Reports that OpenAI is set to confidentially file for an IPO as soon as Friday changed prediction market traders’ outlook on which private AI giant will debut on the public markets first.  

Traders on Kalshi now see OpenAI as the favorite to go public before Anthropic, giving it an 83% chance of getting the big payday first. 

“Getting to public markets first is very important, given this arms race going on,” said Dan Ives, Wedbush Securities’ global head of technology research. “It sets a valuation, you’re the first one to meet with investors on the road, and there’s an advantage.”

Before the initial report on the IPO timeline by the Wall Street Journal which CNBC later confirmed, traders gave OpenAI just over a 32% chance of beating its chief private rival to the public markets.

Chances Anthropic would beat OpenAI to an IPO collapsed on Polymarket to 20% from 69%. 

While the birth of OpenAI’s ChatGPT launched the AI bull market in November 2022, the company has lost some of its shine with investors. 

Worries about the company’s spending, reports on missed revenue and growth targets and leadership turnover weighed on investors’ outlooks. There have even been internal disagreements on the timeline to go public, according to the Journal, with CEO Sam Altman pushing for a faster debut than CFO Sarah Friar. 

At the same time, Anthropic’s enterprise business has led it to experience massive growth in recent months, and reportedly is in talks with investors for a new funding round that would value the company at $900 billion, greater than that of OpenAI’s latest valuation.

Investors became enchanted with Anthropic’s Claude models, which have been constantly updated with new versions. Those updates were followed so closely by investors that they consistently moved the stock market in the beginning of the year, as worries about how new tools from Claude models would disrupt existing businesses mounted.

It was in late March when reports about an extremely powerful new model, Claude Mythos, circulated that Anthropic took a consistent lead over OpenAI on Kalshi of who would have a public debut first. Bloomberg reported around the same time that the company was looking to IPO as soon as October. 

But with an IPO on the way — sooner than prediction market traders thought — and a court win against Elon Musk this week, it could be the moment for a turnaround, according to Ives.

“It started with the lawsuit,” he said. “And now filing the IPO, that’s a great one-two punch to start to put water on the negative fire that’s been on them.”

Disclosure: CNBC and Kalshi have a commercial relationship that includes a CNBC minority investment.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella took the stand to testify in the Musk v. Altman trial in federal court in Oakland, California, on Monday. 

Nadella, wearing a navy suit with a blue tie, began his testimony by answering questions about his role at Microsoft and the early days of the company’s strategic partnership with OpenAI.

In 2024, Elon Musk sued OpenAI, its CEO, Sam Altman, and its president, Greg Brockman, alleging that they went back on their vow to protect the artificial intelligence company’s nonprofit structure and follow its charitable mission. Microsoft is named as a defendant in the lawsuit, as Musk accuses the company of aiding and abetting OpenAI’s purported breach of charitable trust. 

Microsoft has been one of OpenAI’s major backers since 2019, years before the company rocketed into the mainstream with the launch of its ChatGPT chatbot in late 2022. Microsoft’s more than $13 billion worth of investments in OpenAI, including a $1 billion investment in 2019, a $2 billion investment in 2021 and $10 billion in 2023, have come up repeatedly over the course of the trial. 

Musk, who testified late last month, said Microsoft’s $10 billion investment was the key tipping point that made him believe OpenAI was violating its nonprofit mission. He testified that the scale of the investment bothered him, and it prompted him to open a legal investigation into OpenAI. 

“I was concerned they were really trying to steal the charity,” Musk said from the stand.

Musk co-founded OpenAI alongside Altman, Brockman and a handful of other executives and researchers in 2015. After a number of disagreements about OpenAI’s direction, including a failed effort to join it with his automaker Tesla, Musk left the OpenAI board in 2018. He went on to launch a competing AI startup, xAI, which he merged with SpaceX earlier this year. 

OpenAI established a for-profit subsidiary in the months following Musk’s departure, which allowed the company to raise outside funding more easily. Investors, including Microsoft, have since poured billions of dollars into OpenAI’s for-profit arm, and the company’s valuation has swelled to more than $850 billion. 

In October, OpenAI completed a recapitalization that cemented its structure as a nonprofit with an equity stake in its for-profit business. As part of that announcement, Microsoft disclosed that it held a roughly 27% stake in OpenAI’s for-profit unit that was valued at around $135 billion.

The relationship between OpenAI and Microsoft has shown signs of strain in recent months, even as both companies continue to tout it as strategic and core to their businesses. Late last month, the same day that jury selection kicked off in Musk v. Altman, the companies announced a revamped partnership agreement that allows OpenAI to cap revenue share payments and serve customers across any cloud provider.

OpenAI said in a release that the agreement aimed to “simplify our partnership and the way we work together.”

Musk testified that he is not entirely against OpenAI having a for-profit unit, but he said it became “the tail wagging the dog.” He repeatedly accused Altman and Brockman of enriching themselves from a charity while also reaping the positive associations that come from running a nonprofit.

“Microsoft has their own motivations, and that would be different from the motivations of the charity,” Musk said from the stand. “All due respect to Microsoft, do you really want Microsoft controlling digital superintelligence?”

During a videotaped deposition shown in court last week, former OpenAI director Tasha McCauley recalled a discussion with Nadella and her fellow board members after the 2023 decision to dismiss Altman as OpenAI’s CEO.

“To the best of my recollection, Satya wanted to restore things to as they had been,” McCauley said. The board members didn’t think that was the right move, she said.

— CNBC’s Jordan Novet contributed to this report.

WATCH: The Musk vs. OpenAI trial is underway — here’s where things stand

Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s CEO of applications, announced several leadership changes on Friday and revealed she is taking a significant medical leave because of a worsening neuroimmune condition.

OpenAI hired Simo in May, and she told staffers in a memo on Friday that her condition relapsed a few weeks before she started in the role. She said the past month has been “particularly rough health-wise,” and she decided she needs to take several weeks off to recover.

“For my entire time here, I’ve postponed medical tests and new therapies to stay completely focused on the job and not miss a single day of work,” Simo wrote in the memo, which was viewed by CNBC. “I took time off for the first time two weeks before the break for some medical tests, and it’s now clear that I’ve pushed a little too far and I really need to try new interventions to stabilize my health.”

OpenAI President Greg Brockman will oversee product in Simo’s absence, she said. Simo also announced that Brad Lightcap, OpenAI’s chief operating officer, will transition to a new role focused on “special projects.” He will report directly to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

“We have a strong leadership team focused on our biggest priorities: advancing frontier research, growing our global user base of nearly 1 billion users, and powering enterprise use cases,” an OpenAI spokesperson said in a statement. “We’re well-positioned to keep executing with continuity and momentum.”

WATCH: AI and Rare Disease with OpenAI CEO of Applications Fidji Simo

Shares of Marvell Technology surged 8% after Nvidia announced plans to invest $2 billion in the semiconductor company as businesses race to meet ballooning artificial intelligence demand.

“Marvell is a marvelous investment,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” on Tuesday. “Been dying to say that.”

The deal ties Marvell into Nvidia’s AI ecosystem, making it easier for customers to build on the infrastructure. Both companies will also join forces on silicon photonics technology and AI-focused telecommunications infrastructure.

Nvidia has made a string of $2 billion bets on technology companies in recent months.

That includes investments in Synopsys, CoreWeave, Coherent and Lumentum. Most recently, Nvidia invested $2 billion in Nebius Group. The AI cloud company on Tuesday revealed plans to build one of Europe’s largest datacenters.

Huang said each of the deals is “an expansion of our ecosystem.”

With Marvell, Huang said the partnership broadens access to semi-custom application-specific integrated circuits, or ASICs, often specialized for specific tasks. Hyperscalers are increasingly creating these chips to run AI workloads.

“We’re also smart investors,” Haung said. “We’ve expanded the [total addressable market] for both of us as a result of this partnership, and we want to be an investor in that.”

The leading chipmaker has been a major beneficiary of the AI craze that’s swept up Wall Street in recent years, due to its graphics processing units, or GPUs, which underpin large language models.

Marvell is another major winner in the race. Shares popped this month after the company issued robust guidance and called for accelerating revenue growth into 2027 as AI demand surges.

CEO Matt Murphy told CNBC that demand remains strong despite geopolitical tensions in the Middle East and that customers intend to continue deploying its tools.

“This just helps turbo-charge our growth and our opportunity, and gives us an infusion of capital that actually allows us to go do that,” he said. “We were doing great on our own, but this is a way for Marvell to actually just really take a leap forward.”

JD.com launched its long-anticipated European online shopping platform on Monday, as the Chinese e-commerce giant looks to challenge Amazon as well as domestic rivals that have already expanded internationally.

Joybuy, JD.com’s international online shopping brand, launches in six new markets, including the U.K. and Germany, with the company banking on fast deliveries and high-quality products to get an edge on rivals.

While peers like AliExpress and Temu operate an asset-light model and ship goods directly from China, JD.com has its own local warehouses and logistics networks that enable it to minimize delivery times.

The approach has been successful in China, where JD has developed an extensive logistics network for super-fast deliveries and established itself as a destination for domestic consumers to buy global brands such as Apple.

The Chinese tech giant said customers in Europe can get same-day delivery on orders placed before 11 a.m. For orders over £29 in the U.K., there’s no extra cost.

Joybuy will also feature brand stores from companies including L’Oréal Paris and De’Longhi. These are effectively a branded space in the Joybuy app where companies can showcase their official goods.

JD.com is stepping into a highly-competitive European e-commerce market, which features heavyweights like Amazon, as well as smaller local players and rival services from Alibaba‘s AliExpress and Temu-owner PDD.

Both AliExpress and Temu have sought to bring competitively-priced products to the European market, but have relied on a marketplace model of third-party merchants who sell through their platforms.

While Temu and AliExpress have been operating internationally for the past few years, JD is hoping to catch up.

Joybuy emphasizes its ownership of much of the inventory that it sells.

“We’re at first party retailer, we’re completely different to every other retailer based on our customer proposition,” Matthew Nobbs, U.K. managing director of Joybuy, told CNBC in an interview.

“So we don’t do any de minimus business. We’re a retailer, first, and foremost for brands, and that’s our core.”

“De minimis” refers to a rule in various countries that gives customs duties exemptions for low-value goods.

Apple on Monday announced that it will bring a new integrated video podcast experience to Apple Podcasts this spring.

The move comes as video viewership continues to reshape podcasting. About 37% of people over age 12 watch video podcasts monthly, according to Edison Research.

The update brings Apple Podcasts more in-line with its competitors Spotify, YouTube and now Netflix, which have increasingly leaned into video podcasting.

“Twenty years ago, Apple helped take podcasting mainstream by adding podcasts to iTunes, and more than a decade ago, we introduced the dedicated Apple Podcasts app,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Services, in a statement. “By bringing a category-leading video experience to Apple Podcasts, we’re putting creators in full control of their content and how they build their businesses, while making it easier than ever for audiences to listen to or watch podcasts.”

Within the Apple Podcasts app, users will be able to switch seamlessly between watching and listening to shows from the same feed. They can also use picture-in-picture mode and download video episodes for offline viewing.

While Apple Podcasts has supported video through RSS since 2005, those feeds were kept separate from audio versions of the same show. The new update introduces support for HLS, or HTTP Live Streaming, a streaming protocol developed by Apple that enables adaptive video playback and greater controls within the app.

The new HLS format also introduces dynamic video ad insertion. Creators who distribute through participating hosting providers and ad networks will be able to insert video ads, including host-read spots, into episodes.

Apple said it will not charge creators or hosting providers to distribute content. However, it will charge participating ad networks an impression-based fee for delivering dynamic video ads through HLS.

These launch podcast hosting partners include Acast, Amazon-owned ART19, Triton’s Omny Studio and SiriusXM who will all be supporting HLS video.

The announcement comes as competitors continue investing in podcast video. YouTube said last year it has more than 1 billion monthly active viewers of podcast content on its platform. Spotify has also expanded its video podcast offerings and said it paid more than $100 million to podcasters in the first quarter of last year.

Netflix has also entered the video podcast space. The streaming platform inked a deal with Spotify last year to bring video podcasts to Netflix and has begun investing in original video podcast programming, including “The Pete Davidson Show,” which launched in January.

Apple does not break out revenue specifically for Apple Podcasts, but its Services segment, which includes digital content and subscription businesses, generated $30 billion in revenue in its most recent quarter.

In January, the company acquired Israeli artificial intelligence startup Q.ai for an undisclosed amount. The company has not released details of the acquisition, though Q.ai’s website indicated it was working on audio-focused AI tools.

BEIJING — China’s Luckin Coffee is taking direct aim at Starbucks‘ high-end roastery chain with a new flagship store in the country’s south that sells premium drinks.

It’s Luckin’s first major departure from its original strategy of operating budget-priced coffee kiosks – a move that helped the company overtake Starbucks in terms of the number of storefronts in China.

Now, with the U.S. company selling off most of its struggling China business to a local investment firm, Luckin is proving it’s more than made a comeback from fraud allegations in 2020 that forced it to delist from the Nasdaq.

The Chinese company on Sunday officially opened its two-floor Luckin Coffee Origin Flagship in Shenzhen on the border with Hong Kong.

In contrast to Luckin’s typical offerings priced at roughly $1 or $2 for an Americano or latte, the flagship store has nudged prices slightly higher for a range of pour-over and cold brew coffee drinks. Customers can choose beans from Brazil, Ethiopia or China’s Yunnan province, as Luckin taps into the geographical sourcing “origin” theme popular with Starbucks and other coffee companies.

The new store also sells several specialty drinks such as a “tiramisu latte” with a pastry on top, according to posts on Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu. Users have started posting about 1 to 3 hour waits for the drinks since the store’s soft launch on Jan. 20.

The 420-square-meter (4,521 square feet) store signals how intense the competition in China has become for Starbucks. Back in 2017, the U.S.-based coffee giant chose Shanghai for its second-ever Reserve Roastery “megastore,” after launching the premium store concept in Seattle three years earlier.

But as coffee has taken off in China, traditionally a tea-drinking market, Starbucks has run into a slew of competitors from boutique cafes to chains such as Cotti Coffee and Manner — which often sell drinks at half the price as Starbucks.

Luckin reported revenue of $1.55 billion for the three months ended Sept. 30, 2025, a nearly 48% increase from a year earlier.

That’s just for the company’s self-operated stores, which account for well over half of Luckin’s China locations and most of its handful of overseas stores. The new Shenzhen location is billed as Luckin’s 30,000th store. The company reported a total of 29,214 stores worldwide as at Sept. 30.

In contrast, Starbucks has just over 8,000 stores in China and around 16,900 in the U.S., its biggest market.

The Seattle-based coffee giant reported a 6% year-on-year increase in China net revenue to $831.6 million for the three months ended Sept. 28. Comparable same-store sales, a standard industry metric, was just 2%, but improved to 7% for the quarter ended Dec. 28.

Starbucks did not share China net revenue for the latest quarter. The company expects to close a deal in the spring to sell 60% of its China business to Boyu Capital, while retaining a 40% stake. When the deal was announced in November, Starbucks said it values its China business at $13 billion, including future licensing fees.

Luckin, whose shares still trade over-the-counter in the U.S., had a market value of around $10.46 billion as of Thursday.