David Wadhwani, president of Adobe’s Digital Media unit, speaks at Adobe’s Max conference in Los Angeles in October 2022.
Adobe
In September 2009, with the stock market still in the doldrums from the Great Recession, Adobe announced plans to spend $1.8 billion for marketing software vendor Omniture, its second-biggest acquisition ever at the time.
Prior to the deal getting announced, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen said at a meeting that he’s “always trying to not waste a good crisis,” according to the recollection of John Mellor, who was executive vice president at Omniture and stayed on at Adobe for almost 10 more years.
There’s a similarly opportunistic sentiment in the air today. With over three-quarters of 2022 in the books, Adobe’s stock is down 43% this year and on pace for its worst year since 2008, the depths of the financial crisis. This time, the company faces an economic downturn highlighted by soaring inflation.
Last month, Adobe agreed to pay $20 billion for Figma, the largest takeover of a private software company and a sum more than four times greater than what Adobe had ever spent in an acquisition. While Narayen is still CEO, he’s not the person who spearheaded this deal. That distinction belongs to the president of Adobe’s sprawling digital media business, David Wadhwani, according to people familiar with the transaction who asked not to be named because the details were private.
Wadhwani, 51, has spent more than a decade at Adobe over two separate stints, rejoining the company in mid-2021 after six years in other Silicon Valley executive and investing roles. Wadhwani, Adobe’s third highest-paid executive after Narayen, 59, and finance chief Dan Durn, is in the driver’s seat to become the next CEO, a position strengthened internally by the Figma deal, some people close to Adobe said. A former executive told CNBC that everyone is wondering when Wadhwani will get the promotion.
In January, Wadhwani and Anil Chakravarthy, the head of Adobe’s marketing software business, were each named as presidents of the company, a title Narayen had held since 2005. Chakravarthy joined Adobe in 2020 after serving four years as CEO of Informatica.
Some sources close to the company said Wadhwani and Chakravarthy are both strong contenders but cautioned that Narayen isn’t leaving anytime soon. The business Wadhwani oversees is roughly three times the size as Chakravarthy’s in terms of revenue.
For Wadhwani, Figma represents a risky bet on growth at a time when Wall Street is telling tech companies to tighten their belts and preserve cash. Assuming the deal closes, Adobe is paying about 50 times annual recurring revenue, and a price equal to double Figma’s private valuation last year, even with cloud stocks broadly down by more than half in the past 12 months. At the time of the announcement, the purchase price amounted to about 12% of Adobe’s market cap, compared to almost 10% for Omniture 13 years ago.
Cloud stocks and Adobe past year
CNBC
Figma founder and CEO Dylan Field will report to Wadhwani. Brad Rencher, former head of Adobe’s marketing software group, said Wadhwani’s elevated status became abundantly clear to him when he first read of the acquisition.
“I was like, OK, David was the sponsor. He was the one standing up and doing it,” said Rencher, who’s now CEO of BambooHR, a startup in Utah. A move that big doesn’t happen without the CEO’s support, Rencher said.
Narayen told CNBC’s Jon Fortt last month that he and Field had held “multiple conversations” over the years. Field said at a conference recently that Adobe first reached out to Figma in 2012, days after he announced the startup. But Adobe waited a decade to pounce, giving Figma time to show that it could succeed selling its software inside large companies such as Microsoft.
The make-or-break bet
In his 15-year tenure as CEO, Narayen hasn’t been shy about dealmaking, just at a smaller size. He orchestrated several billion-dollar-plus deals, including Omniture. The biggest prior to Figma was marketing automation software provider Marketo, which Adobe bought for $4.75 billion in 2018.
Figma is different. It shows Adobe’s willingness to pay top dollar for a trendy asset and let it run independently, rather than just buying companies and integrating their capabilities into existing products. And it might be Wadhwani’s make-or-break opportunity to prove he should be CEO of the fourth-biggest U.S. business software company by market cap.
Among past and current colleagues, Wadhwani is known to be unnervingly still in meetings, speaking in a slow and measured manner and often wrapping up by summarizing the three most critical points that were discussed. Rencher said there’s a clear similarity to his boss.
“He’s made in Shantanu’s image,” Rencher said.
Still, he can become passionate and animated. Rencher recalls a company offsite for executives a little over a decade ago at a spa resort in Carmel Valley, California, about two hours south of Adobe’s headquarters in San Jose. There was an icebreaker to try and ease the executives into conversation. But Wadhwani was ready to get down to business.
“We’ve got to change something or we’re going to be in trouble,” Wadhwani said, according to Rencher’s memory of the event.
Adobe said Wadhwani wasn’t available for an interview and the company declined to comment on succession planning.
Wadhwani is said to be a dedicated family man, with a wife, two daughters and a dog, though he allows himself one indulgence. When he travels on business, he insists on eating McDonald’s at airports. In particular, he loves the French fries, a former colleague said.
At Adobe, Wadhwani has been at the center of one of the most important shifts in the company’s 39-year history: the move from perpetual licenses to subscriptions. When Adobe revealed the grand plan for a new business model to analysts in 2011, Wadhwani was tasked with announcing the prices.
“We believe that over the course of the next few years as a result of this, we’ll attract over 800,000 new users — new incremental users to our Creative Suite — and do it in a way that’s good for the customer and good for Adobe,” Wadhwani said.
Revenue growth slowed and eventually declined as Adobe made its strategic and technological changes. But each quarter, hundreds of thousands more people signed up for Creative Cloud, a bundled subscription offering of key Adobe products such as Photoshop, Illustrator and Premiere Pro.
Shantanu Narayen, CEO, Adobe
Mark Neuling | CNBC
The revenue became more predictable and less closely associated with product releases. Investors responded by pushing the stock price above the $50 mark in late 2013 for the first time. It kept rising, and by 2016, nearly 7 million people were subscribing to Creative Cloud. In all, the stock price soared 233% over those four and a half years, compared with a 67% rise for the S&P 500.
Prior to the Creative Cloud launch, executives discussed the vision at an executive meeting at a lodge in Sausalito, California, across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco.
It wasn’t a universally popular idea to bet the company on a new revenue model that was just starting to gain mass adoption in software. But Wadhwani spoke up in the middle of a disagreement and made clear that he saw real value in the effort. He showed the group early drawings of the product from company designers, said Michael Gough, a former Adobe vice president, who was in attendance.
“He was the one that was sort of rallying people to take it seriously,” Gough said. “Let’s talk about what would we actually do. What are we missing from the stack? What kind of resources would it take? He was taking the vision and creating a working plan, basically, and getting people to at least talk about the possibility of doing it.”
Jumping to a startup
By 2015, the subscription business was humming. Adobe significantly outperformed its target for paid Creative Cloud subscriptions. In June of that year, Wadhwani presented for the first time on an Adobe quarterly earnings call with analysts.
Three months later, he resigned “to pursue a CEO opportunity,” as Adobe stated in a press release. The new gig was made public a couple weeks later, when data analytics startup AppDynamics said Wadhwani would be taking over for Jyoti Bansal, a star founder in the software industry and the Bay Area.
Wadhwani told colleagues when he left that he wanted to be a CEO, said a former Adobe employee. Internally, there was chatter that he’d come to see that he wouldn’t be the next CEO of Adobe, according to a former executive.
Bansal, who’d guided AppDynamics into the billion-dollar startup club, was resistant to the idea of bringing in an outside CEO, said Steve Harrick, a partner at Institutional Venture Partners, an early backer of the company. Wadhwani eventually won over Bansal, who didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Harrick said that Wadhwani would frequently follow up with him after board meetings that ended without resolution on important matters. As CEO, Wadhwani pushed for engineers to build software in-house to broaden its offerings to existing customers, Harrick said. He also guided the company to become more dependent on revenue from subscriptions, rather than from more traditional licenses, an evolution he had advanced at Adobe.
Wadhwani was quickly poised to be CEO of a public company, after AppDynamics filed for its IPO in 2016. Early the following year, the company was set to raise almost $200 million and trade on the Nasdaq until Cisco showed up at the last minute and agreed to pay $3.7 billion for AppDynamics, more than double its expected valuation.
“They were not dual-tracking. They were not trying to be bought,” said Harrick. “They were earnestly saying, ‘This is a public company, that’s our marching orders.'”
Wadhwani stayed at Cisco after the acquisition. With Cisco trying to expand beyond networking and telecommunications gear and into software, Wadhwani advocated for the company to do more deals, suggesting it look at Datadog and HashiCorp, according to a former Cisco executive.
Neither deal happened. Datadog went public in September 2019, followed by HashiCorp in December 2021. However, Cisco did invest in HashiCorp in 2020.
Wadhwani left Cisco in October 2019 to join venture firm Greylock Partners, an early investor in AppDynamics. Less than two years later, he rejoined Adobe to again run the digital media business, but this time with bigger aspirations.
“He missed having a group of people around him where they were doing a lot of stuff together,” said Mona Akmal, co-founder and CEO of sales software startup Falkon, which was Wadhwani’s first Greylock investment.
Akmal told Wadhwani she wanted him to stick with her even as he pursued a job elsewhere. He’s continued attending every board meeting, she said.
Akmal said she wasn’t surprised to see Wadhwani return to an operating role, as she would joke with him that he was born to be a CEO. He’s tall and handsome, and his hair is always perfect, she said. She would ask about his hair, which has turned largely white, and question why he hasn’t dyed it.
“Are we doing the white hair because we want to look more executive?” she remembered asking him. “He would give you the smile, like, ‘Maybe.'”
Wadhwani rapidly got up to speed upon his return to San Jose. He’s participated in all three of Adobe’s quarterly earnings calls with analysts this year, providing details on Creative Cloud and, more recently, the Figma deal.
Internally, his targets included reaching creative professionals who are becoming more willing to collaborate, growing Document Cloud after the pandemic boosted e-signature rival DocuSign and popularizing Adobe Express to address the low end of the market, a former executive said.
‘Really important shift’
He’s been recruiting top talent, bringing back product veteran Deepa Subramaniam and technologist Ely Greenfield, who was technology chief at AppDynamics under Wadhwani.
At Adobe’s annual Max conference in Los Angeles this month, Wadhwani took the stage for the first time since 2014, and highlighted to analysts the opportunities to expand the digital media business.
He said the company was making “a really important shift and transition,” directing people who show interest in working with PDF files toward free services and then introducing them to premium capabilities. Wadhwani said the company has taken a page from its Document Cloud business and applied it to Creative Cloud, encouraging customers to pay for additional services.
At the event, Wadhwani said Figma’s popular design collaboration tools can accelerate Adobe’s effort to get more people engaging with documents in Adobe applications, thus widening the pool of potential customers. He invited Field to join him onstage and talk about Figma’s current projects.
Dylan Field, co-founder and CEO of Figma, speaks at the startup’s Config conference in San Francisco on May 10, 2022.
Figma
During a question-and-answer session later in the day, Wadhwani sat directly to the right of Narayen, who was flanked on the other side by Chakravarthy. Wadhwani and Narayen seemed to have coordinated their outfits. Both wore sneakers and sweaters over collared shirts.
Jay Vleeschhouwer, an analyst at Griffin Securities, asked the executives how Figma can help Adobe become more web oriented.
“I could probably literally spend hours on file formats versus object models in the web and what it takes,” Narayen said.
Then Wadhwani spoke up. Figma doesn’t depend on any one file format, he noted.
“One of the things that we’re really excited about,” Wadhwani said, is “working with Dylan and team to take those core capabilities, take the core platform that Dylan and team have built, and really reimagine what should the flows be.”
“Good news is David can also talk hours about the same issue,” Narayen said, referring to his file formats comment. Narayen smiled as the analysts and his fellow executives laughed.
Co-founder and chief executive officer of Nvidia Corp., Jensen Huang attends the 9th edition of the VivaTech trade show in Paris on June 11, 2025.
Chesnot | Getty Images Entertainment | Getty Images
Nvidia has just shelled out over $900 million to hire Enfabrica CEO Rochan Sankar and other employees at the artificial intelligence hardware startup, and to license the company’s technology, CNBC has learned.
In a deal reminiscent of recent AI talent acquisitions made by Meta and Google, Nvidia is paying cash and stock in the transaction, according to two people familiar with the arrangement. The deal closed last week, and Enfabrica CEO Rochan Sankar has joined Nvidia, said the people, who asked not to be named because the matter is private.
Nvidia has served as the backbone of the AI boom that began with the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022. The company’s graphics processing units (GPUs), which are generally purchased in large clusters, power the training of large language models and allow for big cloud providers to offer AI services to clients.
Enfabrica, founded in 2019, says its technology can connect more than 100,000 GPUs together. It’s a solution that could help Nvidia offer integrated systems around its chips so clusters can effectively serve as a single computer.
A spokesperson for Nvidia declined to comment, and Enfabrica didn’t provide a comment for this story.
While Nvidia’s earlier AI chips like the A100 were single processors slotted into servers, its most recent products come in tall racks with 72 GPUs installed working together. That’s the kind of system inside the $4 billion data center in Wisconsin that Microsoft announced on Thursday.
Nvidia previously invested in Enfabrica as part of a $125 million Series B round in 2023 that was led by Atreides Management. The company didn’t disclose its valuation at the time, but said that it was a fivefold increase from its Series A funding.
Late last year, Enfabrica raised another $115 million from investors including Spark Capital, Arm, Samsung and Cisco. According to PitchBook, the post-money valuation was about $600 million.
Tech giants Meta, Google, Microsoft and Amazon have all poured money into hiring top AI talent through deals that resemble acquihires. The transactions allow the companies to bring in top engineers and researchers without worrying about the regulatory hassles that come with acquisitions.
The biggest such deal came in June, when Meta spent $14.3 billion on Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang and others and took a 49% stake in the AI startup. A month later, Google announced an agreement to bring in Varun Mohan, co-founder and CEO of artificial intelligence coding startup Windsurf, and other research and development employees in a $2.4 billion deal that also included licensing fees.
Last year, Google made a similar deal to bring in the founders of Character.AI. Microsoft did the same thing for Inflection, as did Amazon for Adept.
While Nvidia has been a big investor in AI technologies and infrastructure, it hasn’t been a significant acquirer. The company’s only billion-dollar-plus deal was for Israeli chip designer Mellanox, a $6.9 billion purchase announced in 2019. Much of Nvidia’s current Blackwell product lineup is enabled by networking technology that it acquired through that acquisition.
Nvidia tried to buy chip design company Arm, but that deal collapsed in 2022 due to regulatory pressure. In the past year, Nvidia closed a $700 million purchase of Run:ai, an Israeli company whose technology helps software makers optimize their infrastructure for AI.
On Thursday, Nvidia announced one of its most sizable investments to date. The chipmaker said it’s taken a $5 billion stake in Intel, and announced that the two companies will collaborate on AI processors. Nvidia also said this week that it invested close to $700 million in U.K. data center startup Nscale.
— Correction: A prior version of this story mistakenly included the name of a company as an investor in Enfabrica.
CrowdStrike logo is seen in this illustration taken July 29, 2024.
Dado Ruvic | Reuters
CrowdStrike shares popped about 13%, a day after the cybersecurity firm issued better-than-expected long-term guidance at its investor day.
The company on Wednesday said it expects net new annual recurring revenues to grow at least 20% in 2027, ahead of analysts’ expectations. CrowdStrike plans for ARR to hit $10 billion by 2031, and then double to $20 billion by 2036.
“CrowdStrike is by far the most advanced security platform in the industry, and the plethora of AI-based solutions announced today will further separate CrowdStrike from the competition,” wrote Wells Fargo analyst Andrew Nowinski in a note following the event.
Some Wall Street firms also boosted their price targets.
Read more CNBC tech news
Cybersecurity has taken center stage this year as businesses beef up security in the age of artificial intelligence. Many companies have harnessed AI tools to strengthen their offering as threats rise in sophistication.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang attends the “Winning the AI Race” Summit in Washington D.C., U.S., July 23, 2025.
Kent Nishimura | Reuters
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said that the company’s $5 billion investment and technology collaboration with Intel comes after the two companies held discussions for nearly a year.
Huang said that he communicated personally with Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan about the partnership. He called Tan a “longtime friend” on a Thursday call with reporters after the companies announced that Nvidia would co-develop data center and PC chips with Intel as part of the investment deal. On the call, Tan said he and Huang have known each other for 30 years.
“We thought it was going to be such an incredible investment,” Huang said.
Nvidia said it will collaborate with the chipmaker to create artificial intelligence systems for data centers that combine Intel’s x86-based central processors with Nvidia’s graphics processors and networking.
Intel will also sell CPUs for PCs and notebooks that integrate Nvidia graphics processors, or GPUs.
The transaction itself took a few months to come together, Intel’s revenue chief Greg Ernst wrote in a LinkedIn post, adding that the agreement was reached on Saturday.
The investment highlights how the fortunes of the two companies have switched atop Silicon Valley’s pecking order as a result of the AI explosion ushered in by OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT in late 2022.
Intel shares are down 31.78% in the last five years, while Nvidia shares are up 1,348% as of opening prices on Thursday. Nvidia is worth over $4.25 trillion, while Intel is only worth $143 billion.
How Intel and Nvidia will collaborate
For decades, the most important part in a PC or server was the central processor, and Intel dominated the market for those chips. But AI infrastructure, like the machines in the $4 billion data center Microsoft announced on Thursday, often needs two or more Nvidia GPUs for every one CPU.
Nvidia AI systems, like the NVL72 used by Microsoft, come with Arm-based CPUs, instead of Intel x86-based CPUs. On the call, Huang said Nvidia will soon support Intel’s CPUs in its NVLink racks for AI.
“We’ll buy those CPUs from from Intel, and then we’ll connect it into super chips that then becomes our compute node, that then gets integrated into a rack scale AI supercomputer,” Huang said.
Nvidia will also contribute GPU technology to Intel chips that ship in laptops and PCs, which is an underserved market, Huang said. In total, the addressable markets for the two product collaborations are worth $50 billion, Huang said.
“We’re going to become a very large customer of Intel CPUs, and we’re going to be a large supplier of GPU chiplets into Intel” chips, he said.
Huang said the deal with Intel will have “no” impact on Nvidia’s business relationship with Arm.
Thursday’s investment deal is focused on the relationship between Nvidia and Intel’s product division, not its foundry. The two companies, however, did not rule out future foundry partnerships.
“We’ve always evaluated Intel’s foundry technology, and we’re going to continue to do it, but today, this announcement, is squarely focused on these custom CPUs,” Huang said. Nvidia currently uses Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company to manufacture its chips.
The collaboration will use Intel’s packaging, which is a part chip manufacturing that occurs toward the end of the process and combines several chip components into a single part that can be installed in machines.
Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan makes a speech on stage in Taipei, Taiwan May 19, 2025.
Ann Wang | Reuters
Tan said he was grateful for Nvidia’s vote of confidence.
“‘I’d like to thank Jensen for the confidence in me, and our team and Intel will work really hard to make sure it’s a good return for you,” Tan said.
Last year, Intel’s board removed previous CEO Pat Gelsinger because of rising costs in its manufacturing business and the company’s failure to gain a foothold in AI chips. In March, Intel named Tan, a well-connected investor who had turned around chip software firm Cadence Design Systems, its new chief executive.
Tan has focused on cutting costs and raising money in his short tenure leading Intel even as the future of the company’s manufacturing business, called Intel Foundry, remains unclear.
In addition to the $5 billion from Nvidia and $8.9 billion from the U.S. government, Intel has taken a $2 billion investment from SoftBank, sold a majority stake in its ASIC subsidiary Altera to Silver Lake for $3.3 billion and sold $1 billion in stock from Mobileye, its self-driving car subsidiary.
Intel has also cut significant staff, saying in July that it would eliminate 15% of its workforce by the end of the year.
The company develops its own chips as well as manufacturing them. It wants to manufacture chips for companies like Nvidia or Apple, but has yet to secure them as customers. Analysts say Intel needs a big foundry client to signal that its technology is stable and ready for volume production.
But cutting-edge chip manufacturing is expensive, and Intel has signaled that if it can’t get enough customers, it may not continue investing in its foundry. That could spark a reaction from Washington, whose politicians and lobbyists consider Intel to be strategically important for the nation because it is the only American company capable of manufacturing the most advanced chips.
The Trump administration took a 10% stake in Intel in August. Intel was previously in line to receive $8.9 billion in grants and loans from the CHIPS Act, but the Trump administration asked and received an equity stake in the chipmaker in exchange for the money.
Huang was with Trump this week in England to attend a State Dinner at Windsor Palace and announce new projects and investments in the U.K. But the Trump administration wasn’t involved in this deal, according to a White House official and Huang.
“Intel’s new partnership with Nvidia is a major milestone for American high-tech manufacturing,” White House spokesman Kush Desai said in a statement.