging Face can also be deployed as NIM.

Rather than creating their own models, developers can easily access these options via Nvidia’s NIM service.

Nvidia’s strategy is to link its hardware to all of this software, giving it an edge over rivals in a bid to cement its dominance so far in AI.

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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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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.

Don’t miss these cryptocurrency insights from CNBC Pro:

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