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When Nvidia this week said it would take a $2 billion stake in chip design company Synopsys, it was just the latest in a string of massive investments announced by the chipmaker this year.

Nvidia has also said it would take a $1 billion stake in Nokia, invest $5 billion in Intel and $10 billion in Anthropic — $18 billion in investment commitments from those four deals, not counting smaller venture capital investments.

That doesn’t even include the biggest commitment of all: $100 billion to buy OpenAI shares over a number of years, although there is still no definitive agreement, Nvidia finance chief Colette Kress said Tuesday.

It’s a lot of money and a lot of deals, but Nvidia’s got the cash to write big checks.

At the end of October, Nvidia had $60.6 billion in cash and short-term investments. That’s up from $13.3 billion in January 2023, just after OpenAI released ChatGPT. That launch three years ago was key to making Nvidia’s chips the most valuable tech product.

As Nvidia has transformed from a maker of gaming technology into the most valuable U.S. company, its balance sheet has become a fortress, and investors are increasingly wondering what the company will do with its cash.

“No company has grown at the scale that we’re talking about,” said CEO Jensen Huang, when asked what the company plans to do with all its cash, on Nvidia’s earnings call last month.

Analysts polled by FactSet expect the company to generate $96.85 billion in free cash flow this year alone and $576 billion in free cash flow over the next three years.

Some analysts would like to see Nvidia spend more of its cash on share repurchases.

“Nvidia is set to generate over $600B in free cash flow over the next few years and it should have a lot left over for opportunistic buybacks,” wrote Melius Research analyst Ben Reitzes in a note on Monday.

The company’s board increased its share repurchase authorization in August, adding $60 billion to its total. In the first three quarters of the year, it spent $37 billion on share repurchases and dividends.

“We’re going to continue to do stock buybacks,” Huang said.

Nvidia is doing the buybacks, but it’s not stopping there.

Huang said that Nvidia’s balance sheet strength gives its customers and suppliers confidence that orders in the future, which he called offtake, will be filled.

“Our reputation and our credibility is incredible,” Huang said. “It takes a really strong balance sheet to do that, to support the level of growth and the rate of growth and the magnitude associated with that.”

Kress, Nvidia’s CFO, on Tuesday said that the company’s “largest focus” is making sure it has enough cash to deliver its next-generation products on time. Most of Nvidia’s largest suppliers are equipment manufacturers like Foxconn and Dell, which can require that Nvidia provide working capital to manage inventory and build additional manufacturing capacity.

Huang called his company’s strategic investments “really important work” and said that if companies like OpenAI grow, it drives additional consumption of AI and Nvidia’s chips. Nvidia has said that it does not require any of its investments to use its products, but they all do anyway.

“All of the investments that we’ve done so far — all of it, period — is associated with expanding the reach of Cuda, expanding the ecosystem,” Huang said, referring to the company’s AI software.

In an October filing, Nvidia said it had has already made $8.2 billion in investments in private companies. For Nvidia, those investments have replaced acquisitions.

Nvidia’s $7 billion acquisition of Mellanox in 2020 is the largest the company has ever made, and it laid the groundwork for its current AI products, which aren’t single chips but entire server racks that sell for around an estimated $3 million.

But the company faced regulatory issues when it tried to buy chip technology firm Arm for $40 billion in 2020.

Nvidia called off the deal before it could be completed after regulators in the U.S. and UK raised concerns about its effects on competition in the chip industry. Nvidia has purchased some smaller companies in recent years, to bolster its engineering teams, but it hasn’t completed a multi-billion acquisition since the Arm deal failed.

“It’s hard to think about very significant, large types of M&A,” Kress this week said, speaking at an investor conference. “I wish one would come available, but it’s not going to be very easy to do so.”

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Microsoft will raise prices of commercial Office subscriptions in July

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Microsoft will raise prices of commercial Office subscriptions in July

A general view of the Microsoft office building is seen in Cologne, Germany, on November 18, 2025.

Nurphoto | Nurphoto | Getty Images

Microsoft said Thursday that it will increase the prices of Office productivity software subscriptions for commercial and government clients on July 1.

The company’s Office applications, which include Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook, have been facing increased competition in recent years from Google.

“We are continuously investing and innovating our platform for the future,” Nicole Herskowitz, corporate vice president for Microsoft 365 and Copilot, wrote in a blog post. “In the last year, we released more than 1,100 features across Microsoft 365, Security, Copilot, and SharePoint.” The new features have added value to the suites, she wrote.

Price hikes for commercial Office subscriptions have been infrequent. In 2022, Microsoft raised prices of its productivity bundles for the first time since launching the original Office 365 subscriptions in 2011. Microsoft changed the name of Office 365 to Microsoft 365 in 2020. In January, Microsoft announced a price hike for consumer Office bundles.

Microsoft offers Office 365 subscriptions for commercial use that include access to its productivity applications, along with higher-priced Microsoft 365 subscriptions that also include Windows operating system updates.

Here’s a breakdown of the commercial price changes:

  • For small and medium-sized businesses, Microsoft 365 Business Basic will cost $7 per person per month, up from $6.
  • Microsoft 365 Business Standard will be available for $14, up from $12.50.
  • Microsoft 365 Business Premium will continue to cost $22.
  • The entry-level Office 365 E1 offering for enterprises will still be sold for $10.
  • Office 365 E3 will jump 13% to $26 from $23.
  • The Microsoft 365 E3 package including Windows for enterprises will rise 8% to $39 from $36.
  • The full-featured Microsoft 365 E5 will increase to $60 from $57.
  • For front-line workers such as cashiers, Microsoft 365 F1 subscriptions will cost $3, up from $2.25.
  • Microsoft 365 F3 will be available for $10, up from $8.

The U.S. Defense Department and other government clients will face similar percentage price increases.

The various subscriptions all exclude access to the $30 Microsoft 365 Copilot add-on that draws on generative artificial intelligence models. Some companies have started widely rolling out Copilot, while others have held off on expanding their deployments, CNBC reported last week.

In many cases, organizations receive discounts off of list prices, but Microsoft has cut back on direct volume deals for some types of customers.

Almost 43% of Microsoft’s $77.7 billion in fiscal first-quarter revenue came from its Productivity and Businesses Processes segment, which includes Office. In October, the company said revenue from Microsoft 365 commercial cloud services jumped 17%, while seats increased 6%, mainly from products targeting small and medium-sized businesses and front-line workers.

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Cramer says this retail stock is ‘one of the greatest performers of all time’

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Cramer says this retail stock is ‘one of the greatest performers of all time’

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Google taps AI vibe-coder Replit in challenge to Anthropic and Cursor

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Google taps AI vibe-coder Replit in challenge to Anthropic and Cursor

People walk next to the Google Cloud logo, during the 2025 Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, Spain, March 4, 2025.

Albert Gea | Reuters

Google Cloud announced Thursday a multi-year partnership with artificial intelligence coding startup Replit, giving the search giant fresh firepower against the coding products of rivals, including Anthropic and Cursor

Under the partnership, Replit will expand usage of Google Cloud services, add more of Google’s models onto its platform, and support AI coding use cases for enterprise customers.

Google will continue to be Replit’s primary cloud provider. 

Replit, founded nearly a decade ago, is a leader in the fast-growing AI vibe-coding space.

In September, the startup closed a $250 million funding round that almost tripled its valuation to $3 billion, and said it grew annualized revenue from $2.8 million to $150 million in less than a year. 

And new data from Ramp, a fintech company that also tracks enterprise spending on its platform, found that Replit had the fastest new customer growth among software vendors. Google, meanwhile, is adding new customers and spending faster than any other company on Ramp’s platform.

Put those together, and you get a clearer picture of why both companies see opportunity.

Read more CNBC tech news

Vibe-coding emerged as a phenomenon earlier this year after AI models became more adept at generating code using only natural language prompts, allowing users with little experience in programming to use AI to create functioning code and potentially full applications. 

Anthropic announced on Tuesday that its product Claude Code hit $1 billion in run-rate revenue. The coding startup Cursor, in November, closed a funding round that valued it at $29.3 billion, while also announcing it reached $1 billion in annualized revenue. 

Replit, which bills itself as an easy-to-use product for non-developers, could help drive Google Cloud adoption among enterprises, and expand the reach of its AI efforts beyond traditional engineers. 

Google is riding on the momentum of its new top-scoring model, Gemini 3. Shares of Alphabet have risen more than 12% since its debut. 

Google gathers AI momentum after Gemini 3 release

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