SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA – JUNE 23: XBOX CEO Phil Spencer arrives at federal court on June 23, 2023 in San Francisco, California. Top executives from Microsoft and Activision/Blizzard will be testifying during a five day hearing against the FTC to determine the fate of a $68.7B merger of the two companies. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
As Microsoft attempts to convince regulators to approve its $68.7 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard, the company is revealing some of the other ways it’s looked to expand in the video game industry.
Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer testified in San Francisco on Friday that the company previously opened up talks with mobile game developer Zynga but ended up not consummating a deal.
The hearing, which began on Thursday and will continue next week, came after the Federal Trade Commission gained a temporary restraining order to keep Microsoft from closing the Activision purchase. The court agreed to maintain the status quo as it reviewed the FTC’s request for a preliminary injunction for the deal.
“A lot of respect for people at Zynga and what they built,” Spencer said at the hearing. “In the end, for our opportunity, we thought we needed to have something that was even bigger than what Zynga was, given our very small starting space in the mobile gaming business.”
Take Two Interactive, the publisher of Grand Theft Auto titles and other games, ended up acquiring Zynga, in May of last year for $12.7 billion. Zynga was originally for the Facebook hit social game FarmVille, before eventually expanding into mobile games, largely through acquisitions.
Prior to the Microsoft offer, Activision met with a financial firm to work on topping Take-Two‘s purchase of Zynga, CNBC reported at the time.
Spencer didn’t say when Microsoft was in talks with Zynga, and the company wouldn’t provide further comment. However, Zynga said in a filing last year that executives met in September 2021 with representatives from an unnamed “strategic acquirer,” which “expressed non-specific interest in an acquisition of Zynga.”
It wasn’t the the first time Microsoft showed such interest. The company reportedly tried to buy Zynga in 2010.
In trying to the get Activision deal over the finish line, Microsoft says that even if the two companies combine, the joint entity would be smaller than Sony, whose PlayStation console competes with Microsoft’s Xbox, as well as China’s Tencent.
Spencer said on Friday that mobile games represent a faster opportunity for growth than PC games and consoles, where Microsoft gets the bulk of its gaming revenue. Microsoft has tried to boost cloud-based game streaming on mobile devices, but that effort has challenges. They include the smaller typefaces on phone screens and the fact that smartphones don’t come with controllers, Spencer said.
Additionally, Apple has stood in the way of bringing Microsoft’s Game Pass library of video games to its App Store, he said.
Spencer said that after the company went to Zynga, he worked with Microsoft finance chief Amy Hood to look for mobile opportunities. Activision was the biggest publisher of mobile content, and it was already a longtime Microsoft partner, he said.
Activision grew its portfolio of mobile games with the 2016 acquisition of King, publisher of Candy Crush Saga. About 35% of the company’s $8 billion in 2022 revenue came from its King segment.
Peter Thiel, president and founder of Clarium Capital Management LLC, holds hundred dollars bills as he speaks during the Bitcoin 2022 conference in Miami, Florida, U.S., on Thursday, April 7, 2022.
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The current wave of interest in Ethereum and related assets follows an announcement by Robinhood that it will enable trading of tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs across Europe, and a groundswell of interest in stablecoins throughout June following Circle’s wildly successful IPO and ongoing progress in Congress on the Senate’s proposed stablecoin bill, the GENIUS Act.
The price of ether itself also continued its rally, up more than 4% Wednesday. The coin has doubled in price in the past three months.
Thiel is a venture capitalist and hedge fund manager best known as a cofounder of both PayPal and Palantir and an early investor in Facebook. Founders Fund was an investor in Tagomi, the crypto brokerage acquired by Coinbase in 2020, and Polymarket, the prediction market built on Ethereum.
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NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang speaks during the NVIDIA GTC Paris keynote, part of the 9th edition of the VivaTech technology startup and innovation fair, held at the Dôme de Paris in the Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris on June 11, 2025.
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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang sold another 225,000 shares of the chipmaker, totaling about $37 million, according to a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing.
The sale comes as part of a plan adopted in March for Huang to sell up to 6 million shares of the leading artificial intelligence company. Huang began trading stock last month. His most recent sale, disclosed last Friday, totaled 225,000 shares, or about $36 million.
Since he began selling stock this year, Huang has unloaded 1.2 million shares, totaling about $190 million, according to InsiderScore. In last year’s prearranged plan, Huang cashed in over $700 million.
AI demand and the need for graphics processing units powering large language models have spiked Huang’s net worth and propelled Nvidia past a $4 trillion market capitalization, making it the most valuable company.
That surge in value has put Huang above Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffett in net worth on Bloomberg’s Billionaire Index.
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In another significant win, Nvidia said this week that it plans to soon restart sales of its H20 chips to China after the Trump administration indicated that it would approve export licenses.
Earlier this year, the administration said Nvidia would need a license approval to ship the chips, designed specifically for China.
“The U.S. government has assured NVIDIA that licenses will be granted, and NVIDIA hopes to start deliveries soon,” the company said in a statement Tuesday.
Huang said during a press conference on Wednesday in Beijing, China, that he wants to sell chips more advanced than the H20 to China at some point.
Huang wasn’t the only stakeholder to unload Nvidia shares. Board member Brooke Seawell sold $16 million worth of stock.
Jensen Huang, chief executive officer of Nvidia Corp., speaks to members of the media in Beijing, China, on Wednesday, July 16, 2025.
Na Bian | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Nvidia is looking to ship more advanced chips to China than its current generation, CEO Jensen Huang said on Wednesday, as he looks to revitalize sales in the world’s second-largest economy.
The comments come after Nvidia said on Monday that it will resume sales of its H20 artificial intelligence chip to China, reversing a previous ban. The H20 is a less-advanced semiconductor designed for AI workloads that comply with U.S. export restrictions to China.
“I hope to get more advanced chips into China than the H20,” Huang said during a press conference in Beijing, China, in response to a CNBC question.
“And the reason for that is because technology is always moving on … today Hopper’s terrific but some years from now we will have more and more and better and better technology, and I think it’s sensible that whatever we’re allowed to sell in China will continue to get better and better over time as well,” he said referencing Hopper, Nvidia’s chip architecture that the H20 is built on.
Nvidia has been caught in the crosshairs of U.S.-China tensions over trade and technology. The tech giant has faced several rounds of restrictions that have forced it to restrict access of its most advanced chips to China. In response, Nvidia has developed semiconductors that comply with export restrictions, such as the H20.
Nvidia took a $4.5 billion writedown on the unsold H20 inventory in May and said sales in its last financial quarter would have been $2.5 billion higher without any export curbs.
Huang has trod a fine line between praising U.S. President Donald Trump’s policies regarding reshoring chip manufacturing to America while also lobbying for change on curbs to China.
The Nvidia boss has argued the Chinese AI market could be worth $50 billion in the next two-to-three years and that it would be a “tremendous loss” for American firms not to be part of that. Huang also told CNBC this year that Nvidia’s Chinese rival Huawei has “got China covered” if U.S. firms can’t participate in the market.
“Export control are things that are outside of our control and they can be quite disruptive to our business. It is our job only to inform the governments of the nature and the unintended consequences of the policies that they make,” Huang said during his visit to Beijing.
Nvidia has also laid out a roadmap to release more advanced chips, though it remains unclear if the U.S. government would allow Nvidia to sell more advanced products to Chinese companies. However, U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick suggested on Tuesday that the government would continue to allow chip sales to China so that companies in the market rely on American technology.
“The idea is the Chinese are more than capable of building their own,” Lutnick told CNBC. “You want to keep one step ahead of what they can build, so they keep buying our chips.”