Apps are helping people avoid air pollution amid record wildfires, rising temperatures
Air quality in the United States and Europe improved over the last decade thanks to stricter environmental regulations, but intensifying wildfires raise new air pollution concerns.
The National Interagency Fire Center reported that, as of August 8, there were 107 large active fires that had burned more than 2.2 million acres domestically across 15 states so far this year. In Europe, wildfires in Greece and Turkey are raging amid record heat waves now as well.
As a result, more people are turning to mobile apps to understand when air quality is better or worse, wherever they may be. These apps use a mix of data from government-operated satellites, or weather, fire and ambient air quality stations, as well as sensors and systems run by private sector entities. Some are even crowdsourced from relatively affordable air quality sensors sold by companies such as PurpleAir and IQAir.
Air quality apps
According to senior mobile insights analyst Jonathan Briskman of Sensor Tower, the top-rated apps for outdoor air quality monitoring in the U.S. between January 2020 and July 2021 have been: AirCare, AirVisual, and South Coast AQMD, based on ratings from the App Store, and Google Play.
Here’s what those three apps do:
- AirCare, made by developers in Northern Macedonia, is available for iOS and Android mobile devices, including iPhones, iPads, Apple Watch and Huawei smartphones, among many others. Tiers include a free, ad-supported version, a 99 cents ad-free version, and at the premium level, a $14.99 annual subscription for a pro-version. The app includes kid-friendly air pollution information, charts and maps that show pollutant levels derived from government-run sensors and stations, alongside volunteers’ PurpleAir and other sensors throughout the U.S., Europe and Australia. In some major metro areas, the app also tracks ultra-violet and pollen levels.
- AirVisual, made by the Swiss air quality company IQAir, tracks air pollution in more than 10,000 cities and 80 countries drawing on data from tens of thousands of sensors, some positioned at U.S. embassies overseas. The company’s free mobile apps are also ad-free and available for iOS and Android devices. Besides real-time maps that show levels of six different types of major pollutants, IQAir’s AirVisual and mobile website provide seven-day air pollution and weather forecasts, along with air pollution-related news and health information. The apps can pair with the company’s own sensors, including the portable AirVisual Pro sold for around $269.
- South Coast AQMD, is a free and ad-free app run by the local air pollution agency in Southern California of the same name and tracks air pollution across Orange County, Los Angeles, Riverside and San Bernardino, specifically. It features real-time and forecasted air quality and weather conditions, and maps that show where drivers can charge their electric vehicles or find other non-traditional fueling stations. It also includes information about upcoming local events and political hearings related to air quality issues to encourage community participation. The app is available in both English and Spanish for Apple and Android devices.
The five most popular air quality apps in the U.S., based on installs since the start of 2020, according to Sensor Tower included two of those top-rated apps, AirVisual (from IQ Air) and Air Care, as well as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s app AirNow, an app from venture-backed startup Breezometer that shows air quality, pollen and active fire data, and an app called Oregon Air developed for the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality.
Use of these apps, and new installs are often driven by regional events. As of August 8, 2021 there were 16 large active fires searing through Oregon according to the NIFC.
How air pollution impacts health
Air quality monitoring and measurement are critical for public health, says Yanelli Nunez, a postdoctoral research scientist at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health.
She notes that robust studies have shown that air pollution contributes to lung cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and lower respiratory infections, and even impacts mortality, pregnancy outcomes and cardiovascular disease.
Nunez works in an environmental health sciences laboratory with Marianthi-Anna Kioumourtzoglou. Their research has also found long-term exposure to air pollution can affect the nervous system and may influence functions such as memory or cognitive capabilities.
The scientists wrote in an e-mail to CNBC: “Americans living in poor air quality areas tend to be people of color or low-income communities. We are finally starting to pay more attention to these issues, which hopefully will lead to change. The air pollution composition is also changing.”
In one example, greenhouse gas emissions from transportation declined in New York City from 2014 to 2017, while commercial cooking emissions rose.
With increased wildfires, the scientists wrote, “The sources and composition of the air pollution mixture that we are experiencing could differently impact our health, so we need to better understand source-specific effects, especially for these newly prominent sources.”
Indoor air matters, too
While outdoor air quality is important, society doesn’t talk or do enough about indoor air quality, said Richard Corsi, UC Davis’ incoming dean of the college of engineering, currently a professor and dean at Portland State University.
Using pre-pandemic numbers, Corsi explained that the average American would spend almost 70 out of 79 years of their life domiciled inside of buildings. “Because we spend so much time indoors, even our exposure to pollutants of outdoor origin is dominated by what we breathe there, especially in our homes,” he said.
Pollutants of outdoor origin which come from the likes of internal combustion engine vehicles, photochemical smog, refineries and wildfires can get into homes and buildings when doors and windows are opened, when heat and air conditioning systems are used, or through other cracks in the building envelope.
Consumer apps and devices today don’t give users an absolute, precise measurement down to micrograms per cubic meter of a given pollutant, Corsi noted. But they’re very valuable for spotting trends and relative changes in air quality.
Sensors set up indoors can work well to check whether protective measures are working to improve the air inside of a house, school or other building.
Especially during wildfire season, Corsi said, some other simple actions that can protect or improve air quality indoors include: wet-mopping floors and wiping surfaces so pollutants don’t accumulate, using HEPA or high-efficiency particulate air filters, and increasing the MERV or minimum efficiency reporting value of filters in central air systems in a house.
Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Meta Platforms Inc., during the Meta Connect event in Menlo Park, California, US, on Wednesday, Sept. 17, 2025.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is sounding a familiar tune when it comes to artificial intelligence: better to invest too much than too little.
On his company’s third-quarter earnings call on Wednesday, Zuckerberg addressed Meta’s hefty spending this year, most notably its $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI as part of a plan to overhaul the AI unit, now known as Superintelligence Labs.
Some skeptics worry that the spending from Meta and its competitors in AI, namely OpenAI, is fueling a bubble.
For Meta’s newly formed group to have enough computing power to pursue cutting-edge AI models, the company has been building out massive data centers and signing cloud-computing deals with companies like Oracle, Google and CoreWeave.
Zuckerberg said the company is seeing a “pattern” and that it looks like Meta will need even more power than what was originally estimated. Over time, he said, those growing AI investments will eventually pay off in a big way.
“Being able to make a significantly larger investment here is very likely to be a profitable thing over, over some period,” Zuckerberg said on the call.
If Meta overspends on AI-related computing resources, Zuckerberg said, the company can repurpose the capacity and improve its core recommendation systems “in our family of apps and ads in a profitable way.”
Along with its rivals, Meta boosted its expectations for capital expenditures.
Capex this year will now be between $70 billion and $72 billion, compared to prior guidance of $66 billion to $72 billion, the company said.
Meanwhile, Alphabet on Wednesday increased its range for capital expenditures to $91 billion to $93 billion, up from a previous target of $75 billion to $85 billion. And on Microsoft’s earnings call after the bell, the software company said it now expects capex growth to accelerate in 2026 after previously projecting slowing expansion.
Alphabet was the only one of the three to see its stock pop, as the shares jumped 6% in extended trading. Meta shares fell about 8%, and Microsoft dipped more than 3%.
Zuckerberg floated the idea that if Meta ends up with excess computing power, it could offer some to third parties. But he said that isn’t yet an issue.
“Obviously, if you got to a point where you overbuilt, you could have that as an option,” Zuckerberg said.
In the “very worst case,” Zuckerberg said, Meta ends up with several years worth of excess data center capacity. That would result in a “loss and depreciation” of certain assets, but the company would “grow into that and use it over time,” he said.
As it stands today, Meta’s advertising business continues to grow at a healthy pace thanks in part to its AI investments.
“We’re seeing the returns in the core business that’s giving us a lot of confidence that we should be investing a lot more, and we want to make sure that we’re not under investing,” Zuckerberg said.
Revenue in the third quarter rose 26% from a year earlier to $51.24 billion, topping analyst estimates of $49.41 billion and representing the company’s fastest growth rate since the first quarter of 2024.
WATCH: Meta reports Q3 earnings beat, company takes one-time tax charge.
Sundar Pichai, chief executive officer of Alphabet Inc., during the Bloomberg Tech conference in San Francisco, California, US, on Wednesday, June 4, 2025.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Google parent Alphabet is planning a “significant increase” in spend next year as it continues to invest in AI infrastructure to meet the demand of its customer backlog, executives said Wednesday.
The company reported its first $100 billion revenue quarter on Wednesday, beating Wall Street’s expectations for Alphabet’s third quarter. Executives then said that the company plans to grow its capital spend for this year.
“With the growth across our business and demand from Cloud customers, we now expect 2025 capital expenditures to be in a range of $91 billion to $93 billion,” the company said in its earnings report.
It marks the second time the company increased its capital expenditure this year. In July, the company increased its expectation from $75 billion to $85 billion, most of which goes toward investments in projects like new data centers.
There’ll be even more spend in 2026, executives said Wednesday.
“Looking out to 2026, we expect a significant increase in CapEx and will provide more detail on our fourth quarter earnings call,” said Anat Ashkenazi, Alphabet’s finance chief.
The latest increases come as companies across the industry race to build more infrastructure to keep up with billions in customer demand for the compute necessary to power AI services. Also on Wednesday, Meta raised the low end of its guidance for 2025 capital expenditures by $4 billion, saying it expects that figure to come in between $70 billion and $72 billion. That figure was previously $66 billion to $72 billion.
Google executives explained that they’re racing to meet demand for cloud services, which saw a 46% quarter-over-quarter growth to the backlog in the third quarter.
“We continue to drive strong growth in new businesses,” CEO Sundar Pichai said. “Google Cloud accelerated, ending the quarter with $155 billion in backlog.”
The company reported 32% cloud revenue growth from the year prior and is keeping pace with its megacap competitors. Pichai and Ashkenazi said the company has received more $1 billion deals in the last nine months than it had in the past two years combined.
In August, Google won a $10 billion cloud contract from Meta spanning six years. Anthropic last week announced a deal that gives the artificial intelligence company access to up to 1 million of Google’s custom-designed Tensor Processing Units, or TPUs. The deal is worth tens of billions of dollars.
The spend on infrastructure is also helping the company improve its own AI products, executives said on the call.
Google’s flagship AI app Gemini now has more than 650 million monthly active users. That’s up from the 450 million active users Pichai reported the previous quarter.
Search also improved thanks to AI advancements, executives said. Google’s search business generated $56.56 billion in revenue — up 15% from the prior year, tempering fears that the competitive AI landscape may be cannibalizing the company’s core search and ads business.
AI Mode, Google’s AI product that lays within its search engine, has 75 million daily active users in the U.S., and those search queries doubled over the third quarter, executives said. They also reiterated that the company is testing ads in that AI Mode product.
WATCH: Google catching up with Meta pulled on shares following earnings, says D.A. Davidson’s Gil Luria
Technology
ServiceNow CEO denies AI companies are threatening enterprise software: ‘They don’t do what we do’
ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott pushed back against the idea that artificial intelligence technology will make enterprise software redundant in a Wednesday interview with CNBC’s Jim Cramer.
“We realize the world needs access to the great hyperscalers, and so we integrated with all three of them. So that’s a cooperative,” McDermott said. “The world’s going to benefit from the large language model providers, but they don’t do what we do.”
As AI continues to develop, some on Wall Street are worried that companies will be able to rely solely on automated models — making many enterprise software companies’ products obsolete.
ServiceNow makes software for companies including the National Hockey League, FedEx, Ulta Beauty and AstraZeneca.
McDermott detailed some of the functions of ServiceNow’s platform, including management of assets, operations and security.
ServiceNow’s software is needed to perform complex functions — such as regulatory environment processes for financial services firms with decades-old legacy technology — McDermott suggested. He brushed off specific concerns that systems of record, which store data and information, might be “eaten by AI.”
He indicated that agentic AI isn’t up to the task of entering the “already complex environment.”
“Those agents are being sold into silos, and that’s the very reason why AI won’t work,” McDermott said. “AI is a cross-functional sport.”
McDermott also explained why ServiceNow proposed a five-for-one stock split on Wednesday during earnings.
“I feel strongly that we’re right now ready for more than just institutional investors,” he said. “We know the consumer investor wants in, and I don’t want you to have to buy fractional shares and go through all that.”
ServiceNow topped expectations when it reported after close, and shares jumped more than 4% in extended trading.
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