Finance

Qatar Investment Authority’s $1-billion fund of funds has accepted its first group of venture capital fund managers.
Raj Ganguly, co-CEO of B Capital, hailed the Gulf state’s approach to artificial intelligence, and its support for the sector, as of particular interest.
It comes as Qatar looks to diversify away from its dominant oil and gas industry.  

The skyline of Doha, Qatar.
Tim De Waele | Corbis | Getty Images

The Qatar Investment Authority is leveraging its over-$500 billion in assets to attract venture capital firms to the hydrocarbon-rich state.
The sovereign wealth fund’s $1-billion fund of funds program — which invests in both international and regional VC funds — is designed to bolster investments in areas such as technology and health care, as Qatar looks to diversify away from its dominant oil and gas industry.  

Now, it’s accepted its first group of venture capital fund managers.
B Capital, a tech-focused firm led by Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, is among the group of VCs set to launch in Doha, opening its first Middle East office in the Qatari capital. It joins Rasmal Ventures, Utopia Capital Management and Builders VC, which have also joined the program.
Raj Ganguly, co-CEO of B Capital, hailed the Gulf state’s approach to artificial intelligence, and its support for the sector, as of particular interest.
“With all the sandboxes that have been created here in the GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council) to trial new types of AI, we think it’s an incredibly exciting time,” Ganguly told CNBC at Web Summit Qatar in Doha on Monday. “We believe innovation can come from anywhere. We want to back founders from the GCC who have a global mindset.”
B Capital, which focuses on enterprise, fintech, health care and climate investments, has over $7 billion in assets under management and says it targets seed to late-stage growth technology investments.

Mohsin Pirzada, head of funds at QIA – a huge sovereign wealth fund with stakes in prize assets ranging from London’s Harrods to Heathrow Airport — told CNBC that the program has a dual investment mandate.
“Firstly, we seek strong commercial returns and secondly, we seek for positive impact across the VC ecosystem in Qatar,” he said.
He added that the fund of funds was looking for VCs looking to deepen their roots in the country. It aims to “have a beneficial impact on the local economy, to boost deal flow in the market and to support the development of a thriving ecosystem underpinned by a strong private sector,” he added.

A test for Doha

The move comes as Doha faces a particular challenge in attracting financial services firms. In addition to boasting a young, digital-savvy population, many countries in the Middle East also offer incentives to lure storied financial services firms.
Riyadh, for example, has launched a program requiring any company that seeks government contracts to move its regional headquarters to Saudi Arabia, offering corporate tax incentives. The Kingdom has seen several Wall Street firms move to the Saudi capital as a result, including Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Lazard and BlackRock.
The UAE is also targeting global firms, with billionaire Ray Dalio, hedge fund Brevan Howard, asset manager PGIM and private equity giant General Atlantic all setting up offices in capital Abu Dhabi.
“The key word here is ‘compliment’ — this is a relatively small region, so when one country wins, we all win. If we are all attracting businesses, innovators and helping companies to scale, we will all benefit,” the QIA’s Pirzada told CNBC. More

Market volatility appears to be boosting demand for two types of exchange-traded funds: leveraged and inverse.
And, Direxion CEO and ETF money manager Douglas Yones thinks market conditions will keep fueling demand for them.

“We have a lot of securities in the market that are … up a lot over the last five or 10 years. Market seemingly has been going sideways. We saw Friday’s correction,” he told CNBC’s “ETF Edge” this week. “There are people out there that are saying: ‘Hey, maybe I don’t want to be fully invested,’ but also don’t want to take the capital gain on selling a position. What can I do? I can take a long position in a short ETF and inverse ETF. I can basically neutralize my exposure.”
Leveraged and inverse ETFs give investors the opportunity to make monster bets on the stock market’s direction. Investors can go long or short.

Arrows pointing outwards

Yones’ firm is heavily involved in the space. Yones runs the Direxion Daily Semiconductor Bull 3X Shares (SOXL), which is one of the largest leveraged/inverse ETFs. According to FactSet, Broadcom, Nvidia and Qualcomm are among the ETF’s top holdings.
As of Wednesday’s market close, Yones’ ETF is up almost 84% over the past two years, but off 36% over the past year. It’s also down more than 16% over the past week.
“There are market-moving headlines happening two to three times a day. And so, the volatility is growing up, not down,” said Yones. “We think that holds for the whole year.”

VettaFi’s Todd Rosenbluth also sees growing demand for single-stock leveraged ETFs.
“Single-stock leveraged ETFs probably sound hard to wrap your head around. But it’s one stock you get the risk-on or in case of inverse risk-off exposure to that and the liquidity benefits of the ETF wrapper,” the firm’s head of research said.

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Revenue of Nvidia’s automotive and robotics segment more than doubled year on year to a record $570 million in the fourth quarter 2025 fiscal year.
Tech for driver-assist could become Nvidia’s next “billion-dollar” business, despite being a small part of its overall revenue currently.
The company’s automotive segment will likely continue to grow, with real-world applications of autonomous driving to sustain long-term growth of the sector.

Signage at the Nvidia Corp. offices in Taipei, Taiwan, on Tuesday, Jan. 28, 2025.  Photographer: An Rong Xu/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images

U.S. chipmaker Nvidia’s auto segment revenue more than doubled in the latest quarter to a record high on strong demand for driver-assist software.
While the company’s biggest revenue stream by far is chip systems that power artificial intelligence, Nvidia has predicted its products that power driver-assist technology could become its next “billion-dollar” business.

Revenue of Nvidia’s automotive and robotics segment rose 103% year on year to $570 million in the fourth quarter of the 2025 fiscal year. That brought the segment’s revenue for the fiscal year to $1.69 billion, above $1 billion for a second-straight year.
The latest increase in revenue was due to to sales of Nvidia’s “self-driving platforms,” according to the company’s CFO.
“This growth highlights Nvidia’s increasing exposure to powering ADAS, autonomous vehicles, and robotics through its DRIVE platform and related technologies,” Brady Wang, semiconductor analyst at Counterpoint Research, said in an email.
CEO Jensen Huang said in Nvidia’s earnings call the company expects that “every single one” of the 1 billion cars on the roads today “will be robotic cars” that collect data which Nvidia-supported AI systems can help refine, according to a FactSet transcript.

Automotive and robotics is “getting ready to take off,” likely due to investments in autonomous vehicles such as Waymo and Tesla, Gene Munster, managing partner at Deepwater Asset Management, said in an email. Munster also estimated that around 15 companies are building humanoid robots, potentially increasing demand for Nvidia chips.

“The performance of that segment is an important story below the fold that’s not getting much attention because it’s small,” he added, “but they can be a much bigger part of revenue going forward.”
Autos and robotics unit currently accounts for 1.45% of Nvidia’s total revenue.
Counterpoint’s Wang expects this growth to continue with Nvidia’s “increasing adoption of L2+ and more advanced systems”.
Several Chinese electric car companies, including BYD, Nio and Zeekr, use Nvidia’s driver-assist chip systems.
“In addition to autonomous driving, I also anticipate that robotics and physical AI will experience a hype,” Wang added, “followed by real-world applications in the coming years, sustaining the long-term growth of this sector.” More

Chip giant Nvidia has flagged heightened competition from Huawei, despite U.S. restrictions on the Chinese telecommunications company.
In an annual filing Wednesday, Nvidia listed Huawei among its current competitors.
Since 2019, the U.S. has restricted Huawei’s ability to access technology from American suppliers, from advanced 5G chips to Google’s Android operating system.

Dado Ruvic | Reuters

BEIJING — Chip giant Nvidia has flagged heightened competition from Huawei, despite U.S. restrictions on the Chinese telecommunications company.
In an annual filing Wednesday, Nvidia listed Huawei among its current competitors, including it in the list for a second straight year. The company, blacklisted by the U.S. for national security reasons, did not feature among Nvidia’s competitors for at least three prior years.

Nvidia listed Huawei among its competitors in four of five categories, including chips, cloud services, computing processing and networking products.
“There’s a fair amount of competition in China,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told CNBC’s Jon Fortt Wednesday.
“Huawei, other companies, are … quite vigorous and very, very competitive,” Huang said.
Since 2019, the U.S. has restricted Huawei’s ability to access technology from American suppliers, from advanced 5G chips to Google’s Android operating system.

Huawei’s revenue exceeded 860 billion yuan ($118.27 billion) in 2024, state media reported, a 22% jump in revenue from 2023, and the fastest growth since a 32% increase in 2016, according to CNBC calculations of publicly released figures. Huawei typically publishes its annual reports in March.

The company’s revenue barely grew in 2020, and plunged by nearly 29% in 2021. Its consumer segment was hit hard, and even as revenue rose 17% year on year to 251.5 billion yuan in 2023, it was just over half of what the unit generated at its peak in 2020.
The telecommunications company started to make a comeback in the smartphone market in 2023 with the release of its Mate 60 Pro in China. Reviews indicated the device offers download speeds associated with 5G — thanks to an advanced semiconductor chip.
Just over a year later, Huawei launched the Mate 70 smartphone series that uses the company’s first fully self-developed operating system, HarmonyOS NEXT. More

Some states like Arizona, Colorado, Georgia and Rhode Island have delayed phases of their Home energy Rebate programs for consumers who make their homes more energy efficient.
They cited a White House freeze on federal funding that conflicts with President Donald Trump’s agenda.
The rebate programs, created by the Inflation Reduction Act, aim to defray consumer costs for retrofits and utility bills while reducing planet-warming carbon emissions.

Westend61 | Westend61 | Getty Images

Some states have stopped disbursing funds to consumers via Biden-era rebate programs tied to home energy efficiency, due to a Trump administration freeze on federal funding enacted in January.
The Inflation Reduction Act, passed in 2022, had earmarked $8.8 billion of federal funds for consumers through two home energy rebate programs, to be administered by states, territories and the District of Columbia.

Arizona, Colorado, Georgia and Rhode Island — which are in various phases of rollout — have paused or delayed their fledgling programs, citing Trump administration policy.

The White House on Jan. 27 put a freeze on the disbursement of federal funds that conflict with President Trump’s agenda — including initiatives related to green energy and climate change — as a reason for halting the disbursement of rebate funds to consumers.
That fate of that freeze is still up in the air. A federal judge issued an order Tuesday that continued to block the policy, for example. However, it appears agencies had been withholding funding in some cases in defiance of earlier court rulings, according to ProPublica reporting.
In any event, the freeze — or the threat of it — appears to be impacting state rebate programs.
“Coloradans who would receive the Home Energy Rebate savings are still locked out by the Trump administration in the dead of winter,” Ari Rosenblum, a spokesperson for the Colorado Energy Office, said in an e-mailed statement.

The U.S. Department of Energy and the White House didn’t return a request for comment from CNBC on the funding freeze.

In some states, rebates are ‘currently unavailable’

Consumers are eligible for up to $8,000 of Home Efficiency Rebates and up to $14,000 of Home Electrification and Appliance Rebates, per federal law.
The rebates defray the cost of retrofitting homes and upgrading appliances to be more energy efficient. Such tweaks aim to cut consumers’ utility bills while also reducing planet-warming carbon emissions.
California, the District of Columbia, Maine, Michigan, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina and Wisconsin had also launched phases of their rebate programs in recent months, according to data on an archived federal website.
All states and territories (except for South Dakota) had applied for the federal rebate funding and the U.S. Department of Energy had approved funding for each of them.
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The Arizona Governor’s Office of Resiliency said its Home Energy Rebates programs would be paused until federal funds are freed up.
“Due to the current federal Executive Orders, memorandums from the White House Office of Management and Budget, and communications from the U.S. Department of Energy, funding for all Efficiency Arizona programs is currently unavailable,” it said in an announcement Friday.
Rhode Island paused new applications as of Jan. 27 due to “current uncertainty” with Inflation Reduction Act funding and executive orders, according to its Office of Energy Resources.

The Georgia Environmental Finance Authority launched a pilot program for the rebates in fall 2024. That program is ongoing, a spokesperson confirmed Monday.
However, the timeline for a full program launch initially planned for 2025 “is delayed until we receive more information from the U.S. Department of Energy,” the Georgia spokesperson explained in an e-mail.
However, not all states have pressed the pause button: It appears Maine is still moving forward, for example.
“The program remains open to those who are eligible,” Afton Vigue, a spokesperson for the Maine Governor’s Energy Office, said in an e-mail.
The status of rebates in the eight other states and districts to have launched their programs is unclear. Their respective energy departments or governor’s offices didn’t return requests for comment.

‘Signs of an interest’

While the Trump administration on Jan. 29 rescinded its memo ordering a freeze on federal grants and loans — two days after its initial release — the White House said the freeze nonetheless remained in full force.
Democratic attorneys general in 22 states and the District of Columbia filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration, claiming the freeze is unlawful. The White House has claimed it is necessary to ensure spending aligns with Trump’s presidential agenda.
David Terry, president of the National Association of State Energy Officials, said he is optimistic the rebate funding will be released to states soon.
“For these two particular programs, I do not think [the freeze] will stymie the programs,” Terry said. “I see signs of an interest in moving them forward and working with the states to implement them.” More

THE BATTLE between the world’s two largest exchange-traded funds has reached a pivotal moment. On February 18th VOO, an ETF tracking the S&P 500 that is managed by Vanguard, a giant passive-investing firm, took the crown as the world’s largest. Days later SPY, an ETF managed by State Street Global Advisors, another giant, reclaimed it. Both funds boast assets of over $620bn. More