Connect with us

Published

on

Kyle Clark, Founder & CEO of Beta Technologies rings the Opening Bell at the New York Stock Exchange on Nov. 4, 2025.

NYSE

Beta Technologies, an electric aircraft company, debuted on the New York Stock Exchange on Tuesday at $34 a share.

On Monday, the company priced shares in its IPO at $34 each, above its expected range of $27 to $33. Beta said it sold 29.9 million shares, raising over $1 billion in a deal valuing the company at about $7.4 billion.

The stock was up close to 5% in afternoon trading.

Beta’s IPO marks a major test for the small but competitive electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) industry that’s been vying for approval from the Federal Aviation Administration. The nascent market is currently led by the likes of Joby Aviation and Archer Aviation, and proponents say the technology can ease air traffic congestion.

In Beta’s IPO prospectus, the company names Archer as one of its customers for its ground support equipment, which mostly consists of chargers. Beta says its chargers are installed in 51 U.S. locations.

However, the business is currently very small. During the first half of the year, Beta said its net loss widened to $183.2 million from from $137.1 million in the year-ago period. Revenue more than doubled to $15.6 million from $7.6 million a year ago. Beta was founded in 2017.

Founder and CEO Kyle Clark, who is also a test pilot for Beta, told CNBC on Tuesday that aircrafts are currently conducting certain “back end” missions for the U.S. military. He said he expects the company to achieve full FAA certification for commercial operations in about 30 months

Clark said the company needed to demonstrate success in production and operations and a pipeline of back orders to offer “fundamental business reasons to walk into the public markets.”

Beta is going public during a prolonged government shutdown that started at the beginning of October. The Securities and Exchange Commission is operating with a limited staff.

Still, Clark said the company decided to “keep the train on the rails” and proceed during the shutdown.

Amazon and General Electric are two of the company’s leading investors, with stakes of 10.2% and 6.3%, respectively, before the IPO. GE Aerospace said in September it was making a $300 million in Beta. Amazon first invested in 2021 out of its Climate Pledge Fund, part of an effort to “reach net-zero carbon by 2040.”

Shares of eVTOL competitor Joby and Archer fell 9% and 6%, respectively. Both companies have roughly tripled in value over the last year.

WATCH: Beta Technologies CEO on the company’s market debut

Beta Technologies CEO: Here's how our aircrafts differentiate from competitors

Continue Reading

Technology

CNBC Daily Open: SoftBank doubles down on AI amid warnings from ‘Big Short’ investor

Published

on

By

CNBC Daily Open: SoftBank doubles down on AI amid warnings from 'Big Short' investor

Jensen Huang, co-founder and chief executive officer of Nvidia Corp., left, and Masayoshi Son, chairman and chief executive officer of SoftBank Group Corp., during a fireside chat at the Nvidia AI Summit Japan in Tokyo, Japan, on Wednesday, Nov. 13, 2024.

Akio Kon | Bloomberg | Getty Images

SoftBank is selling its entire stake in Nvidia — but not for the reasons you might think.

In its earnings statement released Tuesday, the Japanese group said that it had sold 32.1 million Nvidia shares in October for $5.83 billion.

At first blush, this could be read as a sign that Nvidia’s high valuations are causing SoftBank some unease. And if SoftBank — which infamously pumped $18.5 billion into WeWork only to value it at $2.9 billion eventually — is tamping down on its usual optimism regarding its investments, then retail traders should probably pay attention.

Adding to such worries are comments by Michael Burry — who bet against subprime mortgages before they caused a whole financial crisis in 2008 — on major artificial intelligence companies.

Burry wrote Monday in a post on X that those firms are “understating depreciation” of AI chips, which “artificially boosts earnings — one of the more common frauds of the modern era.”  CNBC could not independently confirm that companies were practicing this.

This doesn’t seem to be SoftBank’s concern, however. A person familiar with the group’s sale told CNBC that it had nothing to do with AI valuations. On the contrary, cash from offloading Nvidia chips will be redirected to SoftBank’s $22.5 billion investment in OpenAI, the person said.

Burry said in his post that he will reveal “more details” on Nov. 25, and exhorted readers to “stay tuned.” That might not be enough enticement for SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son.

— CNBC’s Yun Li, April Roach and Dylan Butts contributed to this report.

What you need to know today

And finally…

Ms. Jo Malone CBE on resilience, reinvention—and rewriting her destiny

Continue Reading

Technology

Lawmakers just released a much-awaited crypto market structure bill. Here’s what it means for digital assets and what comes next

Published

on

By

Lawmakers just released a much-awaited crypto market structure bill. Here's what it means for digital assets and what comes next

The U.S. Capitol is shown the morning after the Senate passed legislation to reopen the federal government on Nov. 11, 2025 on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC.

Win McNamee | Getty Images

The Senate Agriculture Committee has released a draft of its portion of a much-awaited digital assets market structure bill — a critical step toward accelerating institutional and retail adoption of cryptocurrencies. 

Unveiled on Monday by Agriculture Chair John Boozman, R-Ark., and Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., the bipartisan discussion draft lays the groundwork for creating guardrails for the crypto industry in the U.S. It also establishes guidelines for institutions that want to work with digital assets, from bitcoin and ether to tokenized financial instruments.

“This is the most consequential roadmap for how an institution is going to integrate digital assets into their business,” Cody Carbone, CEO of crypto trade association Digital Chamber, told CNBC. “It’s like the best possible step-by-step of what type of compliance rules requirements they would need to follow to work with crypto.”

Here are five key takeaways from the discussion draft.

1. Grants favorable regulatory status to some cryptocurrencies

The text classifies some of the largest digital assets by market capitalization such as bitcoin and ether as “digital commodities,” placing them under the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s purview.  

This provision removes a major blocker to digital asset adoption for institutional fiduciaries, Juan Leon, an analyst at crypto-focused asset manager Bitwise, told CNBC.

“Compliance and risk departments will finally have a federal statute to point to,” Leon said. “This shifts the internal conversation … [and] it provides the legal certainty required to move assets into a formal, strategic allocation.”

It will also create “a starkly bifurcated market” consisting of regulated and unregulated tokens, with the former class of assets seeing “a massive influx of institutional capital, deep liquidity and a robust derivatives ecosystem.”

2. Requires crypto firms to segregate funds and manage conflicts of interest

The draft calls for crypto companies to “establish governance, personnel, and financial resource separation among affiliated entities that perform distinct regulated functions.”

Bitwise’s Leon interprets the provision as a challenge to the “all-in-one” business model that is common among crypto exchanges. According to those models, an exchange, broker, custodian, and proprietary trading desk are all wrapped up into one entity. 

In other words, digital asset firms could be required to keep their various businesses separated like traditional financial companies, according to Leon. The change would serve as “a foundational pillar for institutional adoption.”

3. Gives the CFTC more power to regulate digital assets 

The text gives more power to the CFTC, empowering it to work in tandem with the Securities and Exchange Commission to issue joint rulemaking on crypto-related matters.

“There’s a lot more power or authority delegated to the CFTC to have jurisdiction over this industry,” Carbone said. 

The shift comes after the SEC for years served as the main regulator of digital assets, after it edged out the CFTC to gain authority over the industry. 

4. Allows the CFTC to collect fees

The draft calls for regulated entities to pay fees to the CFTC. Those fees would go toward registering digital commodity exchanges, brokers and dealers, in addition to conducting oversight of regulated entities and carrying out education and outreach. 

5. Establishes listing standards for tokens

The text calls for crypto exchanges to only permit trading of digital commodities that are “not readily susceptible to manipulation.”

It’s a provision that could reduce the number of “rug pulls” and other scams that are still common in some parts of the crypto industry, with the goal of establishing standards and building confidence in the market.

What’s next?

The Senate Agriculture Committee’s discussion draft is far from final, but it does offer critical insights into the direction of efforts to pass crypto-friendly regulations in the U.S., according to Carbone.

“It’s not final, it’s not done, but this gives a good sense of where Congress is going and what the final rules may be,” Carbone said. 

The committee will likely spend the next few weeks getting feedback on their draft, meaning it may be “almost impossible to get [a final version of this part of the bill] done by the end of the year,” he added.

However, that period will give lawmakers time to offer more concrete guidance on several issues that are bracketed – or not yet finalized – in the discussion draft. Those include provisions on anti-money laundering rules and regulations specific to decentralized finance players.

Several crypto players plan to work in tandem with lawmakers to help iron out those details, among others. 

“We’ve long said crypto is a bipartisan issue, and this draft from Chairman Boozman and Senator Booker reflects that,” Moonpay President Keith Grossman told CNBC. “It’s critical that legislation distinguishes between centralized intermediaries and decentralized systems, and we look forward to working with the Committee to get it right.”

The discussion draft is only one piece of larger legislative efforts to overhaul regulations for the crypto industry, according to Carbone. Ultimately, the text will be combined with the Senate Banking Committee’s draft on the digital assets market structure in a bid to create one comprehensive bill.

And although lawmakers are nowhere near the finish line in that process, crypto firms are finding other ways to work with regulators and other authorities to meaningfully advance their industry, Grayscale Investments Chief Legal Officer Craig Salm told CNBC.

“In the absence of comprehensive legislation, we’ve still seen meaningful progress on the regulatory front,” Salm said, adding that the SEC, Internal Revenue Service and Treasury Department have recently provided guidance around staking in crypto exchange-traded products. “That said, thoughtful legislation will be critical to solidifying the foundation of the digital asset industry in the U.S. and unlocking even greater value for investors and consumers.”

Continue Reading

Technology

AMD’s Lisa Su sees 35% annual sales growth driven by ‘insatiable’ AI demand

Published

on

By

AMD's Lisa Su sees 35% annual sales growth driven by 'insatiable' AI demand

Lisa Su, chair and chief executive officer of Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD), during a Bloomberg Television interview in San Francisco, California, US, on Monday, Oct. 6, 2025.

David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

AMD CEO Lisa Su said on Tuesday that the company’s overall revenue growth would expand to about 35% per year over the next three to five years, driven by “insatiable” demand for artificial intelligence chips.

Su said that much of that would be captured by the company’s AI data center business, which it expects to grow at about 80% per year over the same time period, on track to hit tens of billions of dollars of sales by 2027.

“This is what we see as our potential given the customer traction, both with the announced customers, as well as customers that are currently working very closely with us,” Su told analysts.

Ultimately, Su said that AMD could be able to achieve “double-digit” share in the data center AI chip market over the next three to five years.

AMD shares fell 3% in extended trading.

The AI chip market is currently dominated by Nvidia, which has over 90% of the market share, according to some estimates, and which has given the company a market cap of over $4.6 trillion, versus AMD’s roughly $387 billion valuation.

AMD is holding its first financial analyst day since 2022, as the company has found itself at the center of a boom in data center spending for AI.

While companies are spending hundreds of billions of dollars in total on graphics processing unit (GPU) chips to build and power artificial intelligence applications like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, they are also looking for alternatives to increase capacity and control costs. AMD is the only other major developer of GPUs aside from Nvidia.

In October, AMD announced a partnership with OpenAI in which it would sell the AI startup billions of dollars in its Instinct AI chips over multiple years, starting with enough chips in 2026 to use 1 gigawatt of power.

As part of the deal, OpenAI could end up taking a 10% stake in the chipmaker. Su also highlighted long-term deals with Oracle and Meta on Tuesday.

AMD shares have nearly doubled so far in 2025.

Read more CNBC tech news

OpenAI is also helping AMD set up its next-generation systems based around its Instinct MI400X AI chips, which ship next year.

AMD has said that its chips will be able to be assembled into a “rack-scale” system where 72 of its chips work together as one, which is essential for running the largest AI models.

If AMD succeeds at its rack, it will catch up with Nvidia’s AI chips, which have been offered in rack-scale systems for three product generations.

Su said that the company now sees the total market for AI data center parts and systems hitting $1 trillion per year in 2030, representing 40% annual growth per year. AMD reported $5 billion in AI chip sales in its fiscal 2024.

That’s up from the company’s previous forecast of a $500 billion market in 2028 for AI chips. But the updated AMD figure also includes central processors (CPU), an important kind of chip that sits at the heart of a computer, but isn’t a pure AI accelerator like the GPUs made by Nvidia and AMD.

AMD’s Epyc CPUs are still the company’s most important product by sales. It primarily competes with Intel and some smaller Arm-based processors in the CPU market. AMD also makes chips for game consoles, networking parts, and other devices.

On Tuesday, although AMD focused much of its focus on its growing AI business, it told shareholders that its older businesses were growing too.

“The other message that we want to leave you with today is every other part of our business is firing on all cylinders, and that’s actually a very nice place to be,” Su said.

AMD delivers third quarter beat and forecast raise

Continue Reading

Trending