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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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Nvidia to join Dow Jones Industrial Average, replacing rival chipmaker Intel

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Nvidia to join Dow Jones Industrial Average, replacing rival chipmaker Intel

CEO of Nvidia, Jensen Huang, speaks during the launch of the supercomputer Gefion, where the new AI supercomputer has been established in collaboration with EIFO and NVIDIA at Vilhelm Lauritzen Terminal in Kastrup, Denmark October 23, 2024.

Ritzau Scanpix | Mads Claus Rasmussen | Via Reuters

Nvidia is replacing rival chipmaker Intel in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, a shakeup to the blue-chip index that reflects the boom in artificial intelligence and a major shift in the semiconductor industry.

Intel shares were down 1% in extended trading on Friday. Nvidia shares rose 1%.

The switch will take place on Nov. 8. Also, Sherwin Williams will replace Dow Inc. in the index, S&P Dow Jones said in a statement.

Nvidia shares have climbed over 170% so far in 2024 after jumping roughly 240% last year, as investors have rushed to get a piece of the AI chipmaker. Nvidia’s market cap has swelled to $3.3 trillion, second only to Apple among publicly traded companies.

Companies including Microsoft, Meta, Google and Amazon are purchasing Nvidia’s graphics processing units (GPUs), such as the H100, in massive quantities to build clusters of computers for their AI work. Nvidia’s revenue has more than doubled in each of the past five quarters, and has at least tripled in three of them. The company has sginaled that demand for its next-generation AI GPU called Blackwell is “insane.”

With the addition of Nvidia, four of the six trillion-dollar tech companies are now in the index. The two not in the Dow are Alphabet and Meta.

While Nvidia has been soaring, Intel has been slumping. Long the dominant maker of PC chips, Intel has lost market share to Advanced Micro Devices and has made very little headway in AI. Intel shares have fallen by more than half this year as the company struggles with manufacturing challenges and new competition for its central processors.

Intel said in a filing this week that the board’s audit and finance committee approved cost and capital reduction activities, including lowering head count by 16,500 employees and reducing its real estate footprint. The job cuts were originally announced in August.

The Dow contains 30 components and is weighted by the share price of the individual stocks instead of total market value. Nvidia put itself in better position to join the index in May, when the company announced a 10-for-1 stock split. While doing nothing to its market cap, the move slashed the price of each share by 90%, allowing the company to become a part of the Dow without having too heavy a weighting.

The switch is the first change to the index since February, when Amazon replaced Walgreens Boots Alliance. Over the years, the Dow has been playing catchup in gaining exposure to the largest technology companies. The stocks in the index are chosen by a committee from S&P Dow Jones Indices.

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Super Micro’s 44% plunge this week wipes out stock’s gains for the year

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Super Micro's 44% plunge this week wipes out stock's gains for the year

Charles Liang, chief executive officer of Super Micro Computer Inc., during the Computex conference in Taipei, Taiwan, on Wednesday, June 5, 2024. The trade show runs through June 7. 

Annabelle Chih | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Super Micro investors continued to rush the exits on Friday, pushing the stock down another 9% and bringing this week’s selloff to 44%, after the data center company lost its second auditor in less than two years.

The company’s shares fell as low as $26.23, wiping out all of the gains for 2024. Shares had peaked at $118.81 in March, at which point they were up more than fourfold for the year. Earlier that month, S&P Dow Jones added the stock to the S&P 500, and Wall Street was rallying around the company’s growth, driven by sales of servers packed with Nvidia’s artificial intelligence processors.

Super Micro’s spectacular collapse since March has wiped out roughly $55 billion in market cap and left the company at risk of being delisted from the Nasdaq. On Wednesday, as the stock was in the midst of its second-worst day ever, Super Micro said it will provide a “business update” regarding its latest quarter on Tuesday, which is Election Day in the U.S.

The company’s recent challenges date back to August, when Super Micro said it would not file its annual report on time with the SEC. Noted short seller Hindenburg Research then disclosed a short position in the company and wrote in a report that it identified “fresh evidence of accounting manipulation.” The Wall Street Journal later reported that the Department of Justice was in the early stages of a probe into the company.

Super Micro disclosed on Wednesday that Ernst & Young had resigned as its accounting firm just 17 months after taking over from Deloitte & Touche. The auditor said it was “unwilling to be associated with the financial statements prepared by management.”

A Super Micro spokesperson told CNBC that the company “disagrees with E&Y’s decision to resign, and we are working diligently to select new auditors.” Super Micro does not expect matters raised by Ernst & Young to “result in any restatements of its quarterly financial results for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2024, or for prior fiscal years,” the representative said.

Analysts at Argus Research on Thursday downgraded the stock in the intermediate term to a hold, citing the Hindenburg note, reports of the Justice Department investigation and the departure of Super Micro’s accounting firm, which the analysts called a “serious matter.” Argus’ fears go beyond accounting irregularities, with the firm suggesting that the company may be doing business with problematic entities.

“The DoJ’s concerns, in our view, may be mainly about related-party transactions and about SMCI products ending up in the hands of sanctioned Russian companies,” the analysts wrote.

In September, the month after announcing its filing delay, Super Micro said it had received a notification from the Nasdaq indicating that its late status meant the company wasn’t in compliance with the exchange’s listing rules. Super Micro said the Nasdaq’s rules allowed the company 60 days to file its report or submit a plan to regain compliance. Based on that timeframe, the deadline would be mid-November.

Though Super Micro hasn’t filed financials with the SEC since May, the company said in an August earnings presentation that revenue more than doubled for a third straight quarter. Analysts expect that, for the fiscal first quarter ended September, revenue jumped more than 200% to $6.45 billion, according to LSEG. That’s up from $2.1 billion a year earlier and $1.9 billion in the same fiscal quarter of 2023.

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Apple to buy Pixelmator, the iPhone image editing app with AI features

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Apple to buy Pixelmator, the iPhone image editing app with AI features

Peopl walk outside Steve Jobs Theater at the Apple Park campus before Apple’s “It’s Glowtime” event in Cupertino, California, on Sept. 9, 2024.

Nic Coury | AFP | Getty Images

Apple will buy Pixelmator, the creator of image editing apps for Apple’s iPhone and Mac platforms, Pixelmator announced Friday in a blog post.

Pixelmator, a Lithuanian company, was founded in 2007, and in recent years has been best known for Pixelmator and Pixelmator Pro, which compete with Adobe Photoshop. It also makes Photomator, a photo editing app.

Apple has highlighted Pixelmator apps over the years in its keynote product launches. In 2018, Apple named Pixelmator Pro its Mac App of the year, citing the company’s enthusiastic embrace of Apple’s machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities, such as removing distracting objects from photos or making automated color adjustments.

We’ve been inspired by Apple since day one, crafting our products with the same razor-sharp focus on design, ease of use, and performance,” Pixelmator said in its blog post.

Apple does not acquire as many large companies as its Silicon Valley rivals. It prefers to make smaller acquisitions of companies with products or people that it can use to create Apple features. Neither Pixelmator nor Apple provided a price for the transaction.

Pixelmator said in its blog post that there “will be no material changes to the Pixelmator Pro, Pixelmator for iOS, and Photomator apps at this time.”

Earlier this week, Apple released the first version of Apple Intelligence, a suite of features that includes photo editing abilities such as Clean Up, which can remove people or objects from photos using AI.

Apple has acquired other popular apps that received accolades at the company’s product launches and awards ceremonies.

In 2020, Apple bought Dark Sky, a weather app that eventually became integrated into Apple’s default weather app. In 2017, it bought Workflow, an automation and macro app that eventually became Shortcuts, the iPhone’s scripting app, as well as the groundwork for a more capable Siri assistant.

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