Nvidia’s first GPU was made in France — Macron wants the country to produce cutting edge chips again

Published

3 months ago

June 12, 2025

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Jensen Huang, co-founder and chief executive officer of Nvidia Corp., left, and Emmanuel Macron, France’s president at the 2025 VivaTech conference in Paris, France, on Wednesday, June 11, 2025.

Nathan Laine | Bloomberg | Getty Images

French President Emmanuel Macron on Wednesday made a pitch for his country to manufacture the most advanced chips in the world, in a bid to position itself as a critical tech hub in Europe.

The comments come as European tech companies and countries are reassessing their reliance on foreign technology firms for critical technology and infrastructure.

Chipmaking in particular arose as a topic after Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who was doing a panel talk alongside Macron and Mistral AI CEO Arthur Mensch, said on Wednesday that the company’s first graphics processing unit (GPU) was manufactured in France by SGS Thomson Microelectronics, now known as STMicroelectronics.

Yet STMicroelectronics is currently not at the leading edge of semiconductor manufacturing. Most of the chips it makes are for industries like the automotive one, which don’t required the most cutting-edge semiconductors.

Macron nevertheless laid his ambition out for France to be able to manufacture semiconductors in the range of 2 nanometers to 10 nanometers.

“If we want to consolidate our industry, we have now to get more and more of the chips at the right scale,” Macron said on Wednesday.

The smaller the nanometer number, the more transistors that can be fit into a chip, leading to a more powerful semiconductor. Apple’s latest iPhone chips, for instance, are based on 3 nanometer technology.

Very few companies are able to manufacture chips at this level and on a large scale, with Samsung and Nvidia provider Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) leading the pack.

If France wants to produce these cutting-edge chips, it will likely need TSMC or Samsung to build a factory locally — something that has been happening in the U.S. TSMC has now committed billions of dollars to build more factories Stateside.

Macron touted a deal between Thales, Radiall and Taiwan’s Foxconn, which are exploring setting up a semiconductor assembly and test facility in France.

“I want to convince them to make the manufacturing in France,” Macron said during VivaTech — one of France’s biggest tech events — on the same day Nvidia’s Huang announced a slew of deals to build more artificial intelligence infrastructure in Europe.

One key partnership announced by Huang is between Nvidia and French AI model firm Mistral to build a so-called “AI cloud.”

France has looked to build out its AI infrastructure and Macron in February said that the country’s AI sector would receive 109 billion euros ($125.6 billion) in private investments in the coming years. Macron touted the Nvidia and Mistral deal as an extension of France’s AI buildout.

“We are deepening them [investments] and we are accelerating. And what Mistral AI and Nvidia announced this morning is a game-changer as well,” Macron told CNBC on Wednesday.

Technology

Amazon suspends engineer who protested company’s work with Israeli government

Published

36 mins ago

September 11, 2025

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Amazon suspends engineer who protested company's work with Israeli government

Amazon suspended a software engineer who protested the company’s work with the Israeli government, CNBC has confirmed.

Ahmed Shahrour, a Palestinian engineer who works for Amazon’s Whole Foods business and is based in Seattle, was informed Monday morning that he was being suspended with pay “until further notice” after he posted messages on Slack criticizing the company’s ties to Israel.

“It has come to Amazon’s attention that a post you made in multiple internal company Slack channels may violate multiple policies,” an Amazon human resources representative wrote in a message, which was viewed by CNBC. The company said in the message that it’s investigating the incident.

Earlier Monday, Shahrour posted messages across several internal Slack channels and sent a letter to Amazon executives, including CEO Andy Jassy, detailing his concerns.

Shahrour urged the company to drop Project Nimbus, Amazon and Google’s joint $1.2 billion cloud computing contract launched in 2021 to provide the Israeli government with artificial intelligence tools, data centers and other infrastructure.

“Every day I write code at Whole Foods, I remember my brothers and sisters in Gaza being starved by Israel’s man-made blockade,” Shahrour, who joined Amazon three years ago, wrote in the letter. “I live in a state of constant dissonance: maintaining the tools that make this company profit, while my people are burned and starved with the help of that very profit. I am left with no choice but to resist directly.”

The letter was earlier reported by independent journalist Kali Hays.

Amazon spokesperson Brad Glasser didn’t specifically address Shahrour’s situation.

“We don’t tolerate discrimination, harassment, or threatening behavior or language of any kind in our workplace, and when any conduct of that nature is reported, we investigate it and take appropriate action based on our findings,” Glasser wrote in an email to CNBC.

The company didn’t respond to questions about its work with Israel or its policies for moderating employee posts on internal channels.

Tech workers at Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Palantir and other companies have become more outspoken in their criticism of business dealings with the Israeli military.

Microsoft last month fired two employees who participated in a protest inside the company’s headquarters. In April 2024, Google terminated 28 employees after a series of protests against labor conditions and its involvement in Project Nimbus. Tech firms have ramped up security at some conferences in recent months after an uptick in protests.

Amazon hasn’t acknowledged the Nimbus contract beyond stating that it provides technology to customers “wherever they are located.” Google has previously said it provides generally available cloud computing services to the Israeli government that aren’t “directed at highly sensitive, classified or military workloads.” Microsoft said last month that most of its work with Israel Defense Forces involves cybersecurity for the country, and that the company intends to provide technology in an ethical way.

As part of the suspension, Amazon revoked Shahrour’s access to company email and tools, and removed his Slack posts, he told CNBC in an interview. Shahrour said Amazon didn’t state what policies his posts violated.

The letter also alleges Amazon has taken steps to “silence” pro-Palestinian employees who have criticized the war in Gaza. Amazon recently issued a warning to an engineer who shared an article about American doctors volunteering in Gaza and it fired an employee in France who spoke out against Israel on social media, Shahrour said. CNBC confirmed the account with a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be named due to confidentiality.

The company has deleted posts in the “Arabs at Amazon” Slack channel that discussed the conflict in Gaza, while posts in other channels disparaging Palestinians weren’t removed, Shahrour said.

“It feels like I can’t voice anything, and if I do, I’m going to get a warning,” he said.

Microsoft employees earlier this year expressed concern that the company blocked Outlook emails containing the words “Palestine,” “Gaza,” “genocide,” “apartheid” and “IOF off Azure,” while messages with the word “Israel” could go through, CNBC reported in May.

A Microsoft spokesperson previously said the company took steps to “try and reduce” widely shared emails that were sent to employees who hadn’t “opted in.”

WATCH: Israel’s plays to take over Gaza City

Technology

Adobe’s stock gains on earnings, revenue beat

Published

1 hour ago

September 11, 2025

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Adobe's stock gains on earnings, revenue beat

An Adobe sign hangs along Main Street during the 2025 Sundance Film Festival on Jan. 27, 2025 in Park City, Utah.

David Becker | Getty Images

Adobe reported fiscal third-quarter results that topped analysts’ estimates. The design software maker’s shares rose in extended trading.

Here’s how the company did in comparison with LSEG consensus:

Earnings per share: $5.31 adjusted vs. $5.18 expected
Revenue: $5.99 billion vs. $5.91 billion expected

Revenue increased 11% from $5.41 billion a year earlier, Adobe said in a statement. Net income rose to $1.77 billion, or $4.18 per share, from $1.68 billion, or $3.76 per share, a year ago.

For the fourth quarter, the company says earnings per share will be $5.35 to $5.40, topping the average analyst estimate of $5.34. Adobe’s guidance for revenue for the quarter is $6.08 billion to $6.13 billion, while analysts expected $6.08 billion, according to LSEG.

Adobe said it expects annualized revenue in its digital media business to increase 11.3% for the fiscal year, up from a prior forecast of 11% growth. Digital media revenue for the fourth quarter will be $4.56 billion to $4.51 billion, beating the $4.51 billion average estimate, according to StreetAccount.

As of Thursday’s close, Adobe’s stock was down 21% this year, badly underperforming tech peers and the broader Nasdaq, which is up 14%.

This is developing news. Please check back for updates.

Technology

Oracle shares retreat 6% after sharpest rally in more than 30 years

Published

2 hours ago

September 11, 2025

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Oracle shares retreat 6% after sharpest rally in more than 30 years

Safra A. Catz, CEO of Oracle, on Oct. 7, 2024.

Marco Bello | Reuters

Oracle shares closed down 6% on Thursday, a day after the stock closed at a record high, following an analyst note expressing concern that most of the company’s upcoming growth is coming from a single client: OpenAI.

The software vendor has seen its stock go on a wild ride this week after CEO Safra Catz on Tuesday said that Oracle had “signed four multi-billion-dollar contracts with three different customers” in the latest quarter. The company’s remaining performance obligation, a measure of contracted revenue that has not yet been recognized, swelled to $455 billion, up 359% year over year.

In its forecasts, Oracle called for cloud infrastructure revenue to expand 14-fold by 2030.

In extended trading on Tuesday, Oracle stock moved up 30% following the company announcing fiscal first-quarter results. On Wednesday, the stock ended the day up nearly 36%, closing at a record high of $328.33.

The build-out is part of a broad expansion across technology to put in place the necessary infrastructure to meet demand for applications that draw on sophisticated artificial intelligence models that typically run on Nvidia chips.

But the excitement around Oracle’s projections were tempered after The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday reported that OpenAI is set to pay Catz’s company $300 billion over five years. That report came after OpenAI during the quarter announced an agreement with Oracle to build 4.5 gigawatts of U.S. data center capacity. The two companies declined to comment on the report.

“Our enthusiasm for Oracle’s backlog announcements is significantly tempered by the report that it came almost entirely from OpenAI,” Gil Luria, an analyst with a neutral rating on Oracle shares, wrote in a note distributed to clients on Thursday.