This Dutchman moved to San Francisco a year ago to help tech giants prepare for new EU rules
European Union flags flutter outside the EU Commission headquarters, in Brussels, Belgium, February 1, 2023
Yves Herman | Reuters
When Gerard de Graaf moved from Europe to San Francisco almost a year ago, his job had a very different feel to it.
De Graaf, a 30-year veteran of the European Commission, was tasked with resurrecting the EU office in the Bay Area. His title is senior envoy for digital to the U.S., and since September his main job has been to help the tech industry prepare for new legislation called The Digital Services Act (DSA), which goes into effect Friday.
At the time of his arrival, the metaverse trumped artificial intelligence as the talk of the town, tech giants and emerging startups were cutting thousands of jobs, and the Nasdaq was headed for its worst year since the financial crisis in 2008.
Within de Graaf’s purview, companies including Meta, Google, Apple and Amazon have had since April to get ready for the DSA, which takes inspiration from banking regulations. They face fines of as much as 6% of annual revenue if they fail to comply with the act, which was introduced in 2020 by the EC (the executive arm of the EU) to reduce the spread of illegal content online and provide more accountability.
Coming in as an envoy, de Graaf has seen more action than he expected. In March, there was the sudden implosion of the iconic Silicon Valley Bank, the second-largest bank failure in U.S. history. At the same time, OpenAI’s ChatGPT service, launched late last year, was setting off an arms race in generative AI, with tech money pouring into new chatbots and the large language models (LLMs) powering them.
It was a “strange year in many, many ways,” de Graaf said, from his office, which is co-located with the Irish Consulate on the 23rd floor of a building in downtown San Francisco. The European Union hasn’t had a formal presence in Silicon Valley since the 1990s.
De Graaf spent much of his time meeting with top executives, policy teams and technologists at the major tech companies to discuss regulations, the impact of generative AI and competition. Although regulations are enforced by the EC in Brussels, the new outpost has been a useful way to foster a better relationship between the U.S. tech sector and the EU, de Graaf said.
“I think there’s been a conversation that we needed to have that did not really take place,” said de Graaf. With a hint of sarcasm, de Graaf said that somebody with “infinite wisdom” decided the EU should step back from the region during the internet boom, right “when Silicon Valley was taking off and going from strength to strength.”
The thinking at the time within the tech industry, he said, was that the internet is a “different technology that moves very fast” and that “policymakers don’t understand it and can’t regulate it.”
Facebook Chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg arrives to testify before the House Financial Services Committee on “An Examination of Facebook and Its Impact on the Financial Services and Housing Sectors” in the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington, DC on October 23, 2019.
Mandel Ngan | AFP | Getty Images
However, some major leaders in tech have shown signs that they’re taking the DSA seriously, de Graaf said. He noted that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg met with Thierry Breton, the EU commissioner for internal market, to go over some of the specifics of the rules, and that X owner Elon Musk has publicly supported the DSA after meeting with Breton.
De Graaf said he’s seeing “a bit more respect and understanding for the European Union’s position, and I think that has accelerated after generative AI.”
‘Serious commitment’
X, formerly known as Twitter, had withdrawn from the EU’s voluntary guidelines for countering disinformation. There was no penalty for not participating, but X must now comply with the DSA, and Breton said after his meeting with Musk that “fighting disinformation will be a legal obligation.”
“I think, in general, we’ve seen a serious commitment of big companies also in Europe and around the world to be prepared and to prepare themselves,” de Graaf said.
The new rules require platforms with at least 45 million monthly active users in the EU to provide risk assessment and mitigation plans. They also must allow for certain researchers to have inspection access to their services for harms and provide more transparency to users about their recommendation systems, even allowing people to tweak their settings.
Timing could be a challenge. As part of their cost-cutting measures implemented early this year, many companies laid off members of their trust and safety teams.
“You ask yourself the question, will these companies still have the capacity to implement these new regulations?” de Graaf said. “We’ve been assured by many of them that in the process of layoffs, they have a renewed sense of trust and safety.”
The DSA doesn’t require that tech companies maintain a certain number of trust and safety workers, de Graaf said, just that they comply with the law. Still, he said one social media platform that he declined to name gave an answer “that was not entirely reassuring” when asked how it plans to monitor for disinformation in Poland during the upcoming October elections, as the company has only one person in the region.
That’s why the rules include transparency about what exactly the platforms are doing.
“There’s a lot we don’t know, like how these companies moderate content,” de Graaf said. “And not just their resources, but also how their decisions are made with which content will stay and which content is taken down.”
De Graaf, a Dutchman who’s married with two kids, has spent the past three decades going deep on regulatory issues for the EC. He previously worked on the Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act, European legislation targeted at consumer protection and rights and enhancing competition.
This isn’t his first stint in the U.S. From 1997 to 2001, he worked in Washington, D.C., as “trade counsellor at the European Commission’s Delegation to the United States,” according to his bio.
For all the talk about San Francisco’s “doom loop,” de Graaf said he sees a different level of energy in the city as well as further south in Silicon Valley.
There’s still “so much dynamism” in San Francisco, he said, adding that it’s filled with “such interesting people and objective people that I find incredibly refreshing.”
“I meet very, very interesting people here in Silicon Valley and in San Francisco,” he said. “And it’s not just the companies that are kind of avant-garde as the people behind them, so the conversations you have here with people are really rewarding.”
The generative AI boom
Generative AI was a virtually foreign concept when de Graaf arrived in San Francisco last September. Now, it’s about the only topic of conversation at tech conferences and cocktail parties.
The rise and rapid spread of generative AI has led to a number of big tech companies and high-profile executives calling for regulations, citing the technology’s potential influence on society and the economy. In June, the European Parliament cleared a major step in passing the EU AI Act, which would represent the EU’s package of AI regulations. It’s still a long way from becoming law.
De Graaf noted the irony in the industry’s attitude. Tech companies that have for years criticized the EU for overly aggressive regulations are now asking, “Why is it taking you so long?” de Graaf said.
“We will hopefully have an agreement on the text by the end of this year,” he said. “And then we always have these transitional periods where the industry needs to prepare, and we need to prepare. That might be two years or a year and a half.”
The rapidly changing landscape of generative AI makes it tricky for the EU to quickly formulate regulations.
“Six months ago, I think our big concern was to legislate the handful of companies — the extremely powerful, resource rich companies — that are going to dominate,” de Graaf said.
But as more powerful LLMs become available for people to use for free, the technology is spreading, making regulation more challenging as it’s not just about dealing with a few big companies. De Graaf has been meeting with local universities like Stanford to learn about transparency into the LLMs, how researchers can access the technology and what kind of data companies could provide to lawmakers about their software.
One proposal being floated in Europe is the idea of publicly funded AI models, so control isn’t all in the hands of big U.S. companies.
“These are questions that policymakers in the U.S. and all around the world are asking themselves,” de Graaf said. “We don’t have a crystal ball where we can just predict everything that’s happening.”
Even if there are ways to expand how AI models are developed, there’s little doubt about where the money is flowing for processing power. Nvidia, which just reported blowout earnings for the latest quarter and has seen its stock price triple in value this year, is by far the leader in providing the kind of chips needed to power generative AI systems.
“That company, they have a unique value proposition,” de Graaf said. “It’s unique not because of scale or a network effect, but because their technology is so advanced that it has no competition.”
He said that his team meets “quite regularly” with Nvidia and its policy team and they’ve been learning “how the semiconductor market is evolving.”
“That’s a useful source information for us, and of course, where the technology is going,” de Graaf said. “They know where a lot of the industries are stepping up and are on the ball or are going to move more quickly than other industries.”
WATCH: Former White House CTO Aneesh Chopra on A.I. regulation
President Donald Trump speaks before signing executive orders in the Oval Office at the White House on September 19, 2025 in Washington, DC.
Andrew Harnik | Getty Images
President Donald Trump raised the fee for an H-1B visa to $100,000 on Friday, leaving companies scrambling to respond.
With many left wondering whether their careers will remain in tact, here’s a breakdown of the new H-1B fees:
What did Trump change?
As of Sunday, H-1B visa applications will require a $100,000 payment. Previously, visa fees ranged from $2,000 to $5,000 per application, depending on the size of the company.
Employers now must have documentation of the payment prior to filing an H-1B petition on behalf of a worker. Applicants will have their petitions restricted for 12 months until the payment is made, according to the White House.
Who does this impact?
The fee will only be applied to new H-1B applicants, not renewals or current visa holders, according to White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt. The fee will be implemented in the upcoming lottery cycle.
Those who already have H-1B visas and are located outside the U.S. will not be required to pay the fee in order to re-enter.
Leavitt also clarified that the $100,000 is a one-time payment and not an annual charge.
Exceptions can be made to any immigrant whose employment is deemed essential in the national interest by the Secretary of Homeland Security and does not pose a threat to the security or welfare of the U.S.
Employees with B visas who have start dates prior to October 2026 will also receive additional guidance in order to prevent using those temporary business visas as a workaround for H-1B visas.
Who are these workers and why are they needed?
H-1B visas allows highly skilled foreign professionals to work in specialty occupations that generally require at least a bachelor’s degree to fulfill the role. Jobs in the fields of science, technology, engineering and math, or STEM, usually qualify.
Many employers use H-1B workers to fill the gaps in these highly technical roles that are not found within the American labor supply.
Companies in the tech and finance sectors rely heavily on these specially-skilled immigrants, particularly from India and China, which accounted for 71% and 11.7% of visa holders last year, respectively.
How many H-1B visas does the tech industry use every year?
The current annual cap for H-1B visas is 65,000, along with an additional 20,000 visas for foreign professionals with a master’s degree or doctorate from a U.S. institution. A lottery system is used to select additional petitions if demand exceeds the cap.
Since 2012, about 60% or more of approved H-1B workers had computer-related jobs, according to Pew Research.
Amazon was the top employer for H-1B holders in the fiscal year 2025, sponsoring over 10,000 applicants by the end of June, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Microsoft and Meta had over 5,000 each, while Apple and Google rounded out the top six with over 4,000 approvals.
WATCH: CoreWeave CEO on H-1B visas: Additional fee is ‘sand in the gears’ for access to talent
Nvidia will invest $100 billion in OpenAI as the artificial intelligence lab sets out to build hundreds of billions of dollars in data centers based around the chipmaker’s AI processors, the companies said on Monday.
OpenAI plans to build and deploy Nvidia systems that require 10 gigawatts of power, the companies said on Monday. A gigawatt is a measure of power that is increasingly being used to describe the biggest clusters of AI chips.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told CNBC’s Jon Fortt in an interview in San Jose, California, that the 10 gigawatts is equal to between 4 million and 5 million graphics processing units (GPUs), which is what the company will ship in total this year and “twice as much as last year.”
“This is a giant project,” Huang said in the interview, alongside OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, the company’s president.
Nvidia’s first investment of $10 billion will be deployed when the first gigawatt is completed, according to a person familiar with the matter. Investments will be made at then-current valuations, said the person, who declined to be named because the details are private.
Nvidia stock rose almost 4% during on Monday, instantly adding roughly $170 billion in value to the company’s market cap, which now sits close to $4.5 trillion.
The partnership, which Huang described as “monumental in size,” highlights the intimate link between OpenAI and Nvidia, two of the biggest drivers of the recent AI boom. Demand for Nvidia’s GPUs started picking up when OpenAI first released ChatGPT in 2022, and OpenAI still relies GPUs to develop its software and deploy it to users.
“Nvidia invests $100 billion in OpenAI, which then OpenAI turns back and gives it back to Nvidia,” Bryn Talkington, managing partner at Requisite Capital Management, told CNBC after the announcement. “I feel like this is going to be very virtuous for Jensen.”
It further signals the magnitude of Nvidia technology that OpenAI will need to develop next-generation AI that can do more than its current models. OpenAI was already in need of an increasing number of chips to serve its users. The company said it had 700 million active weekly users.
“You should expect a lot from us in the coming months,” Altman said in the interview. “There are three things that OpenAI has to do well: we have to do great AI research, we have to make these products people want to use, and we have to figure out how to do this unprecedented infrastructure challenge.”
The companies said the investment will be deployed “progressively” as the infrastructure is built and that Nvidia would be a “preferred” supplier for OpenAI for chips and networking gear. Nvidia dominates the market for AI chips, but faces increased competition from Advanced Micro Devices and cloud providers which are developing their own chips and systems to tie them together.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman walks on the day of a meeting of the White House Task Force on Artificial Intelligence (AI) Education in the East Room at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., September 4, 2025.
Brian Snyder | Reuters
In August, Huang told investors on an earnings call that building one gigawatt of data center capacity costs between $50 billion and $60 billion, of which about $35 billion of that is for Nvidia chips and systems.
Nvidia and OpenAI said that the first phase of the latest investment will come online in the second half of 2026, using Nvidia’s next-generation Vera Rubin systems.
Nvidia’s investment comes after a roster of investors valued OpenAI at $500 billion in a recent secondary round. Microsoft was one of OpenAI’s early investors, and has a strategic partnership to integrate OpenAI models into its cloud service, Azure, and Microsoft Office. Other OpenAI investors include SoftBank and Thrive Capital.
The companies said on Monday that the partnership will compliment the infrastructure work it is doing with Microsoft, Oracle, SoftBank and the Stargate project.
Altman referred to Nvidia and Microsoft as “passive” investors and two of the company’s “most critical partners” in the CNBC interview.
Huang said Nvidia’s investment is “additive to everything that’s been announced and contracted.” He indicated to CNBC that it’s in addition to anything the company has told Wall Street about its financial expectations.
While this investment dwarfs Nvidia’s prior commitments, the chipmaker has been opening its wallet of late to put funds in many companies in and around the industry.
Last week, Nvidia said it’s taken a $5 billion stake in Intel and announced that the two companies will collaborate on AI processors. Nvidia also said it invested close to $700 million in U.K. data center startup Nscale. And CNBC reported on Thursday that the company spent over $900 million to hire Enfabrica CEO Rochan Sankar and other employees at the AI startup, and to license the company’s technology.
WATCH: Nvidia-OpenAI partnership theme seems to be shortage of compute
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