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As health care becomes increasingly digitized, scientists, doctors and researchers have to try and decipher unprecedented amounts of data to adequately personalize care. The excess of information available to these experts often outpaces their ability to consume and analyze it. Amazon‘s cloud unit has been working to close that gap.

Amazon Web Services recently launched general availability for Amazon Omics, which helps researchers store and analyze omic data like sequences of DNA, RNA and proteins. The service provides customers with the underlying infrastructure they need to make sense of large amounts of data so they can spend more time making new scientific discoveries.

AWS generates a substantial piece of Amazon’s revenue, pulling in $20.5 billion in the third quarter. The cloud-computing business has been expanding into health care, and while AWS doesn’t disclose revenue projections for particular services, the global genomic data analysis market size is expected to reach $2.15 billion by 2030, according to a report from Straits Research.

Dr. Taha Kass-Hout, chief medical officer at AWS, said the vast majority of health care data is unstructured in nature, which means that about 97% of it goes unused. Indexing and making sense of this information is a challenge, especially when researchers are collecting omic data from tens of thousands of patients. 

Prior to his time at Amazon, Kass-Hout served two terms under President Barack Obama and was the first chief health information officer at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Sequencing one human genome can require anywhere from 80 to 150 gigabytes of storage, Kass-Hout said, and some research projects deal with petabytes and exabytes of genomic information.   

“You’re talking about almost nine Harry Potter’s worth if you want to print it on a printer,” Kass-Hout told CNBC. “And that’s just for one human being.”

Amazon Omics helps researchers sort through their data by providing them with three components that they can leverage individually or as a collective. Omics-aware object storage helps researchers store and share raw sequence data; Omics Workflows helps run workflows that process raw sequence data at scale; and Omics Analytics simplifies the output of the sequence processing. 

More than a dozen customers and partners tested a beta version of the service and are already using Amazon Omics.

For Jeffrey Pennington, chief research informatics officer at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, it’s already made a noticeable impact.

Pennington works in the department of biomedical and health informatics, which uses data and technology to solve issues in child health. He said the department spent five years expanding the infrastructure to analyze omics data, and now it’s no longer something they need to build or maintain themselves. 

“We’re a big pediatric academic medical center, but we’re still not big enough to learn and build everything that is required to make productive use of omic data,” Pennington said. “Our time and energy, our effort, our financial wherewithal is much better spent putting the puzzle together rather than generating those pieces in the first place.”

Amazon Omics also encourages collaboration between large research groups, smaller clinical groups and intelligence and pharmaceutical companies, said Boris Oklander, co-founder and chief technology officer of C2i Genomics.

C2i is a biotechnology company that’s working to use genomic data to develop personalized treatments for cancer. Oklander said the company participated in the beta for Amazon Omics after trying to develop its own data-analysis technology.

He said Amazon Omics has created an ecosystem for collaboration that eliminates the need for researchers to build a complex technology from the ground up. 

“We’re just democratizing,” he said. “This type of service is something that allows [us] to unlock the value in the investments that different players in this space are doing.” 

Other major tech companies have developed similar tools. Microsoft‘s cloud-computing platform Azure launched Microsoft Genomics in 2018 to help researchers interpret data generated by genomic technologies. Google‘s Cloud Life Sciences technology also allows researchers to process biomedical data at a large scale.

Pennington said the Broad Institute and DNAnexus offer popular genomic data analysis services as well, but said they can be difficult to maintain and can analyze fewer data types than Amazon Omics.

Given the sensitive and deeply personal nature of omic data, Kass-Hout said privacy and patient data protection is “job zero” for AWS. He said AWS uses more than 300 security, compliance and governance services and supports 98 security standards and compliance certifications. In doing so, AWS goes “way beyond” regulatory compliance, Kass-Hout said, and it also provides best-practice resources and encryption tools to its customers. 

Customers are also responsible for building secure applications on top of Amazon Omics’ services, which guards AWS from seeing or leveraging the data. 

Kass-Hout said that ultimately, Amazon Omics serves as a way to efficiently index information so researchers can focus on making real advances in precision medicine. 

“If the last decade was about the digitization the health and life science industry has gone through, I truly believe the next decade is about making sense of this data in ways now [where] we can find new therapeutics, new diagnostics, more targeted therapies,” he said.

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Microsoft AI chief Suleyman sees advantage in building models ‘3 or 6 months behind’

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Microsoft AI chief Suleyman sees advantage in building models ‘3 or 6 months behind’

Microsoft owns lots of Nvidia graphics processing units, but it isn’t using them to develop state-of-the-art artificial intelligence models.

There are good reasons for that position, Mustafa Suleyman, the company’s CEO of AI, told CNBC’s Steve Kovach in an interview on Friday. Waiting to build models that are “three or six months behind” offers several advantages, including lower costs and the ability to concentrate on specific use cases, Suleyman said.

It’s “cheaper to give a specific answer once you’ve waited for the first three or six months for the frontier to go first. We call that off-frontier,” he said. “That’s actually our strategy, is to really play a very tight second, given the capital-intensiveness of these models.”

Suleyman made a name for himself as a co-founder of DeepMind, the AI lab that Google bought in 2014, reportedly for $400 million to $650 million. Suleyman arrived at Microsoft last year alongside other employees of the startup Inflection, where he had been CEO.

More than ever, Microsoft counts on relationships with other companies to grow.

It gets AI models from San Francisco startup OpenAI and supplemental computing power from newly public CoreWeave in New Jersey. Microsoft has repeatedly enriched Bing, Windows and other products with OpenAI’s latest systems for writing human-like language and generating images.

Microsoft’s Copilot will gain “memory” to retain key facts about people who repeatedly use the assistant, Suleyman said Friday at an event in Microsoft’s Redmond, Washington, headquarters to commemorate the company’s 50th birthday. That feature came first to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which has 500 million weekly users.

Through ChatGPT, people can access top-flight large language models such as the o1 reasoning model that takes time before spitting out an answer. OpenAI introduced that capability in September — only weeks later did Microsoft bring a similar capability called Think Deeper to Copilot.

Microsoft occasionally releases open-source small-language models that can run on PCs. They don’t require powerful server GPUs, making them different from OpenAI’s o1.

OpenAI and Microsoft have held a tight relationship shortly after the startup launched its ChatGPT chatbot in late 2022, effectively kicking off the generative AI race. In total, Microsoft has invested $13.75 billion in the startup, but more recently, fissures in the relationship between the two companies have begun to show.

Microsoft added OpenAI to its list of competitors in July 2024, and OpenAI in January announced that it was working with rival cloud provider Oracle on the $500 billion Stargate project. That came after years of OpenAI exclusively relying on Microsoft’s Azure cloud. Despite OpenAI partnering with Oracle, Microsoft in a blog post announced that the startup had “recently made a new, large Azure commitment.”

“Look, it’s absolutely mission-critical that long-term, we are able to do AI self-sufficiently at Microsoft,” Suleyman said. “At the same time, I think about these things over five and 10 year periods. You know, until 2030 at least, we are deeply partnered with OpenAI, who have [had an] enormously successful relationship for us.

Microsoft is focused on building its own AI internally, but the company is not pushing itself to build the most cutting-edge models, Suleyman said.

“We have an incredibly strong AI team, huge amounts of compute, and it’s very important to us that, you know, maybe we don’t develop the absolute frontier, the best model in the world first,” he said. “That’s very, very expensive to do and unnecessary to cause that duplication.”

WATCH: Microsoft Copilot beginning of a seismic shift in AI integration, says Microsoft AI CEO Suleyman

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Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says, as shareholder, tariffs are ‘not good’

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Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says, as shareholder, tariffs are 'not good'

President Trump’s new tariffs on goods that the U.S. imports from over 100 countries will have an effect on consumers, former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told CNBC on Friday. Investors will feel the pain, too.

Microsoft’s stock dropped almost 6% in the past two days, as the Nasdaq wrapped up its worst week in five years.

“As a Microsoft shareholder, this kind of thing is not good,” Ballmer said, in an interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin that was tied to Microsoft’s 50th anniversary celebration. “It creates opportunity to be a serious, long-term player.”

Ballmer was sandwiched in between Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and current CEO Satya Nadella for the interview.

“I took just enough economics in college — that tariffs are actually going to bring some turmoil,” said Ballmer, who was succeeded by Nadella in 2014. Gates, Microsoft’s first CEO, convinced Ballmer to join the company in 1980.

Gates, Ballmer and Nadella attended proceedings at Microsoft’s Redmond, Washington, campus on Friday to celebrate its first half-century.

Between the tariffs and weak quarterly revenue guidance announced in January, Microsoft’s stock is on track for its fifth straight month of declines, which would be the worst stretch since 2009. But the company remains a leader in the PC operating system and productivity software markets, and its partnership with startup OpenAI has led to gains in cloud computing.

“I think that disruption is very hard on people, and so the decision to do something for which disruption was inevitable, that needs a lot of popular support, and nobody could game theorize exactly who is going to do what in response,” Ballmer said, regarding the tariffs. “So, I think citizens really like stability a lot. And I hope people — individuals who will feel this, because people are feeling it, not just the stock market, people are going to feel it.”

Ballmer, who owns the Los Angeles Clippers, is among Microsoft’s biggest fans. He said he’s the company’s largest investor. In 2014, shortly after he bought the basketball team for $2 billion, he held over 333 million shares of the stock, according to a regulatory filing.

“I’m not going to probably have 50 more years on the planet,” he said. “But whatever minutes I have, I’m gonna be a large Microsoft shareholder.” He said there’s a bright future for computing, storage and intelligence. Microsoft launched the first Azure services while Ballmer was CEO.

Earlier this week Bloomberg reported that Microsoft, which pledged to spend $80 billion on AI-enabled data center infrastructure in the current fiscal year, has stopped discussions or pushed back the opening of facilities in the U.S. and abroad.

JPMorgan Chase’s chief economist, Bruce Kasman, said in a Thursday note that the chance of a global recession will be 60% if Trump’s tariffs kick in as described. His previous estimate was 40%.

“Fifty years from now, or 25 years from now, what is the one thing you can be guaranteed of, is the world needs more compute,” Nadella said. “So I want to keep those two thoughts and then take one step at a time, and then whatever are the geopolitical or economic shifts, we’ll adjust to it.”

Gates, who along with co-founder Paul Allen, sought to build a software company rather than sell both software and hardware, said he wasn’t sure what the economic effects of the tariffs will be. Today, most of Microsoft’s revenue comes from software. It also sells Surface PCs and Xbox consoles.

“So far, it’s just on goods, but you know, will it eventually be on services? Who knows?” said Gates, who reportedly donated around $50 million to a nonprofit that supported Democratic nominee Kamala Harris’ losing campaign.

— CNBC’s Alex Harring contributed to this report.

WATCH: There will be many LLM winners, says infrastructure investor Morrison

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AppLovin can offer TikTok ‘much stronger bid than others,’ CEO says

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AppLovin can offer TikTok 'much stronger bid than others,' CEO says

Piotr Swat | Lightrocket | Getty Images

AppLovin CEO Adam Foroughi provided more clarity on the ad-tech company’s late-stage effort to acquire TikTok, calling his offer a “much stronger bid than others” on CNBC’s The Exchange Friday afternoon.

Foroughi said the company is proposing a merger between AppLovin and the entire global business of TikTok, characterizing the deal as a “partnership” where the Chinese could participate in the upside while AppLovin would run the app.

“If you pair our algorithm with the TikTok audience, the expansion on that platform for dollars spent will be through the roof,” Foroughi said.

The news comes as President Trump announced he would extend the deadline a second time for TikTok’s Chinese-owned parent company ByteDance to sell the U.S. subsidiary of TikTok to an American buyer or face an effective ban on U.S. app stores. The new deadline is now in June, which, as Foroughi described, “buys more time to put the pieces together” on AppLovin’s bid. 

“The president’s a great dealmaker — we’re proposing, essentially an enhancement to the deal that they’ve been working on, but a bigger version of all the deals contemplated,” he added.

AppLovin faces a crowded field of other interested U.S. backers, including Amazon, Oracle, billionaire Frank McCourt and his Project Liberty consortium, and numerous private equity firms. Some proposals reportedly structure the deal to give a U.S. buyer 50% ownership of the company, rather than a complete acquisition. The Chinese government will still need to approve the deal, and AppLovin’s interest in purchasing TikTok in “all markets outside of China” is “preliminary,” according to an April 3 SEC filing.

Correction: A prior version of this story incorrectly characterized China’s ongoing role in TikTok should AppLovin acquire the app.

WATCH: AppLovin CEO Adam Foroughi on its bid to buy TikTok

AppLovin CEO Adam Foroughi on its bid to buy TikTok

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