Superstar athlete LeBron James teased an upcoming partnership with prediction market platform Polymarket in a social media post on Saturday.

James posted a 14-second video on social media platform X that appeared to be an advertisement for Polymarket. “Welcome to Polymarket HQ. Coming soon. In partnership with @Polymarket,” James wrote.

In the video, the basketball legend appears in the elevator of Polymarket’s headquarters and heads to the company’s sports floor.

The post teases a larger campaign between James and Polymarket focused on football, according to a person familiar with the matter, who spoke to CNBC on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly. Further details are expected in the week ahead, the person added.

The terms of James’ deal with Polymarket have not been disclosed. NBA rules restrict players’ financial interests in companies that offer league-related wagering or similar products, including limits on ownership stakes.

Representatives for James and Polymarket declined to comment beyond James’ Saturday post.

James, who is the NBA’s all-time scorer, announced in July he would join the Philadelphia 76ers for his record-extending 24th season — and final chapter of his career. While James didn’t disclose terms of the deal, ESPN previously reported he signed a two-year, $8 million contract with a player option — a significant pay cut from the more than $50 million he made with the Los Angeles Lakers last season.

The 2026-2027 NBA season is set to begin in mid-October.

The four-time NBA champion will join a growing list of star athletes and sports leagues teaming up with prediction market platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi. Prediction markets allow users to trade contracts tied to whether future events occur, including sports outcomes.

Earlier this year, Miami Heat star player Giannis Antetokounmpo became a shareholder in Kalshi and agreed to participate in marketing and live events. Kalshi has said his stake is passive, and its rules prohibit him from trading on NBA-related markets. Athletes, teams and leagues have also inked deals with Kalshi.

Meanwhile, Polymarket has inked partnerships with top leagues including Major League Soccer, Major League Baseball and the National Hockey League, as well as pro teams like MLB’s New York Yankees and NHL’s New York Rangers.

Polymarket is restructuring its marketing operation under new leadership ahead of a busy fall sports calendar, CNBC previously reported.

The company recently hired Travis VanderZanden — formerly of Uber Technologies and Lyft, and the founder of E-Scooter startup Bird — as its chief growth officer. He is expected to oversee Polymarket’s marketing, CNBC reported.

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

WATCH: Josh Harris on signing LeBron…

Cerebras shares gained about 4% on Thursday after the company forged an agreement with Advanced Micro Devices that involves the two chipmakers to work together on artificial intelligence systems.

Cerebras CEO Andrew Feldman said at AMD’s AI conference in San Francisco that his company’s chips will be used in AMD’s Helios AI systems installed in Cerebras data centers starting later this year. Server buyers will be able to configure AMD systems with the company’s “wafer-scale” chips as well.

At the event, AMD is detailing new chips and its Helios integrated system.

The partnership highlights how important “ultra-low latency” has become for AI firms. Chips like those made by Cerebras are configured to provide the first AI answers as quickly as possible, while making tradeoffs in terms of flexibility and total power. The companies claimed that their system would provide five times higher tokens per second per watt than competitors.

AMD rival Nvidia bought assets from Groq in December for $20 billion to integrate that company’s low-latency technology into its systems.

“When something’s a necessity, people want to use it, and they want to use it quickly,” Feldman said.

Cerebras went public in May and has been a particularly volatile stock in its early days. After going public at $185, the stock shot up as high as $386.34 in its debut before falling below $161 in late June. With Thursday’s pop, the shares are trading at $219.80.

In January, Cerebras announced a deal with OpenAI to deliver 750 megawatts of computing power through 2028, a deal worth over $10 billion.

WATCH: Open AI’s chip will compete will compete with other GPUs

Shares of Chinese tech giants Alibaba and Baidu rose Thursday on their partnership with Apple for deploying their AI tools.

Hong-Kong listed shares of Alibaba rose 5% after the company confirmed that its Qwen AI model would be integrated into Apple services in China.

U.S.-listed shares of Alibaba had closed slightly higher overnight after an Alibaba spokesperson told CNBC that “Qwen will be integrated into Apple Intelligence experiences within iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and vision OS for users in China.”

Baidu‘s Hong Kong-listed shares gained 4% as the company confirmed that it was working with Apple on Apple Intelligence features for iPhones in China.

This comes amid reports in late June that its artificial intelligence chip unit Kunlunxin is targeting an initial public offering in the city, which could value its affiliate at $50 billion.

The Cyberspace Administration of China in a notice on Wednesday included Apple Intelligence, along with six other smartphone-based AI services including Huawei Technologies, in a list of approved service providers.

The Apple-Qwen combination will allow users to access the model’s capabilities, “like text and image understanding and generation, without needing to jump between tools,” the Alibaba spokesperson added.

Apple did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comments.

The technological rivalry between China and the U.S. has intensified, as they race for AI dominance. The U.S. has sought to curb China’s ability to access high-end chips, while Beijing has tried to wall off U.S. investments into Chinese tech companies.

“AI leadership is becoming central to economic competitiveness, global standard-setting, and the maintenance of democratic governance,” according to a report by  research organization RAND.

— CNBC’s Evelyn Cheng, Joseph Wilkins and Kai Nicol-Schwarz contributed to this report.

Automaker General Motors on Tuesday announced a new partnership with defense company Lockheed Martin to scale manufacturing and expand production capabilities.

The deal was facilitated by the U.S. Department of Defense, according to Bruce Brown, GM’s vice president of strategy at GM Defense, and will focus on munitions and more.

“What makes this moment especially important is that the country needs more than great technology. It also needs the capacity to build, scale and deliver reliably,” Brown said on a call with reporters. “This is where GM can help. Across our company, we bring deep experience in advanced engineering, digital development, supply chain discipline and manufacturing at scale.”

Lockheed Chief Operating Officer Frank St. John said it was too early to say what projects it would invest in with GM Defense.

Executives from both companies said on the call that the collaboration will allow for more growth at a time when the country is ramping up its production of defense parts.

“Together, we will explore opportunities across three important areas: improving production readiness and scalable manufacturing environments; strengthening supply chains and identifying ways to increase resilience; and applying advanced manufacturing and design approaches [that] can help improve efficiency and accelerate delivery,” St. John said.

Lockheed Martin is investing $9 billion through 2030 to modernize 20 of its facilities and supply bases, St. John added. GM said it will spend $7 billion on research and development in the U.S., according to Brown.

The executives said the partnership will be focused on “high-rate manufacturing” at scale and expanding production capacity. They added that the collaboration is still in early stages and that they need to further define what the potential for future contracts may be. They are working under a memorandum of understanding.

The automaker built tanks for the country during World War II. Its GM Defense unit is one of the company’s newer but fast-growing business segments, reestablished in 2017 with customers including the U.S. Army, Secret Service and NASA.

“America is stronger when two companies with deep manufacturing roots come together to help expand speed, scale and resilience in the defense industrial base. That is why Lockheed Martin and GM are announcing this collaboration,” Brown said on the call.

The partnership comes as President Donald Trump has been pushing for more American manufacturing to bring more production and reshoring into the country. The U.S. has also seen its defense stockpiles fall because of the wars in Ukraine and Iran.

The White House has held discussions with Ford and GM about better supporting the country’s defense industry.

— CNBC’s Michael Wayland contributed to this report.

OpenAI and Microsoft on Monday announced a revamped partnership agreement that will allow the artificial intelligence company to cap revenue share payments and serve customers across any cloud provider.

As part of the new agreement, the companies said revenue share payments from OpenAI to Microsoft will be “subject to a total cap,” but they will continue through 2030, “independent of OpenAI’s technology progress.” Microsoft no longer needs to determine its response if OpenAI finds that it has reached artificial general intelligence, or AGI, which is a term for an AI system that rivals or exceeds human intelligence.

The revenue share between the two companies has existed for years. OpenAI will pay Microsoft at the same percentage, which is 20%, as part of the new deal, according to a source familiar with agreement who asked not to be named because the details are confidential. That means, for example, Microsoft continues to get a cut of every ChatGPT subscription purchase.

To date, when users have paid for access to OpenAI models through Azure, Microsoft has made payments to OpenAI. However, Microsoft will no longer pay a revenue share to OpenAI, according to Monday’s blog post.

The two companies said that Microsoft remains OpenAI’s primary cloud provider, and that OpenAI products will ship first on Azure unless Microsoft decides otherwise. However, OpenAI can now serve “all of its products” to customers across any provider, including Amazon and Google.

Microsoft has been one of OpenAI’s longtime backers, investing more than $13 billion in the company since 2019. The companies have continued to tout their relationship as core and strategic, but it’s shown signs of strain in recent months as the partners move onto the other’s turf. In a memo earlier this month, Denise Dresser, OpenAI’s revenue chief, said the partnership has “limited our ability to meet enterprises where they are.”

“Today, we are announcing an amended agreement to simplify our partnership and the way we work together, grounded in flexibility, certainty, and a focus on delivering the benefits of AI broadly,” OpenAI said.

Microsoft will continue to have a license to OpenAI’s intellectual property on AI models through 2032, although the license will no longer be exclusive, the two companies said.

Microsoft shares fell slightly on Monday.

The revamped partnership comes after Microsoft and OpenAI announced a series of changes to their agreement in October, when OpenAI completed a recapitalization and committed to spending $250 billion on Microsoft Azure cloud services. As part of that announcement, Microsoft said its investment in OpenAI’s for-profit arm was valued at $135 billion, or roughly 27% of the company on an as-converted diluted basis.

But in the months since, OpenAI has been…

Qualcomm shares rose on Monday following reports that it’s partnering with OpenAI to create smartphone processing chips to advance the AI firm’s hardware ambitions.

The U.S. smartphone chipmaker is set to work alongside Taiwanese semiconductor firm MediaTek to develop the chip for OpenAI, with Chinese manufacturer Luxshare co-designing and building the device, Ming-Chi Kuo, an analyst at TF International Securities, said on X on Monday. Mass production of the device is expected in 2028, according to Kuo.

Qualcomm was up 7% just after the opening bell. The stock is down 13% so far this year.

Qualcomm, OpenAI, and MediaTek did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment confirming the partnership.

“Only by fully controlling both the operating system and hardware can OpenAI deliver a comprehensive AI agent service,” Kuo said in the post. “The smartphone is the only device that captures the user’s full real-time state, which is the most important input for real-time AI agent inference.”

He explained that smartphones will remain the “largest-scale device category” in the immediate future, and it makes sense for OpenAI to develop a device that is entirely run by AI as the firm has accumulated user data over the years.

“Smartphone hardware is already highly mature, so OpenAI can work with the supply chain to develop the device,” Kuo said. “On the business model side, OpenAI may bundle subscriptions with hardware and build a new AI agent ecosystem with developers.”

It likely comes as no surprise that OpenAI would partner with the firm to help realize its smartphone plans, after it acquired Apple‘s design chief Jony Ive’s startup io for $6.4 billion in equity last year to design new AI devices expected to be revealed in two years.

Altman said last year that the devices OpenAI is designing with io will be different from smartphones. It will be able to “know everything you’ve ever thought about, read, said,” he said, comparing it to walking through Times Square.

“You can then go for a vibe that is not like walking through Times Square and getting bumped into and having all this stuff compete for your attention,” Altman said. “But, like, sitting in the most beautiful cabin by a lake and in the mountains and sort of just enjoying the peace and calm.”

Additionally, it was reported in September that Luxshare signed a deal with OpenAI to produce consumer devices.

Shares of Samsung SDS surged as much as 21.3% on Wednesday after global private equity firm KKR agreed to invest 1.22 trillion won ($820 million) of newly issued convertible bonds from the South Korean IT solutions and logistics provider. The stock later pared gains to close 17.89% higher.

The deal comes as technology companies ramp up spending on AI infrastructure and digital transformation, with Samsung SDS positioning itself to capture surging demand for artificial intelligence services.

Samsung SDS, part of Samsung Group and affiliate of Samsung Electronics, said in a statement that KKR will advise on mergers and acquisitions, capital allocation, artificial intelligence offerings and global expansion.

“Through this strategic collaboration, we will actively explore a wide range of growth opportunities, including M&A by leveraging KKR’s expertise accumulated in global capital markets,” Jun Hee Lee, President and CEO of Samsung SDS, said.  

The proceeds will also accelerate Samsung SDS’s investments in AI infrastructure and strengthen its expansion as a full-stack AI solutions provider.

A full-stack AI solutions provider builds and delivers every part of an AI system — from the basic computers and data storage all the way to the ready-to-use AI tools that companies actually run their business on.

Samsung SDS also provides traditional cloud, digital transformation and logistics services to a global customer base across industries. 

Shares of Samsung Electronics ended the session 2.18% higher on Wednesday, helped by a rally in U.S. technology stocks overnight. 

“Against a backdrop of increasing demand for digital transformation and AI solutions, we have strong conviction in Samsung SDS’ market leadership and growth potential by playing a critical role in advancing Korea’s digital capabilities and infrastructure,” said Chung Ho Park, Partner and Head of Korea at KKR.

KKR said the investment will mainly come from its Asia Fund IV, and the transaction is expected to close in the second quarter.

— CNBC’s Justina Lee contributed to this report.

Chinese tech giant Baidu has announced plans to bring robotaxis to London starting next year through its partnerships with Lyft and Uber, as the UK emerges as a growing autonomous vehicle battleground.

The announced collaborations will bring Baidu’s Apollo Go autonomous vehicles to the British capital through the Uber and Lyft platforms, the companies said on their respective social media accounts. 

Lyft’s testing of Baidu’s initial fleet of dozens of vehicles will begin in 2026, pending regulatory approval, “with plans to scale to hundreds from there,” Lyft CEO David Risher said in a post on social media platform X on Monday.

Meanwhile, Uber said that its first pilot is expected to start in the first half of 2026. “We’re excited to accelerate Britain’s leadership in the future of mobility, bringing another safe and reliable travel option to Londoners next year,” the company added.

The moves add to Baidu’s growing global footprint, which it says includes 22 cities and more than 250,000 weekly trips, as it races against other Chinese players like WeRide and Western giants like Alphabet‘s Waymo. 

The UK, in particular, has seen a wave of interest from driverless taxi companies, following the government’s announcement in June that it would accelerate its plans to allow autonomous vehicle tech on public roads. 

The government now aims to begin permitting robotaxis to operate in small-scale pilots starting in spring 2026, with Baidu likely aiming to be amongst the first. 

The city of London has also established a “Vision Zero” goal to eliminate all serious injuries and deaths in its transportation systems by 2041, with autonomous driving technology expected to play a large role. 

News of Baidu pilots comes as its competitor Waymo also looks to begin testing in London, with plans for a full service launch in 2026. Waymo currently operates or plans to launch a service or test its fleet in 26 markets, including major cities like Tokyo and New York City.

Baidu, for its part, has been aggressively expanding globally, with testing rolling out in international markets like the United Arab Emirates and Switzerland.