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Jeff Lawson, co-founder and chief executive officer of Twilio Inc., center, rings the opening bell on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange in New York, Sept.17, 2018.

Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Activist investor Anson Funds has built a stake in Twilio and sent a letter to the enterprise software company’s board pushing for the sale of the entire business, a person familiar with the matter told CNBC.

Twilio shares rose as much as 2% on the news in Tuesday morning trading, but has since given back most of those gains.

Anson did not hold any Twilio stock for the period ending Sept. 30, according to securities filings, but has since built a stake valued at around $50 million, the person familiar said. The letter to the board urges Twilio to either sell itself or at a minimum, divest its data and applications business, the person familiar said.

The growth of the stake coincided with Anson’s hiring of Sagar Gupta from Legion Partners. Gupta led Legion’s activist engagements with Twilio and Nutanix, a cloud computing firm.

The news was first reported by The Information.

“Twilio regularly engages with shareholders and appreciates constructive input that furthers our goal of creating sustainable long-term value,” a Twilio spokesperson told CNBC in a statement.

The continued activist attention caps off a challenging year for Twilio, which makes software that helps businesses engage with their customers. The company’s stock is up around 28% year-to-date but remains well off its 2021 highs. In February, the company cut around 1,500 employees, or 17% of its workforce citing a need for heightened efficiency. Those layoffs followed a similar headcount reduction in September 2022.

The company also implemented a reorganization in February, creating two new business units: Data & Applications and Communications. A Twilio spokesperson told CNBC that the February reorganization “reflected input” from Twilio’s shareholders. Nonetheless, the activist investor has urged the board to divest the former business unit if it can’t secure a full sale to a strategic buyer.

Tech acquisitions, while muted compared to pandemic levels, have seen some significant plays in 2023. In March, Silver Lake and CPP Investments announced a deal to take survey software company Qualtrics private in a $12.5 billion deal. IBM acquired software maker Apptio in a $4.6 billion cash deal announced in June. Cisco said it would take cybersecurity firm Splunk private in a $28 billion cash deal in September.

CEO and co-founder Jeff Lawson helped start Twilio in 2008 and guided the company through its 2016 IPO. Twilio has a market cap of around $11.6 billion.

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Jensen Huang says Nvidia’s AI chips are now being manufactured in Arizona

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Jensen Huang says Nvidia's AI chips are now being manufactured in Arizona

Jensen Huang, chief executive officer of Nvidia Corp., speaks to members of the media prior to the keynote address at the Nvidia AI summit in Washington, DC, US, on Tuesday, Oct. 28, 2025.

Kent Nishimura | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said at the company’s GTC conference on Tuesday that its Blackwell graphics processing units — the company’s fastest AI chips — are now in full production in Arizona.

Previously, Nvidia’s fastest GPUs were solely manufactured in Taiwan.

Huang said that President Donald Trump had asked him nine months ago to bring manufacturing back to U.S. shores.

“The first thing that President Trump asked me for is bring manufacturing back,” Huang said. “Bring manufacturing back because it’s necessary for national security. Bring manufacturing back because we want the jobs. We want that part of the economy.”

Earlier this month, Nvidia and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company announced that the first Blackwell wafers had been produced in a facility in Phoenix, Arizona. Wafers are the base material on which semiconductors are etched onto.

Nvidia said in a video that Blackwell-based systems will now be assembled in the U.S., too.

Much of what the company announced on Tuesday at its conference in Washington was for an audience of policymakers to convince them of the essential role that Nvidia plays, and that it would hurt U.S. interests to restrict its exports.

Huang said on Tuesday on a panel before his speech that Nvidia was holding its conference in Washington to allow Trump to attend, according to CNBC’s Kristina Partsinevelos, but the president is currently on a trip in Asia.

Trump said on Tuesday that he planned to meet with Huang on Wednesday, according to a Reuters report

Demand for the company’s GPUs remains high, with 6 million Blackwell GPUs shipped in the last four quarters, Huang said Tuesday. Nvidia expects $500 billion in GPU sales between the Blackwell generation and next year’s Rubin chips combined, he added.

Cell networks ‘built on foreign technologies’

Additionally, Huang Tuesday said Nvidia would partner with Finland-based Nokia to build gear for telecommunications, an industry that he said was worth $3 trillion. As part of the partnership, Nvidia will take a $1 billion stake in Nokia.

Huang said that Nvidia is building chips for 5G and 6G base stations because it’s important to have wireless networks based on American technology.

“Thank you for helping the United States bring telecommunication technology back to America,” Huang said to Nokia CEO Justin Hotard during his speech.

The deal is an appeal to Western policymakers who have long had concerns about the amount of technology from China’s Huawei that is used for cellular networks around the world.

“Our fundamental communication fabric is built on foreign technologies,” Huang said. “That has to stop, and we have an opportunity to do that, especially during this fundamental platform shift.”

Nokia will use Nvidia chips in its future base stations, which are the pricey computers that distribute cellular signals. Huawei gear, the market leader, was effectively banned in the U.S. in 2018, leaving Nokia and Ericcson as the primary equipment vendors for U.S. networks. 

Huang said that Nokia would be using a new product called Nvidia ARC that combines its Grace GPU, a Blackwell GPU and the company’s networking parts. Huang said that AI delivered over next-generation 6G networks could help operate robots and deliver more accurate weather forecasts.

Stakes are high

The location of the conference carries significance as Nvidia makes the case that it is a core part of the “U.S technology stack.”

Huang has argued that it would be better for American interests if Chinese AI developers got used to U.S. technology like Nvidia’s chips, rather than forcing the Chinese to develop their own AI chips. 

“Nvidia is a proud American company building the U.S. AI infrastructure that will ensure our country leads the world in shaping the future of innovation,” Kari Briski, Nvidia’s vice president of generative AI software for enterprise, told reporters on a Monday call. 

The stakes are high for Nvidia. U.S. export restrictions have already cost Nvidia billions of dollars in lost sales.

In April, the U.S. government informed Nvidia that its H20 chip, which was specially designed to comply with U.S. export controls, would require a license to ship to China. In May, Nvidia said it would have recorded about $10.5 billion in H20 sales over two quarters if the government hadn’t made the license requirement.

Then, in July, Huang visited Trump in Washington and again tried to persuade him and other administration officials that it is in U.S. interests to ship Nvidia chips to China. The Trump administration said it would approve license requests for the H20, but that Nvidia would have to pay the U.S. government 15% of China sales. 

Still, Nvidia’s China business isn’t yet back on track.

Earlier this month, Huang said at a financial conference that Nvidia is currently “100% out of China” and has no market share there. While Nvidia said it would receive licenses for the H20 chip, the company hasn’t revealed a newer chip for China based on the company’s current generation of Blackwell GPUs.

Quantum computing

Many of Nvidia’s announcements on Tuesday were partnerships intended to signal that the company works with a variety of U.S. companies.

Among those announcements was NVQLink, a new way to connect quantum chips to Nvidia’s GPUs.

The U.S. having a lead in quantum computing is important to policymakers because military officials are worried that a foreign adversary may be able to spy on military communications if it gets a working quantum computer first. 

Nvidia officials said in a Monday call that its chips can be used to correct errors that pop up during quantum computing and advance the technology. Nvidia said that 17 different quantum computing startups would produce hardware compatible with NVQLink.

“Researchers will be able to do more than just error correction,” Huang said Tuesday. “They will also be able to orchestrate quantum devices and AI supercomputers to run quantum GPU applications.”

Nvidia also said it will partner with the Department of Energy to build seven new supercomputers.

WATCH: Nvidia CEO: We brought GTC to DC so President Trump could attend

Nvidia CEO: We brought GTC to DC so President Trump could attend

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Cramer: Amazon layoffs will help costs, but growth in this one area is what’s needed most

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Cramer: Amazon layoffs will help costs, but growth in this one area is what's needed most

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GitHub unites OpenAI, Google and Anthropic AI agents in one place to bring ‘order to the chaos’

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GitHub unites OpenAI, Google and Anthropic AI agents in one place to bring 'order to the chaos'

Signage at the Microsoft campus in Mountain View, California, US, on Thursday, Oct. 23, 2025.

Benjamin Fanjoy | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Microsoft’s GitHub unit on Tuesday announced Agent HQ, a new “mission control” interface that will allow software developers to manage coding agents from multiple vendors on a single platform. 

An artificial intelligence agent is a tool that can independently complete tasks on behalf of a user. Several companies, including GitHub, have built and released popular agents that are specifically designed for programming. 

Developers have a range of new capabilities at their fingertips because of these agents, but it can require a lot of effort to keep track of them all individually, said GitHub COO Kyle Daigle.

Developers will now be able to manage agents from GitHub, OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, xAI and Cognition in one place with Agent HQ.  

“We want to bring a little bit of order to the chaos of innovation,” Daigle told CNBC in an interview. “With so many different agents, there’s so many different ways of kicking off these asynchronous tasks, and so our big opportunity here is to bring this all together.”  

Read more CNBC tech news

Agent HQ users will be able to access a command center where they can assign, steer and monitor the work of multiple agents.

That means they’ll be able to see what their agents are working on and course correct in real time if they get off track.

The third-party agents will begin rolling out to GitHub Copilot subscribers in the coming months, but Copilot Pro+ users will be able to access OpenAI Codex in VS Code Insiders this week, the company said.

GitHub was acquired by Microsoft in 2018, and it allows users to store, share and collaborate on code. Its platform now supports more than 180 million developers, and the company said it is growing at its fastest rate ever. 

“This is an era of abundance for AI and we just want to make sure that that abundance doesn’t turn to chaos,” Daigle said. “We can allow you to have a great experience using all of these tools via a very open GitHub platform.”

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