Gusto, a startup with payroll and human resources software, said Wednesday that it has agreed to acquire Guideline, a startup specializing in corporate retirement plans. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

Founded in 2011 and based in San Francisco, Gusto is among the world’s most valuable companies backed by venture capitalists, with a $9.3 billion valuation.

Gusto originally was named ZenPayroll and provided software that clients could use to run payroll for their employees. In 2015, the company rebranded to Gusto as it started selling health insurance and workers’ compensation.

Since 2016, Gusto has also offered 401(k) retirement plans through a partnership with Guideline. The relationship isn’t exclusive, though. Organizations can also set up Guideline plans through alternative payroll companies, including ADP, Block, Intuit, Paylocity, TriNet and privately held Rippling.

Those integrations won’t be going away after the acquisition closes, Guideline’s co-founder and CEO, Kevin Busque, said in an interview with CNBC.

Both Gusto and Guideline target small businesses.

Guideline, founded in 2015, has over 400 employees. In 2021, investors valued it at $1.15 billion. Gusto has more than 2,800 employees, with over $500 million in annualized revenue as of 2023. Guideline’s annualized revenue as of January totaled $140 million.

Gusto is in expansion mode, with plans to add 150,000 new clients this year.

“That’s a small number relative to the 6 million employers in the U.S., and we have work to do,” Josh Reeves, Gusto’s co-founder and CEO, told CNBC. Gusto’s customer count sits above 400,000 today, and the company focuses mainly on the U.S.

Gusto hopes to sell Guideline services to more of its clients after the deal closes, without worrying about revenue sharing. It will also pursue expansion in states that have passed mandates for employers to provide workers with retirement plans, Reeves said.

WATCH: Private company hiring bounced back with a 104,000 increase in July, ADP says

Nvidia reports fiscal second-quarter earnings on Wednesday after the bell.

Here’s how Nvidia is expected to do versus LSEG consensus estimates:

• Earnings per share: $1.01, adjusted
• Revenue: $46.02 billion

That would represent 53% year-over-year revenue growth for Nvidia, which carries a market cap of more than $4 trillion and is already the most valuable company in the world.

That type of growth would add to a streak of explosive growth for the chipmaker, which has been on a tear since the arrival of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022 ushered in the generative artificial intelligence era and created insatiable demand for graphics processing units, or GPUs.

Nvidia’s revenue growth has been driven by its data center business, which accounts for about 88% of the company’s total sales.

There are two key questions analysts will want Nvidia to answer about its data center business: How are the current generation of chips doing? And what’s the state of the company’s business in China?

Analysts will want any color that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang can give them about how sales of the company’s Blackwell chips are going. Earlier this year, Nvidia said that Blackwell sales would be limited by the number of racks the company can make, not how many customers wanted to buy them.

Blackwell comes in several different configurations, including one called GB200 that are typically sold in a finished rack computer that has 72 GPUs and costs millions of dollars.

“That’s probably going to be the most important thing, because I think right now, demand is clearly outstripping supply,” KeyBanc analyst John Vinh told CNBC.

The other big question facing Nvidia is its China business. In 2023, it introduced a slowed-down chip, called the H20, specifically to comply with export controls to China. In April, the Trump administration said the H20 would require a license. A month later, Nvidia said it would lose out on $8 billion in sales to China.

The Trump administration in July said it would grant those licenses. But the Chinese government has signaled in August that China-based technology companies should use homegrown chips, raising questions about demand in that country.

Most analysts expect Nvidia to completely exclude China from its guidance. According to LSEG estimates, Nvidia is expected to guide to nearly $53 billion in sales for its fiscal third quarter, which would represent 51% annual growth.

WATCH: What’s next for Nvidia in China

Saudi Arabia is looking to make data its new oil — if artificial intelligence and data center company Humain gets its way.

The company, owned by the Saudi kingdom’s massive sovereign wealth fund, the Public Investment Fund, is looking to build out data center capacity in a country with seemingly unlimited land and abundant energy resources.

Faced with lower oil prices and soaring costs for domestic megaprojects like the futuristic region of Neom, the kingdom is hoping that surging demand for the data and computing facilities will serve as a reliable cash cow for decades to come.

“Our ambition is very clear. We want to be the third-largest AI provider in the world, behind the United States and China,” Tareq Amin, Humain CEO, told CNBC’s Access Middle East on Tuesday.

Launched in May of this year, just a day before U.S. President Donald Trump’s visit to the Kingdom, Humain aims to deliver full-stack AI capabilities across data centers, infrastructure, cloud platforms and advanced AI models, which it hopes will position Saudi Arabia as the region’s AI hub.

Saudi Arabia faces stiff competition from the neighboring United Arab Emirates, which is forging ahead with its own major partnerships with U.S. tech giants on a number of projects, including the Stargate Campus in Abu Dhabi. The Stargate Project is a $500 billion private sector AI-focused investment vehicle, announced by OpenAI in January in partnership with Abu Dhabi investment firm MGX and Japan’s SoftBank, and will be built with the help of Oracle, Nvidia and Cisco Systems. 

While Saudi Arabia’s data center market is projected to grow from $1.33 billion in 2024 to $3.9 billion by 2030, it still has a long way to go before reaching the scale of the U.S. market, currently valued at over $200 billion.

Further questions remain as to the cost and environmental impact of running and cooling miles of data centers in the Middle East’s scorching deserts, as well as the ability to draw AI engineers to live in Saudi Arabia.

Access to skill and talent remains a major challenge — to bridge that gap, Saudi Arabia relies heavily on foreign talent, with professionals that require high salaries and often don’t stay in the kingdom for a sustained period of time.

Even with the offer of ample pay, drawing and retaining AI engineers will prove difficult for the kingdom. AI-related roles in Saudi Arabia remain largely vacant, with a 50% hiring gap, according to Minister of Human Resources and Social Development Ahmed Al-Rajhi.

In comparison to the UAE, which has a more consistent strategy of attracting investment and executing government strategy, Saudi Arabia is more likely to “struggle” when it comes to AI engineers, said Baghdad Gherras, a UAE-based venture partner at Antler, which invests in early-stage AI ventures.

“I think the bottom up version of Saudi is extremely concentrated at the top, but there is a kind of … lag at the middle management and how the vision is being communicated and translated on the ground,” he said.

Humain is also in partnership with U.S. chipmaking giants AMD and Nvidia, for chips that will supply Humain’s ambitious data center construction plans.

The PIF-owned firm has started construction on two large campuses in the kingdom made up of 11 data centers. Each data center will have a 200-megawatt capacity. By the fourth quarter of 2025 Humain wants 50 megawatts built, followed by an additional 50 megawatts every quarter into 2026.

By 2030 it is targeting installation of 1.9 gigawatts, and six gigawatts by 2034.