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Dec 09, 2025
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Supported by
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Happy Tuesday! The Trump administration will let Nvidia sell relatively advanced chips to China. Paramount SkyDance makes a $108 Billion tender offer for Warner. Google expects to launch its first AI glasses next year.
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The Trump administration will let Nvidia sell a relatively advanced set of artificial intelligence server chips to China, the president said in a social media post, ending a debate in Washington about whether to let a geopolitical adversary access state-of-the-art technology from the U.S. Trump implied that the White House is directing the Commerce Department to let Nvidia sell Hopper 200 chips, which are a generation behind the Nvidia’s Blackwell chips that are now being mass produced. Many of today’s best-known AI models, such as GPT-5, were trained using Hopper 100 or 200-series chips. Nvidia previously sold a much less powerful version of its Hopper chips, the H20, to China. One question is how the Chinese government will react to the availability of H200. China has instructed many of the company’s biggest
AI developers to limit their use of Nvidia chips so that China’s homegrown AI server chips, including Huawei’s can flourish. Nvidia sales to China have petered out this year. But given that chips from Huawei are better suited to running existing AI models, known as inference, as opposed to developing new models, China may be more open to local companies using the Nvidia H200 chips for model-training purposes. Shares of Nvidia rose around 2% in after-hours trading on Monday. Spokespeople for Nvidia and Commerce didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Semafor earlier reported on the White House decision, which temporarily boosted Nvidia shares during normal trading hours. Nvidia previously said the Trump administration wanted the U.S. government to keep 15% of Nvidia’s sales to China. The White House decision is a win for Trump advisers such as David Sacks, a venture capitalist who has argued that restricting sales to China would help local Chinese chipmakers and that those firms would then make gains in selling chips to other nations that would otherwise buy American technology.
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The Ellison family-controlled Paramount Skydance made an all-cash tender offer for Warner Bros. Discovery at $30 a share, or $108.4 billion, coming in over the top of the $27.75 a share cash and stock deal that Netflix and WBD’s board agreed to last week. Unlike the Netflix proposed purchase, which is only for WBD’s studio and HBO Max streaming service, though, Paramount is offering to buy the whole company including the cable channels which now generate the bulk of WBD’s profits but are declining as viewers shift away from cable TV. In the Netflix deal, WBD shareholders will also get shares in a new company holding the cable channels, closing the gap between the two offers. WBD stock quickly jumped 4.4% to $27.23, just below the Netflix price. Paramount said it had lined up $54 billion in debt financing and $41
billion in equity financing from Larry Ellison and a fund affiliated with RedBird Capital Management, several Middle Eastern funds and an investment fund controlled by Jared Kushner. Ellison, the Oracle co-founder whose son David runs Paramount, is worth at least $255 billion based on the value of his Oracle stake alone. But the Paramount offer’s big advantage is that the Ellisons are close to the Trump administration and will likely have an easier time getting approval for the purchase. Warner said in a statement its board would review the Paramount offer and respond within 10 days.
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Google expects to launch its first AI glasses, including an audio-focused model and one with a built-in display screen, in 2026, the company said in a blog post on Monday. Google is collaborating with Samsung and the glasses companies Warby Parker and Gentle Monster on the hardware. Google will be entering a market currently dominated by Meta Platforms, whose Ray-Ban glasses with a camera and microphone have been a surprise hit (although not necessarily for the AI features). Meta has started selling Ray-Ban glasses with a display screen in some stores in September, with a wider rollout planned for next year. Snap, a much smaller rival, has explored raising outside capital for its own AR glasses, which incorporate some Google AI technology.
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International Business Machines agreed to acquire data streaming firm Confluent for around $11 billion in cash. Confluent provides technology that helps companies manage real-time data streams used in AI models, making it a logical fit for IBM as it looks to boost its software, cloud and AI offering. The AI boom has boosted companies’ need to get access to real-time data. IBM is paying $31 a share in cash, which represents a roughly 33% premium of Confluent’s share price as of Friday. Confluent shares surged more than 25% in early trading Monday, while IBM’s stock fell slightly. The deal also marks one of IBM’s biggest acquisitions in recent years after it strikes the largest software deal in history buying Red Hat for $$34.5 billion. Last year, it agreed to buy cloud management tool provider HashiCorp for $6.4
billion. Centerview Partners advised IBM and Morgan Stanley advised Confluent.
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Skild AI, which develops AI foundation models to power robots to perform a variety of tasks, is in talks to raise over $1 billion at a valuation around $14 billion from SoftBank and Nvidia, Reuters reported on Monday. That valuation would be triple the two-year-old startup’s valuation from earlier this year, when it raised $500 million at a $4.2 billion valuation in a funding round backed by SoftBank, which has been doubling down on robotics investments. Over the summer, Skild released videos of its model, the Skild Brain, powering a
variety of robots, including robotic arms, robot dogs, and two-legged humanoids. The humanoids walked across stacks of pallets, up and down stairs, and through the woods. In September, Skild showed off a robot dog adapting to changes, including continuing to walk after having its legs cut off with a chainsaw.
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