Microsoft has been making its GitHub subsidiary more dependent on the company’s own Azure public cloud.
That lines up with Microsoft’s desire to increase the use of Azure, whose revenue was growing 40% in the second quarter, faster than any other major product category the company discloses every three months.
At the same time, it must be careful not to break commitments it made at the time of the $7.5 billion GitHub acquisition in 2018. Otherwise, some developers wary of Microsoft’s past behavior might not want to use GitHub to store their software code.
In the late 1990s, the U.S. Department of Justice argued that Microsoft had illegally required device makers to commit to including the Internet Explorer browser on every PC they shipped with the Windows 95 operating system. In the settlement of the landmark antitrust case, Microsoft agreed to a ban on pacts mandating exclusive support of its software, among other changes.
When GitHub was a standalone company, software developers saw it as a neutral ground where they could house their software projects and then run the code on the market-leading Amazon Web Services cloud or any other computing environment. Then Microsoft announced its plan to buy GitHub. Some developers objected, and over 1,900 people signed a petition to block the deal.
“Microsoft likely acquired GitHub so it could more closely integrate it with Microsoft Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) and ultimately help drive compute usage for Azure,” Sid Sijbrandij, co-founder and CEO of GitHub competitor GitLab, was quoted as saying in a company blog post.
On the day Microsoft announced the GitHub deal, Microsoft published a blog post from its CEO, Satya Nadella, that communicated Microsoft’s intent.
“Going forward, GitHub will remain an open platform, which any developer can plug into and extend,” Nadella wrote. “Developers will continue to be able to use the programming languages, tools and operating systems of their choice for their projects — and will still be able to deploy their code on any cloud and any device.”
The company would also speed up the ability for developers at large companies to use Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure, Nadella wrote.
Some developers worried that Microsoft would adjust GitHub so that running code on Azure would be the easiest approach.
But Microsoft has employed more subtle tactics.
Instead of pushing developers to run their code on Azure, GitHub has simply introduced new products and features, many of which are built on Azure. So when developers use GitHub, Azure is increasingly the backbone.
For instance, GitHub Copilot, a tool that helps developers complete their coding projects line by line, uses Azure, said Scott Guthrie, Microsoft’s executive vice president for cloud and enterprise, in an interview with CNBC. The GitHub Actions service for building and deploying code and the Codespaces cloud-based development environment operate in Azure, too, Guthrie said.
“GitHub, historically, I could say, has run in their own data centers, not actually on a public cloud, and a lot of the new features of GitHub are using our public cloud,” Guthrie said.
That means the GitHub acquisition can increase Azure usage — even if customers don’t realize it — and Microsoft can say that GitHub continues to allow people to run their code on any server.
Under Nadella, Microsoft has transformed other companies it has bought into Azure users. In 2019 LinkedIn announced plans to move the business social network to Azure, and in 2020 Microsoft said Mojang Studios, publisher of the popular Minecraft video game, would stop using Amazon’s AWS.
“There is a lot of great stuff we’re doing, but at the same time, we’re being super careful, obviously, because you know, GitHub has a gestalt of its own, and so we’re making sure — and I think we’ve done a really good job of that — sort of being able to integrate all of those features in a very native way inside of GitHub,” Guthrie said.
In September Microsoft informed investors that its closely watched Azure and Other Cloud Services revenue growth number each quarter would expand to include “additional GitHub cloud revenue now delivered via our datacenter infrastructure.” Until now that revenue has fallen under the company’s Server Products category.
Samsung Electronics’s Galaxy Z TriFold media day at Samsung Gangnam in Seoul, South Korea, on Dec. 2, 2025.
Anadolu | Anadolu | Getty Images
Samsung Electronics on Monday announced the launch of its first multi-folding smartphone as it races to keep pace with innovations from fast-moving rivals.
The long-anticipated “Galaxy Z TriFold” will go on sale in South Korea on Dec. 12, with launches to follow in other markets including China, Taiwan, Singapore, and the United Arab Emirates, the company said in a press release.
The phone will be available in the U.S. during the first quarter of 2026, with more details to be shared later, the South Korean tech giant added. The Galaxy Z Trifold will ship as a single model in black with 16GB of memory and 512GB of storage, priced at 3,594,000 South Korean won ($2,449).
With Apple’s expected entry into the foldable segment, Samsung is positioning this device as a multi-fold pilot to reinforce its technology leadership.”
Liz Lee
Associate Director at Counterpoint Research
The device uses two inward-folding hinges to open into a 10-inch display — a tad smaller than the 11th-generation iPad’s 11-inch display — with a 2160 x 1584 resolution.
When its screen panels are folded, the device is measures 12.9 millimeters (0.5 inches) thick — slightly more than the Galaxy Z Fold6 at 12.1 mm and the latest Galaxy Z Fold7 at 8.9 mm.
“Samsung’s first tri-fold model will ship in very limited volume, but scale is not the objective,” Liz Lee, associate director at Counterpoint Research, said in a statement shared with CNBC.
“With competitive dynamics set to shift materially in 2026, especially with Apple’s expected entry into the foldable segment, Samsung is positioning this device as a multi-fold pilot to reinforce its technology leadership.”
A Samsung Electronics Co. Galaxy Z TriFold smartphone on display during a media preview in Seoul, South Korea, on Tuesday, Dec. 2, 2025.
Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Lee added that Samsung’s latest product is meant to test durability, hinge design and software performance while gathering real-world user insights before wider commercialization.
The phone’s three foldable panels can also run three apps vertically side by side, and offer a desktop-like mode without a separate display.
The TriFold features Samsung’s largest battery capacity among its foldable models and supports super-fast charging that reaches 50% in 30 minutes.
TM Roh, who was recently appointed Samsung Electronics co-CEO and head of the Device eXperience division, said the Galaxy Z TriFold reflects years of work on foldable designs and aims to balance portability, performance and productivity in one device.
Samsung was an early innovator of folding smartphones, unveiling its first foldable device in 2019. While the market has remained relatively small, new competitors have continued to enter, including Chinese brands that have proven competitive in both price and dimension.
Visitors try out the Galaxy Z Trifold during Samsung Electronics’ Galaxy Z TriFold media day at Samsung Gangnam in Seoul, South Korea, on Dec. 2, 2025.
Anadolu | Anadolu | Getty Images
In September, telecommunications giant Huawei announced its second-generation trifold phone for the Chinese market, measuring 12.8 mm thick when folded.
This year has also seen Chinese brands like Honor launch foldable smartphones in international markets. Honor was spun off from Huawei in 2020 in a bid to avoid U.S. sanctions and tap international markets.
Like Samsung’s other recent foldables, the TriFold is rated IP48, meaning it is water-resistant up to 1.5 meters for up to 30 minutes but offers limited dust protection.
In this year’s flurry of massive artificial intelligence deals – for which a couple of billion dollars is pocket change – Nvidia ‘s announcement on Monday of a $2 billion investment to expand its long-time partnership with Synopsys might seem just incremental. Not so, asserted Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, in an interview with Jim Cramer shortly after the news broke. Jensen said, “This is a huge deal.” Here’s why: Synopsys provides software and tools that allow companies like Nvidia to design, test, and verify semiconductors. Jensen said, “Nvidia was built on a foundation of design tools from Synopsys,” among others. This deal allows Synopsys, which earlier this year completed its purchase of engineering simulation software maker Ansys, to leverage Nvidia’s AI platform to deliver computer-modeled design and engineering solutions across many industries. Nvidia’s powerful chips, called graphics processing units (GPUs), are the gold standard in AI. With Monday’s deal , Nvidia will be positioned to bring GPU-powered accelerated computing to the world’s industrial sector, which represents an addressable market measured in the tens of trillions of dollars. What makes that possible is that the AI we are talking about here obeys the laws of physics, meaning that it can be relied upon to show how things will really run in the real world. Synopsys CEO Sassine Ghazi, standing alongside Jensen, said that what we’re talking about here, in a practical sense, is taking a workload that may have taken two to three weeks and compressing that to a matter of hours. Even with the work of Synopsys and other electronic design automation (EDA) providers, Jensen said Nvidia still spends “billions of dollars in prototyping” products in the physical world. “In the future, we’re going to prototype all of these products digitally so that we don’t waste any money when we build it physically,” he explained. “We could do basically the entire engineering work inside a computer in a digital twin before we have to build it at all. So, the type of products we can invent and the quality that we could do, and the speed that we could do it at is going to be extraordinary.” Jensen said that industrial companies that make things, be it Nvidia, or GM , or Boeing , spend hundreds of millions, even low billions of dollars on engineering software tools. He noted, however, that the money spent on prototyping can be 10 times to 20 times that figure. The ability to prototype digitally, therefore, represents a massive opportunity for industrial companies to reduce costs. Jensen told Jim, “This is really the culmination of everything I showed you when you visited Nvidia years ago. It’s taken this long for us to create the software stack necessary for Synopsys and the rest of the EDA [electronic design automation] industry, in order for them to accelerate the software that they’ve historically only run on CPUs [central processing units].” He added, “All of a sudden, the market opportunity increases by a factor of 10 to 100.” Jim Cramer, who started recommending Nvidia stock in 2009, first interviewed Jensen a year later. The “Mad Money” host even renamed his dog “Nvidia” in 2017 to demonstrate his belief in the company. While first bought in Jim’s Charitable Trust in August 2017 and exited in October 2018, Nvidia stock has been a constant since we re-initiated it in March 2019. More recently, Jim hosted Jensen at the Investing Club’s October Monthly Meeting, where the CEO got to meet many early Nvidia investors who made lots of money on the stock. The Trust is the portfolio the Club uses. In Monday’s interview, Jim also pressed Jensen on recent concerns about whether the launch of Gemini 3, powered by Google’s custom chips, would encroach on Nvidia’s GPU business. Google’s own semiconductors, called tensor processing units, were co-designed by Broadcom . Jensen, who complimented Google on their chips, said, “What Nvidia does is much more versatile,” dismissing the concerns and bringing the conversation back to the potential of the Synopsys investment. “You’re now seeing a real, tangible example of an opportunity that we could do with our platform that nobody else can.” AI goes far beyond the chatbots and consumer-facing solutions that have garnered most of our attention – and contributed to the pressure on shares of Nvidia since the Gemini 3 launch. Jensen said that Monday’s announcement is about revolutionizing the industrial software industry, where the stakes are much higher. On the consumer side, an answer to a query that is 90% correct, or recommends an item, movie, or new music with 90% accuracy, is a pretty good start – but on the industrial side, “that 10% you don’t get right, becomes mission critical,” the CEO added. That’s also why the pace of advancement has been so much faster in consumer AI. However, as exciting as the consumer-oriented developments have been, it’s the industrial side that likely proves to be the real opportunity. While capital expenditures by the biggest tech companies in the world to support consumer AI has, thus far, been the real driver of AI investment and infrastructure spending, the industry is now getting to the point where we should see spending ramp up elsewhere, be it from automakers like Ford and GM, or even ship builders in Korea. Not only does that speak to more spending in the years to come, but also a diversification of the spending base, which should materially help to de-risk the customer base for companies like Nvidia that have in recent years seen so much of their demand come from a select few customers. Ultimately, the move marks a significant milestone for Nvidia and the AI trade more broadly as it lays the groundwork for a material expansion in industrial AI. As we see it, the deal is a strong move for both companies. Synopsys gets to better serve its customers, while Nvidia expands its own ecosystem and helps to lay the groundwork for even more GPU-based accelerated computing infrastructure. On a conference call hosted by both companies to discuss the deal, Jensen said, “Of all the AI opportunities – industrial AI, physical AI – is the largest of all. And the reason for that is very clear. The world’s industries represent the vast majority of $100 trillion industry today. That industry, whether you’re designing cars or trains or planes or designing computers, all of that largely is based on general purpose computing. … But in order for us to go even further, in order for us to do even more, expanding the reach of design and engineering so that we could do almost everything in the world inside a digital environment, long before we create the physical manifestation, that journey, we’ve been preparing for several years now, and today our announcement really kicks it into turbocharge.” Jensen wrapped up by noting that Synopsys is the company that has allowed Nvidia to design its own chips, since its founding, and that the deal announced Monday is going to “enable everyone to design everything that’s physically manifested in the future.” (Jim Cramer’s Charitable Trust is long NVDA, AVGO, BA. See here for a full list of the stocks.) As a subscriber to the CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer, you will receive a trade alert before Jim makes a trade. Jim waits 45 minutes after sending a trade alert before buying or selling a stock in his charitable trust’s portfolio. If Jim has talked about a stock on CNBC TV, he waits 72 hours after issuing the trade alert before executing the trade. THE ABOVE INVESTING CLUB INFORMATION IS SUBJECT TO OUR TERMS AND CONDITIONS AND PRIVACY POLICY , TOGETHER WITH OUR DISCLAIMER . NO FIDUCIARY OBLIGATION OR DUTY EXISTS, OR IS CREATED, BY VIRTUE OF YOUR RECEIPT OF ANY INFORMATION PROVIDED IN CONNECTION WITH THE INVESTING CLUB. NO SPECIFIC OUTCOME OR PROFIT IS GUARANTEED.
After years of largely trading together, stocks related to artificial intelligence and the data center are starting to move in different directions, CNBC’s Jim Cramer said.
“The Google complex cohort roared while the OpenAI complex got hammered. Meanwhile, the hyperscalers with great balance sheets held up much better than the ones with strained balance sheets,” he said. “Just keep in mind that things change very fast in the AI space, so what was true last month might not necessarily stay true this month or next year.”
He pinpointed a difference in the performance of AI companies linked to OpenAI — like Nvidia, Oracle, Microsoft and AMD — and those affiliated with Alphabet — such as Broadcom and Celestica. He said latter cohort has seen a boost as some investors start to favor the newest iteration Gemini over ChatGPT. Wall Street Street at large is also growing concerned about OpenAI’s massive spending commitments, Cramer continued.
Hyperscalers with strong balance sheets are starting to pull ahead, he continued, noting that companies like Alphabet, Meta and Amazon have the capacity to keep spending big on AI. However, Cramer added, Oracle, CoreWeave and Nebius have more strained balance sheets.
But he warned that the AI space is volatile and said it’s possible another platform will surpass Gemini. Cramer also said he doesn’t want to “paint with too broad of a brush here.” For example, he noted that Nvidia got hit over worries about newfound competition and its ties to OpenAI. However, the AI giant also just reported a blowout quarter with strong guidance and demand for its products still exceeded supply, he continued.
The diversification of the AI trade is a good thing, Cramer suggested, saying it’s positive that investors are starting to think more critically about which of these companies “deserves to be winners.”
“In general, I think it’s actually pretty healthy. I’m never going to root against higher stock prices,” he said. “But there was always something unsettling about the entire AI cohort rallying in lockstep.”
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Disclaimer The CNBC Investing Club holds shares of Nvidia, Meta, Microsoft and Broadcom.
