Connected newsletter: Nvidia reassures investors; Speed Fibre Group sold
Connected at the Business Post is your source for the news that matters in technology and innovation, all told from an Irish perspective
Whatever kind of week you have had, it probably hasn’t been as good as Jensen Huang’s. His personal fortune grew by as much as $4.2 billion to $46.1 billion over the last few days as Nvidia, the company he leads, published its latest earnings.
Amid fears the chipmaker might not be able to cope with demand for its products, which are used to power AI tools such as ChatGPT, Nvidia saw a massive bounce in the value of its shares after posting impressive results and a bullish forecast for the full-year.
Talking of chipmakers, Arm, the British semiconductor company currently owned by SoftBank, took a step closer to its planned initial public offering (IPO) later this year as investors bet the once-obscure designer of phone chips can flourish in the era of artificial intelligence computing.
Microsoft’s $69 billion Activision Blizzard acquisition got a new chance at winning approval from UK regulators this week after the tech giant submitted a substantially different deal to the country’s antitrust watchdog.
A Morgan Stanley unit was fined £5.4 million (€6.34 million) for failure to retain messages sent by traders over WhatsApp in the first-ever penalty of its type issued under the UK energy regulator’s powers. The fine follows on from penalties against Wall Street firms in the US.
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In local news, Development Capital invested €6 million in Dublin-based IP Telecom, bringing the Irish investment fund’s total investments in native SME’s to €100 million since 2013.
Nostra Technologies revealed it had brought in Phoenix Equity Partners as an investor. The news comes nearly six months after the Business Post revealed the company was looking for external funding.
In addition, InfraBridge and the Irish Infrastructure Fund (IIF) announced the sale of Speed Fibre Group to Cordiant Digital Infrastructure Limited for a total enterprise value of €190.5 million.
Connected magazine returns this weekend. As usual, we’ve plenty of great features to explore, including Elaine Burke reporting on how technology is changing policing.
Elsewhere in Connected, Jason Walsh looks at AI and cybersecurity, and edge computing while I’m focused on the benefits of start-up accelerators. Marie Boran considers the future for X, formerly Twitter, while Jonathan Keane explores Apple’s move into the metaverse, and takes a look at cloud gaming. Alex Meehan meanwhile reveals how 3D printing has hit the mainstream.
Connected is in print with the Business Post and is also available online.
All the best
Charlie
Start-ups hunker down in Europe as funding dries up (Wall Street Journal)
Venture-capital investments fall 61%, leading companies to cut jobs, expansion plans
Elon Musk’s shadow rule (The New Yorker)
How the US government came to rely on the tech billionaire—and is now struggling to rein him in
