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Foundry USA

A war is brewing among states to attract bitcoin miners, and new data shows that a whole lot of them are headed to New York, Kentucky, Georgia, and Texas.

Within the U.S., 19.9% of bitcoin’s hashrate – that is, the collective computing power of miners – is in New York, 18.7% in Kentucky, 17.3% is in Georgia, and 14% in Texas, according to Foundry USA, which is the biggest mining pool in North America and the fifth-largest globally.

A mining pool lets a single miner combine its hashing power with thousands of other miners all over the world, and there are dozens from which to choose. 

“This is the first time we’ve actually had state-level insight on where miners are, unless you wanted to go cobble through all the public filings and try to figure it out that way,” said Nic Carter, co-founder of Castle Island Ventures, who presented Foundry’s data at the Texas Blockchain Summit in Austin on Friday. “This is a much more efficient way of figuring out where mining occurs in America.”

But as Carter points out, the Foundry dataset does not account for all of the U.S. mining hashrate, since not all U.S.-based mining farms enlist the services of this pool. Riot Blockchain, for example, is one of the largest publicly-traded mining companies in America, with a huge presence in Texas. They don’t use Foundry, so their hashrate is not accounted for in this dataset – which is part of the reason why Texas’ mining presence is understated. 

Though the dataset only captures a portion of the country’s domestic mining market, it does point to nationwide trends that are reshaping the debate around carbon’s footprint. 

Many of the states ranking the highest are epicenters of renewable energy, a fact which has already begun to recast the narrative among skeptics that bitcoin is bad for the environment. 

While Carter acknowledges that U.S. mining isn’t wholly renewable, he does say that miners here are much better about selecting renewables and buying offsets. 

“The migration is definitely a net positive overall,” he said. “Hashrate moving to the U.S. will mean much lower carbon intensity.”

Where did all the miners go

When Beijing decided to kick out all its crypto miners this spring, about half of the bitcoin network went dark practically overnight. While the network itself didn’t skip a beat, the incident did set off the biggest migration of bitcoin miners ever seen. 

The Foundry dataset shows the biggest bitcoin mining operations are in some of the states with the most renewable – a game changer for the debate around bitcoin’s environmental impact.  

Because miners at scale compete in a low-margin industry, where their only variable cost is typically energy, they are incentivized to migrate to the world’s cheapest sources of power – which also tend to be renewable.

Take New York, which leads Foundry’s ranking. A third of its in-state generation comes from renewables, according to the latest available data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration

New York counts its nuclear power plants toward its 100% carbon free electricity goal, and critically, New York produces more hydroelectric power than any other state east of the Rocky Mountains. It was the third-largest producer of hydroelectricity in the nation, as well.

New York’s chilly climate – plus its previously abandoned industrial infrastructure ripe for repurposing – have also made it an ideal spot for bitcoin mining. 

Crypto mining company Coinmint, for example, operates facilities in New York, including one in a former Alcoa Aluminum smelter in Massena, which taps into the area’s abundant wind power, plus the cheap electricity produced from the dams that line the St. Lawrence River. The Massena site, at 435 megawatts of transformer capacity, is billed as one of – if not the – largest bitcoin mining facility in the U.S.

New York was weighing legislation this year to ban bitcoin mining for three years so it could run an environmental assessment to gauge its greenhouse gas emissions. Lawmakers have since largely walked it back. 

“Bitcoin mining in New York is actually very low in carbon intensity, given its hydro power, and, as a consequence, if New York were to ban bitcoin in-state, it would probably raise the carbon intensity of the bitcoin network overall,” said Carter. “It would be the complete opposite of what they wanted.”

Other states capturing a large share of America’s bitcoin mining industry include Kentucky and Georgia.

Beyond the fact that Kentucky’s governor is friendly to the industry, having just passed a law this year that grants certain tax exemptions to crypto mining operations, the state is also known for its hydroelectric and wind power.

Connecting rigs to otherwise stranded energy, like natural gas wells, is another power source. Although coal is also a big player in the energy mix, many mining operations there gravitate to renewables.

And then there’s Texas

Texas may rank fourth according to Foundry’s data set, but many experts believe there is no question that it is the leading jurisdiction for miners right now. 

Some of the biggest names in bitcoin mining have set up shop in Texas, including Riot Blockchain, which has a 100-acre site in Rockdale, and Chinese miner Bitdeer, which is right down the road. 

Orders for new ASICs – the specialty gear used to mint new bitcoin – show that tens of thousands more machines are due to be delivered in Texas, according to The Block Crypto

The appeal of Texas comes down to a few big fundamentals: Crypto-friendly lawmakers, a deregulated power grid with real-time spot pricing, and perhaps most importantly, access to significant excess energy which is renewable, as well as stranded or flared natural gas. 

The regulatory red carpet being rolled out for miners also makes the industry very predictable, according to Alex Brammer of Luxor Mining, a cryptocurrency pool built for advanced miners.

“It is a very attractive environment for miners to deploy large amounts of capital in,” he said. “The sheer number of land deals and power purchase agreements that are in various stages of negotiation is enormous.”

Some miners plug straight into the grid in order to power their rigs. ERCOT, the organization that operates Texas’ grid, has the cheapest utility-scale solar in the nation at 2.8 cents per kilowatt hour. The grid is also rapidly adding wind and solar power. 

“You just can’t beat the cost of power in West Texas, and when you couple that with a skilled power management company that can manage your demand response programs, it’s almost unbeatable anywhere else in the world,” continued Brammer. 

Deregulated grids tend to have the best economics for miners, because they can buy spot energy. 

“They can participate in economic dispatch, which means that they stop buying electricity when prices get high, so you have far more flexibility if you are active in the spot markets,” explained Carter.

Another major energy trend in the bitcoin mining business in Texas is using “stranded” natural gas to power rigs, which both reduces greenhouse gas emissions and makes money for the gas providers, as well as the miners.

Carter says that if this is fully exploited, flared gas in Texas alone could power 34% of the bitcoin network today – which would make Texas not only the clear leader in bitcoin mining in the U.S., but in the world.

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Google announces new health-care AI updates for Search

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Google announces new health-care AI updates for Search

A Google corporate logo hangs above the entrance to their office at St. John’s Terminal on March 11, 2025, in New York City.

Gary Hershorn | Corbis News | Getty Images

Google on Tuesday announced health-care updates to Search, including a way for people with specific health conditions to compare their experiences with others.

The company unveiled a new feature called “What People Suggest,” which uses AI to pull together online commentary from patients with similar diagnoses. A patient with arthritis would be able to look up how other people with the condition approach exercise, for instance. The feature is available on mobile devices in the U.S., Google said.

Google said it has also expanded its knowledge panels, or the information boxes that appear to the right of search results, to cover “thousands” more health topics. The panels are coming to new countries and languages, including Spanish, Japanese and Portuguese, starting on mobile devices.

The tech giant has launched several health-care projects and features over the years, but it has struggled to outline a consistent business strategy within the sector. The company built out a formal Google Health unit starting around 2018, which swelled to more than 500 employees, but it was dissolved in 2021.

Karen DeSalvo, Google’s chief health officer, told CNBC months later that the company was “still all-in on health.”

In recent years, many of Google’s health-care initiatives have centered around AI.

Google introduced artificial intelligence summaries called AI Overviews last year, and the feature shows a quick summary of answers to search questions at the very top of Search. The rollout was rocky, as users were quick to share examples AI tool giving incorrect and controversial responses, like encouraging users to add glue to pizza.

AI Overviews appear for some health-related queries, like “How do I know if I have the flu?” But some experts have encouraged users to use caution with these answers, according to a December report from The Senior List. Out of more than 200 health searches, a panel of medical experts said 70% Google’s AI Overviews were considered risky.

Google said Tuesday that recent health-focused advancements with its Gemini models have allowed the company to improve AI Overviews for health topics.

In late 2023, Google announced MedLM, a suite of AI models designed specifically for health-care, to help clinicians and researchers carry out complex studies, summarize doctor-patient interactions and complete other tasks.

The company also unveiled Vertex AI Search for Healthcare that year, which is a generative AI tool that clinicians can use to search for information across disparate medical records.

Watch: Google to acquire cloud security startup Wiz for $32 billion.

Google to acquire cloud security startup Wiz for $32 billion

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Google to acquire cloud security startup Wiz for $32 billion

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Google to acquire cloud security startup Wiz for  billion

The Wiz website on a smartphone arranged in New York, US, on Tuesday, July 16, 2024. 

Gabby Jones | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Google on Tuesday signed a “definitive agreement” to acquire Wiz, a New York-based cloud security startup, for $32 billion in an all-cash deal.

The deal, which will be Google’s largest-ever acquisition, will improve its cloud security offering in a world of advancing artificial intelligence and cybersecurity threats. Wiz will become a part of the company’s cloud business. Google said it expects to close the deal in 2026.

“Google Cloud is a leader in cloud infrastructure, with deep AI expertise and a track record of industry-leading security innovation,” Google said in a release. “Bringing all this to Wiz will help make their solutions even better and more scalable, benefiting customers and partners across all major clouds.”

The acquisition comes after CNBC reported in July that Wiz had walked away from a potential $23 billion acquisition by Google and announced to employees that it would pursue an initial public offering instead.

“Saying no to such humbling offers is tough,” Wiz co-founder Assaf Rappaport wrote to employees in a July memo obtained by CNBC. At the time, a source familiar with the matter told CNBC that Wiz walked away from the deal in part due to antitrust and investor concerns.

Before talks with Google were reported, Wiz had set its sights on two goals: an IPO and $1 billion in annual recurring revenue. In the memo at the time, Rappaport wrote that the company would pursue those milestones.

Wiz was founded in 2020 and has grown rapidly under Rappaport, with the company hitting $100 million in annual recurring revenue after just 18 months. The company’s cloud security products include prevention, active detection and response, a portfolio that’s appealed to large firms and would have helped Google compete with Microsoft, which also sells security software.

“Becoming part of Google Cloud is effectively strapping a rocket to our backs: it will accelerate our rate of innovation faster than what we could achieve as a standalone company,” Rappaport said in a blog post Tuesday.

Google has a long history in dealmaking and snatching up smaller companies to broaden its offerings to customers. Its largest deal before Wiz was the $12.5 billion acquisition of hardware marker Motorola in 2012. Two years later, the company sold some assets to Lenovo for $2.9 billion. Google has also made cybersecurity acquisitions in the past, paying $5.4 billion for Mandiant in 2022.

Wiz’s products will still work on competitor platforms including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud, the companies said. The Wall Street Journal first reported Monday that the companies were in advanced discussions.

While the agreement may still draw government scrutiny, many on Wall Street have been hopeful that President Donald Trump’s new White House administration will be more amenable to tech industry deals. Alphabet is currently battling an antitrust suit over its online search dominance.

— CNBC’s Jennifer Elias, Jordan Novet and Rohan Goswami contributed to this report.

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Baidu, once China’s generative AI leader, is battling to regain its position

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Baidu, once China’s generative AI leader, is battling to regain its position

Pictured here is the Ernie bot mobile interface, with the Baidu search engine home page in the background.

Future Publishing | Future Publishing | Getty Images

Chinese tech giant Baidu has released two new free-to-use artificial intelligence models as it vies to regain its leading position in the country’s fiercely competitive AI space. 

The Baidu models launched Sunday included the company’s first reasoning-focused model, and come ahead of plans to move toward an open-source strategy. 

However, experts told CNBC that while the release of the models is a positive development for Baidu, they also highlight how it is playing catch up as its Ernie bot — one of China’s earliest versions of a ChatGPT-like chatbot — struggles to gain widespread adoption. 

“The new models make Baidu more competitive since the company has been lagging behind in a reasoning model release,” Lian Jye Su, chief analyst at Omdia, told CNBC.

A reasoning model is a large language model that breaks down tasks into smaller pieces and considers multiple approaches before generating a response. It is designed to process complex problems in a similar way to humans.

Chinese startup DeepSeek upended the global AI race and transformed China’s ecosystem in January when it released its R1 reasoning model, which rivaled American competitors despite costing a fraction of the price.

Baidu has said its new ERNIE X1 reasoning model “delivers performance on par with DeepSeek R1 at only half the price,” and has “stronger understanding, planning, reflection, and evolution capabilities.” CNBC has not been able to independently verify this claim.

According to Wei Sun, principal analyst of artificial intelligence at Counterpoint Research, Baidu’s future competitiveness could hinge on whether its new models deliver on the promised performance and cost advantages. 

“Baidu is clearly in catch-up mode, largely due to its slow innovation pace and underestimating rapid shifts in market dynamics,” Sun said. 

What happened? 

Baidu rolled out its first generative AI platform to the public in 2023, giving China one of its first answers to OpenAI’s popular AI chatbot ChatGPT. 

However, despite initial momentum, Baidu’s Ernie product has since been eclipsed by competitors including startups as well as large-tech companies such as Alibaba and ByteDance.

Experts list a number of reasons for Baidu’s struggles and slow rate of innovation.

“Baidu fell behind when they tried to build proprietary models and compete for funding for AI,” Ray Wang, principal analyst and founder of Constellation Research, told CNBC. He added that the company has also suffered from recent government crackdowns and was distracted by “regulatory nonsense.” 

CFOTO | Future Publishing | Getty Images

Proprietary models keep their source code and underlying architecture confidential, in contrast to models from the likes of DeepSeek, whose source code is made freely available on the open web for possible modification and redistribution.

“Using a closed-source approach means that [Baidu] was training its model from scratch whereas the open-source models were able to leverage certain parts that were communal to developers,” said Kai Wang, a senior equity analyst for Morningstar. 

Baidu, however, said last month that it would make its next-generation AI model Ernie open-source from June 30, according to Reuters.

“Baidu has always been very supportive of its proprietary business model and was vocal against open source, but disruptors like DeepSeek have proven that open source models can be as competitive,” said Omdia’s Su. 

He added that Baidu is “merely following the footstep” of its biggest competitors in China, namely Alibaba, DeepSeek, and Tencent, which have all now released open-source models. 

Baidu’s advantages

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