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FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years in prison for massive crypto fraud

FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison on Thursday for the massive fraud and conspiracy that doomed his cryptocurrency exchange and a related hedge fund, Alameda Research.

The sentence in Manhattan federal court was significantly less than the 40 to 50 years in prison that federal prosecutors wanted for Bankman-Fried. But it was much more than the five to six-and-a-half years suggested by his attorneys.

“There is a risk that this man will be in position to do something very bad in the future,” Judge Lewis Kaplan said before sentencing the 32-year-old and ordering him to pay $11 billion in forfeiture to the U.S. government.

“And it’s not a trivial risk at all,” Kaplan added.

The judge said that in 30 years on the federal bench, he had “never seen a performance” like Bankman-Fried’s trial testimony.

If Bankman-Fried was not “outright lying” during cross-examination by prosecutors, he was “evasive,” Kaplan said.

Jurors at trial likewise did not buy Bankman-Fried’s version of events, convicting him in November of seven criminal counts and holding him responsible for losing about $10 billion in customer money due to the securities fraud conspiracy.

Kaplan on Thursday said the quarter-century prison term has “the purpose of disabling him to the extent that can appropriately be done for a significant period of time.”

Before being sentenced, Bankman-Fried spoke contritely even as he suggested that the billions of dollars customers lost was the result of a “liquidity crisis” or “mismanagement,” not fraud.

Indicted FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried leaves the U.S. Courthouse in New York City, July 26, 2023.

Amr Alfiky | Reuters

“My useful life is probably over,” he said while wearing a beige jailhouse jumpsuit. “It’s been over for a while now since before my arrest.”

“They built something really beautiful and I threw all of that away,” he said of his co-workers at FTX, a company once valued at $32 billion. “It haunts me every day.”

“A lot of people feel really let down. And they were very let down,” he said. “And
I’m sorry about that. I’m sorry about what happened at every stage.”

“It’s been excruciating to watch this all unfold,” he told Kaplan. “Customers don’t deserve this level of pain.”

“I was the CEO of FTX and I was responsible.”

But even as he took some responsibility, Bankman-Fried suggested that customers eventually would get back the money they placed with his exchange, and blamed a federal bankruptcy court for not making those customers whole yet.

Kaplan appeared to stop paying close attention at that point.

In response, Bankman-Fried crossed his arms and began rapidly tapping his right foot as he continued speaking.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Nicholas Roos, arguing for a prison sentence of up to five decades, scoffed at the picture painted by Bankman-Fried and his lawyers.

FTX’s collapse was not due to “a liquidity crisis or act of mismanagement,” Roos said. “It was the theft” of billions of dollars of customer money around the world, the prosecutor said.

“It was a loss that affected people significantly.”

Manhattan U.S. Attorney Damian Williams, in a statement after the sentencing, said, “Samuel Bankman-Fried orchestrated one of the largest financial frauds in history.”

“His deliberate and ongoing lies demonstrated a brazen disregard for his customers’ expectations and disrespect for the rule of law, all so that he could secretly use his customers’ money to expand his own power and influence,” Williams said.

Attorney General Merrick Garland said, “Anyone who believes they can hide their financial crimes behind wealth and power, or behind a shiny new thing they claim no one else is smart enough to understand, should think twice. I

Bankman-Fried’s family, in a statement, said, “We are heartbroken and will continue to fight for our son.” Both Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried, who are Stanford Law professors, were in court for the sentencing.

Barbara Fried and Allan Joseph Bankman, parents of FTX Co-Founder Sam Bankman-Fried, arrive at court in New York, US, on Thursday, March 28, 2024. Sam Bankman-Fried returns to court for sentencing after being convicted of a massive fraud that led to the collapse of his FTX exchange. 

Yuki Iwamura | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Before he sentenced SBF, Kaplan said he rejected “the entirety of defendant’s argument there was no loss” at FTX, calling that claim “misleading, logically flawed and speculative.”

Several victims of Bankman-Fried then talked about the damage to their lives from his crimes.

Bankman-Fried looked at the victims as they talked to the judge.

Bankman-Fried plans to appeal his conviction and sentence.

Three other people, who all testified against Bankman-Fried at trial, are awaiting their own sentencings after pleading guilty to criminal charges related to FTX and Alameda Research.

They are Caroline Ellison, the Alameda CEO who at one time dated Bankman-Fried, FTX engineering chief Nishad Singh and Gary Wang, the co-founder and chief technology officer of FTX.

WATCH: The collapse of FTX: Insiders Tell All

This is developing news. Check back for updates.

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Oracle Cloud to deploy 50,000 AMD AI chips, signaling new Nvidia competition

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Oracle Cloud to deploy 50,000 AMD AI chips, signaling new Nvidia competition

We're still early in the AI cycle, says Bernstein's Stacy Rasgon

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure on Tuesday announced it will deploy 50,000 Advanced Micro Devices graphics processors starting in the second half of 2026.

AMD shares climbed about 2%. Oracle shares sank 4% while Nvidia was more than 3% lower.

The move is the latest sign that cloud companies are increasingly offering AMD’s graphics processing units as an alternative to Nvidia’s market-leading GPUs for artificial intelligence.

“We feel like customers are going to take up AMD very, very well — especially in the inferencing space,” said Karan Batta, senior vice president of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

Oracle will use AMD’s Instinct MI450 chips, which were announced earlier this year.

They are AMD’s first AI chips that can be assembled into a larger rack-sized system that enables 72 of the chips to work as one, which is needed to create and deploy the most advanced AI algorithms.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman appeared with AMD CEO Lisa Su at a company event in June to announce the product.

Read more CNBC tech news

Earlier this month, OpenAI announced a deal with AMD for processors requiring 6 gigawatts of power over multiple years, with a 1-gigawatt rollout starting in 2026. As part of the deal, and if the deployment goes well, OpenAI may end up owning as many as 160 million shares of AMD, or about 10% of the company.

In September, OpenAI entered into a five-year cloud deal with Oracle that could be worth as much as $300 billion.

OpenAI has historically been closely linked with Nvidia, whose chips were used to develop ChatGPT. Nvidia’s chips dominate the market for data center GPUs with more than 90% market share. Nvidia also invested in OpenAI in September.

But OpenAI leaders say the company needs as much computing power as possible, which means it needs AI chips from multiple suppliers. OpenAI also has plans to design its own AI chips with Broadcom.

“I think AMD has done a really fantastic job, just like Nvidia, and I think both of them have their place,” Batta said.

Tuesday at Oracle AI World, founder and Chairman Larry Ellison is set to take the stage and share his views on the latest OpenAI deal and what his company is doing to stay ahead of its main cloud competitors – Microsoft, Amazon and Google

“Oracle has already shown it is willing to place big bets and go all in to meet the AI moment. The company must now prove that beyond capacity, it can capitalize on its massive underlying data and enterprise capabilities … to add meaningful value to the enterprise AI wave,” said Daniel Newman, CEO of The Futurum Group, on the sidelines of Oracle’s conference.

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Major real estate developers are fast becoming power brokers

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Major real estate developers are fast becoming power brokers

Aerial view of the Apple Data Center in Mesa near Phoenix, Arizona, U.S. on August 6, 2017. Picture taken on August 6, 2017. Apple plans to build its second data center in China at Ulanqab City in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region.

Jim Todd | Reuters

A version of this article first appeared in the CNBC Property Play newsletter with Diana Olick. Property Play covers new and evolving opportunities for the real estate investor, from individuals to venture capitalists, private equity funds, family offices, institutional investors and large public companies. Sign up to receive future editions, straight to your inbox.

The sudden surge in demand for data is fast creating new commercial real estate sectors – not just data centers, but so-called quantum real estate and powered land.

The former refers to structures designed to house specialized quantum computers. The latter is land prepared and ready for data center operations, with a focus on obtaining a reliable and sufficient power supply. That land would have to be secured with the permits, utility commitments and infrastructure needed to deliver power to a data center.

There are currently about 20,000 acres of powered land sitting under operational data centers around the world. Roughly 40,000 acres of powered land, almost 2 billion square feet, are needed to support current projections for data center growth over the next five years, according to a new research paper from Hines, a global real estate investment manager. That’s equivalent to just under the size of three Manhattans or about 1½ times the size of Paris.

Hines, which has been developing data centers for more than 20 years, has pivoted to a new business in just the past year. It is now securing power and entitlements for hyperscale sites. What that means on the ground is mapping grids, negotiating with landowners and providing financial guarantees to grid operators, who now demand it.

“The challenge isn’t building walls anymore. It’s getting megawatts to the site,” said David Steinbach, Hines’ global chief investment officer. “Hines is focused on this front-end work, making land AI-ready before the buildings even rise.”

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Steinbach said powered land has become its own investable asset class, because power rights themselves are scarce and valuable. Once grid connections and permits are secured, you’ve created a tradeable asset with clear demand from hyperscalers and operators, he said. 

The competition for powered land is being led more by tech companies and energy producers than real estate developers, but Hines clearly doesn’t want to be left behind. 

The smartest capital today isn’t chasing square footage — it’s enabling computation,” said Steinbach, citing the recent Nvidia deal with Intel to co-develop chips for data centers and personal computers. “Nvidia‘s $5 billion bet on Intel isn’t just a chip deal, it’s a seismic signal that AI infrastructure is the new oil.”

In August, Silver Lake, a global private equity firm focused on technology investment, along with Commonwealth Asset Management, a real estate and infrastructure investment firm, announced the launch of a powered land platform aimed at data center development. It will deploy $400 million of capital “to assemble a global portfolio of strategically located powered land sites to address the key scarce input in meeting the escalating demand for data centers,” according to a news release.

The platform is currently operating in and targeting high-growth markets across the U.S., Canada and the U.K., where power access is becoming increasingly scarce.

“This investment represents a long-term commitment to not only meeting the immediate needs of AI-driven data center growth but also positioning the company as a leader in the future of digital infrastructure and a one-stop shop for rapidly growing developers and hyperscalers,” said Lee Wittlinger, managing director at Silver Lake, in the release. “Our innovative approach to land and power solutions, combined with strategic relationships with key energy partners, will enable us to meet the evolving demands of hyperscalers with a holistic, differentiated approach.”

Data center hubs will now have to expand beyond already crowded markets like northern Virginia and into power-rich regions in the Midwest and Texas. Hines’ research paper points to big opportunities right now in Europe, where undersupply and growing demand could mean big potential for both developers and investors. It also highlights the Middle East as an emerging market with growing potential as governments there invest heavily in artificial intelligence, renewables and grid infrastructure.

This is not to say that this new concept of powered land is without challenges, including securing the appropriate land, managing entitlement processes with local governments, and working with utility providers to obtain sufficient commitments.  

“This isn’t just a tech story,” said Steinbach. “It’s a building cycle story reshaping how and where the real estate business develops for decades to come.”

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Big bank earnings, Broadcom’s OpenAI chip deal, record-high car prices and more in Morning Squawk

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Big bank earnings, Broadcom's OpenAI chip deal, record-high car prices and more in Morning Squawk

A sign is posted in front of a Broadcom office in San Jose, California, on Dec. 12, 2024.

Justin Sullivan | Getty Images

This is CNBC’s Morning Squawk newsletter. Subscribe here to receive future editions in your inbox.

Here are five key things investors need to know to start the trading day:

1. Broadcom’s boon

OpenAI made its latest artificial intelligence partnership official yesterday, announcing a custom chip deal with Broadcom. Shares of the chipmaker closed Monday’s session nearly 10% higher following news of the partnership, though the stock pulled back by 3% in premarket trading this morning.

Here’s what to know:

  • The companies — which have been working together for 18 months — are building and deploying 10 gigawatts of custom AI accelerators as part of the deal.
  • While the financial terms of the agreement weren’t disclosed, analysts were quick to suggest that OpenAI is the unnamed $10 billion customer that Broadcom touted in September. But Charlie Kawwas, president of Broadcom’s semiconductor solutions group, told CNBC that the mystery customer is a different company.
  • With the deal, CNBC’s MacKenzie Sigalos reports, OpenAI is venturing into the chipmaking business and increasingly positioning itself as a competitor to hyperscalers.
  • Other chip stocks including Nvidia, Taiwan Semiconductor, On Semiconductor and Micron Technology also saw upside in yesterday’s session.
  • Tech stocks led the market’s rebound to start the week, with the S&P 500 clawing back more than half of what it lost in Friday’s sell-off.
  • Oaktree Capital Management co-founder Howard Marks said he isn’t describing the AI trade as a “bubble” just yet. “The valuations are … high but not crazy,” he told CNBC.

2. Bank teller

Jamie Dimon, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of JPMorgan Chase & Co. speaks during an event honoring local construction workers who helped build the firm’s new headquarters at 270 Park Avenue, in the Midtown area of New York City, U.S., Sept. 9, 2025.

Shannon Stapleton | Reuters

3. Peace deal

U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at Ben Gurion International Airport before boarding his plane to Sharm El-Sheikh, on October 13, 2025 in Tel Aviv, Israel.

Chip Somodevilla | Getty Images

President Donald Trump traveled to Israel and Egypt yesterday to finalize a peace deal he said ended the war in Gaza. Trump first arrived in Tel Aviv to mark the release of Israeli hostages taken by Hamas during its 2023 invasion of Israel, saying in a speech at the Israeli parliament that the “long and painful nightmare” was over for both Israelis and Palestinians.

Experts told CNBC’s Lori Ann LaRocco that despite the ceasefire, ocean carriers likely won’t return to the Red Sea in the near future. The Houthi rebels who have launched attacks on trade vessels in the body of water said they will not stop targeting the maritime routes.

4. The rare earth row

A view of mining facilities at the MP Materials rare earth mine in Mountain Pass, California, U.S. January 30, 2020.

Steve Marcus | Reuters

Shares of U.S. rare earth miners are continuing to rally before the opening bell this morning. The stocks notched solid gains in Monday’s session after China’s tightening of export controls led Trump to reignite the U.S.-China trade dispute.

As CNBC’s Spencer Kimball reports, Beijing’s restrictions on rare earth exports could hit the U.S. defense industry, in particular. The Defense Department is reportedly speeding up its effort to stockpile $1 billion worth of the critical minerals, which are crucial components of several U.S. weapons systems. The fact that the U.S. doesn’t have its own rare earth reserve is “scandalous,” Jeremy Siegel of the University of Pennsylvania told CNBC yesterday.

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5. If the price is right

A 2019 Nissan Motor Co. Rogue sport utility vehicle (SUV) sits on the lot at a car dealership in Joliet, Illinois, U.S., on Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2019.

Daniel Acker | Bloomberg | Getty Images

The Daily Dividend

Oracle CEO Magouyrk: ‘Of course’ OpenAI can pay $60 billion per year

CNBC’s MacKenzie Sigalos, Ashley Capoot, Spencer Kimball, Sam Meredith, Lori Ann LaRocco, Liz Napolitano, Holly Ellyatt, Samantha Subin and Mike Wayland contributed to this report. Josephine Rozzelle edited this edition.

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