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A man uses his mobile phone as he walks past advertising for iPhones outside an Apple store.
Philip Fong | AFP | Getty Images

Eight states will roll out a feature allowing users to add driver’s license and state IDs to Apple Wallet for iPhone and Apple Watch to use at security at participating airports, Apple announced Wednesday.

Arizona and Georgia are the first states to adopt the feature and Connecticut, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, Oklahoma, and Utah will follow, though the company did not specify a timeline.

The news comes just months after Apple said it was working on the feature with the Transportation Security Administration at its Worldwide Developers Conference in June. The feature is a crucial step in Apple’s plan to replace physical wallets and will offer more convenience to travelers looking for touchless airport travel, the company said.

Adding IDs to the Wallet app works similarly to uploading credit cards and transit passes, Apple said. Once users scan the ID, they will also be asked to complete facial and head movements as an additional security measure.

After tapping their mobile ID at identity readers in airports, users must approve a note from TSA using Face ID or Touch ID. The company says customer data is “encrypted and protected against tampering and theft” and that the ID can only be viewed by the owner.

Last year, Apple launched mobile student IDs to allow students to access campus buildings and make purchases without a physical card, a feature expanded to additional universities in the U.S. and Canada this summer.

The new ID feature will be available with an iPhone software update due for release later this fall.

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Nvidia says its GPUs are a ‘generation ahead’ of Google’s AI chips

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Nvidia says its GPUs are a 'generation ahead' of Google's AI chips

Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang looks on as US President Donald Trump speaks at the US-Saudi Investment Forum at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC on November 19, 2025.

Brendan Smialowski | Afp | Getty Images

Nvidia on Tuesday said its tech remains a generation ahead of the industry, in response to Wall Street’s concerns that the company’s dominance of AI infrastructure could be threatened by Google’s AI chips.

“We’re delighted by Google’s success — they’ve made great advances in AI and we continue to supply to Google,” Nvidia said in a post on X. “NVIDIA is a generation ahead of the industry — it’s the only platform that runs every AI model and does it everywhere computing is done.”

The post came after Nvidia saw its shares fall 3% on Tuesday after a report that Meta, one of its key customers, could strike a deal with Google to use its tensor processing units for its data centers.

In its post, Nvidia said its chips are more flexible and powerful compared with so-called ASIC chips — such as Google’s TPUs — which are designed for a single company or function. Nvidia’s latest generation of chips are known as Blackwell.

“NVIDIA offers greater performance, versatility, and fungibility than ASICs,” Nvidia said in its post.

Nvidia has more than 90% of the market for artificial intelligence chips with its graphics processors, analysts say, but Google’s in-house chips have gotten increased attention in recent weeks as a viable alternative to the Blackwell chips, which are expensive but powerful.

Unlike Nvidia, Google doesn’t sell its TPU chips to other companies, but it uses them for internal tasks and allows companies to rent them through Google Cloud.

Earlier this month, Google released Gemini 3, a well-reviewed state-of-the-art AI model that was trained on the company’s TPUs, not Nvidia GPUs.

“We are experiencing accelerating demand for both our custom TPUs and Nvidia GPUs,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement. “We are committed to supporting both, as we have for years.”

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang addressed rising TPU competition on an earnings call earlier this month, noting that Google was a customer for his company’s GPU chips and that Gemini can run on Nvidia’s technology.

He also mentioned that he was in touch with Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google DeepMind.

Huang said that Hassabis texted him to say that the tech industry theory that using more chips and data will create more powerful AI models — often called “scaling laws” by AI developers — is “intact.” Nvidia says that scaling laws will lead to even more demand for the company’s chips and systems.

WATCH: Meta reportedly in talks to use Google’s AI chips

Meta reportedly in talks to use Google's AI chips

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What Dick’s Sporting Goods’ earnings report tells us about Nike’s turnaround

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What Dick's Sporting Goods' earnings report tells us about Nike's turnaround

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Musk’s xAI to close $15 billion funding round in December: sources

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Musk's xAI to close  billion funding round in December: sources

Elon Musk attends the U.S.-Saudi Investment Forum in Washington, D.C., U.S., November 19, 2025.

Evelyn Hockstein | Reuters

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup xAI is expected to close a $15 billion round at a $230 billion pre-money valuation next month, sources familiar with the matter told CNBC’s David Faber.

The deadline for allocation is the end of day on Tuesday, with the round expected to close on Dec. 19, the sources said.

This confirms earlier CNBC reporting that the company was raising $15 billion. The Tesla CEO later called the report on the round “False” in a post on the social media platform X.

At the time, sources told CNBC that xAI would use a large portion of the money for funding graphics processing units responsible for powering large language models.

CNBC had previously reported in September that the startup was looking to raise $10 billion at a $200 billion valuation.

The funding round is yet another sign of the insatiable demand for AI tools. Companies, including OpenAI and Anthropic, have raised billions and reached sky-high valuations as investors pour more money into companies building foundational AI models.

Sam Altman‘s OpenAI finalized a $6.6 billion-share sale at a $500 billion valuation last month, and Reuters recently reported that the ChatGPT maker was eying a $1 trillion initial public offering.

Anthropic closed a $13 billion funding round in September that roughly tripled its valuation from March.

Musk’s xAI is responsible for creating the Grok chatbot that has come under fire for disseminating hate speech, including antisemitic content. The company recently debuted Grokipedia, an AI-powered competitor to Wikipedia.

In March, Musk announced the merger of xAI with X in a deal valuing the social media platform at $33 billion.

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