Big Tech is doubling down on investing billions in India, drawn by its abundance of resources for building data centers, a large talent and digital user pool, and market opportunity.

In under 24 hours, Microsoft and Amazon pledged more than $50 billion toward India’s cloud and AI infrastructure, while Intel on Monday announced plans to make chips in the country to capitalize on its growing PC demand and speedy AI adoption.

While India trails the U.S. and China in the race to develop a native AI foundational model, and lacks a large domestic AI infrastructure company, it wants to leverage its expertise in the information technology sector to create and deploy AI applications at enterprise level, also offering Big Tech companies a huge opportunity.

Having a model or computing is not enough for any enterprise to use AI effectively, and it requires companies making application layer and a large talent pool to deploy them, S. Krishnan, secretary at India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, told CNBC.

Stanford University ranks India among the top four countries along with the U.S., China and the UK in the global and national AI vibrancy ranking. GitHub, a community of developers, has ranked India at the top with the global share of 24% of all projects.

India’s opportunity lies more in “developing applications” which will be used to drive revenues for AI companies, Krishnan said.

On Tuesday, Microsoft announced $17.5 billion in investment in the country, spread over 4 years, aimed at expanding hyperscale infrastructure, embedding AI into national platforms, and advancing workforce readiness.

“This scale of capex gives Microsoft first‑mover advantage in GPU‑rich data centers while making Azure the preferred platform for India’s AI workloads, as well as deepening alignment with the government’s AI public infrastructure push,” said Tarun Pathak, research Director at Counterpoint Research. 

Amazon on Wednesday announced plans to invest over $35 billion, on top of the $40 billion it has already invested in the country.

Over the past few months, AI and tech majors such as OpenAI, Google, and Perplexity have offered their tools for free to millions in India, with Google also firming up its plans to invest $15 billion toward building data center capacity for a new AI hub in southern India.

“India combines a huge digital user base, rapidly growing cloud and AI demand, and a high-talent IT ecosystem that can build and consume AI at scale, making it more than just a market for users and instead a core engineering and deployment hub,” Pathak said.

It ended up being a “hawkish cut,” as expected. Still, investors managed to find a few gifts tucked between the lumps of coal.

Even though the U.S. Federal Reserve lowered interest rates on Wednesday stateside, two regional bank presidents — Jeffrey Schmid of Kansas City and Austan Goolsbee of Chicago — wanted rates to stand pat.

Their cautioned was echoed in the Fed’s “dot plot” of rate projection, which showed officials penciling in just one cut in 2026 and another for 2027.

Even the Fed’s rate statement was repurposed from the December 2024 meeting, which ushered in a nine-month period without cuts until September this year.

Why, then, did U.S. markets rise after the meeting?

The biggest surprise was the Fed’s announcement that it would begin purchasing $40 billion in Treasury bills, starting Friday. That move increases the money supply in the economy. In other words, it’s a stealthy way to ease conditions, which helps support financial markets.

Next, Chair Jerome Powell dismissed speculation about future hikes.

“I don’t think that a rate hike … is anybody’s base case at this point,” Powell said. “I’m not hearing that.”

Fed officials also see the U.S economy as remaining resilient. Collectively, they increased their forecast for economic expansion in 2026 to 2.3% from an earlier estimate of 1.8% in September.

“We have an extraordinary economy,” said Powell.

And the markets may be setting up for an extraordinary finish to the year.

“The last interest rate decision of 2025 has essentially paved the way for a Santa Claus rally to end the year, and the S&P 500 is poised to exceed the 7,000 milestone in the next few weeks,” said José Torres, senior economist at Interactive Brokers.

For investors, that would count as a very decent Christmas surprise.

— CNBC’s Jeff Cox contributed to this report.

Trump slams European leaders as ‘weak’ — just as they’re trying to impress him

U.S. President Donald Trump has once again provoked outrage among his European allies, describing them as “weak” in an interview with Politico published Tuesday. Criticizing the region’s response to the war in Ukraine, Trump said: “I think they don’t know what to do.”

That comment will be jarring for Europe after its efforts to support Ukraine — efforts which Trump has frequently downplayed. Instead, Europe has had to watch on as U.S. officials have held talks with their Russian and Ukrainian counterparts on a draft peace plan for Ukraine, without a seat at the table. 

— Holly Ellyatt

A newly proposed exchange-traded fund would offer exposure to bitcoin, much like other popular ETFs tracking the world’s oldest cryptocurrency. But, there’s a twist: The fund would trade bitcoin-linked assets while Wall Street sleeps. 

The Nicholas Bitcoin and Treasuries AfterDark ETF aims to purchase bitcoin-linked financial instruments after the U.S. financial markets close, and exit those positions shortly after the U.S. market re-opens each day, according to a December 9 filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The fund would not hold bitcoin directly. Instead, the AfterDark ETF would use at least 80% of the value of its assets to trade bitcoin futures contracts, bitcoin exchange-traded products and ETFs, and options on those ETFs and ETPs. 

The offering would capitalize on bitcoin’s outsized gains in off-hours trading.

Hypothetically, an investor who had been buying shares of the iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF (IBIT) when U.S. markets formally close, and selling them at the next day’s open, would have scored a 222% gain since January 2024, data from wealth manager Bespoke Investment Group shows. But an investor that had bought IBIT shares at the open and sold them at the close would have lost 40.5% in the same time.

Bitcoin was last trading at $92,320, down nearly 1% on the day. The leading cryptocurrency is down about 12% over the past month and little changed since the beginning of the year. 

The proposed ETF underscores jockeying among sponsors to launch ETFs tracking all kinds of cryptocurrencies, from altcoins like Aptos and Sui to memecoins such as Bonk and Dogecoin. The contest has only accelerated under President Donald Trump, who has pushed the SEC and Commodity Futures Trading Commission to soften their stances on token issuers and digital asset exchanges. 

Since being approved under the prior administration in January 2024, more than 30 bitcoin ETFs have begun trading in the U.S., according to data from ETF.com.