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.
Elon Musk’s business empire is sprawling. It includes electric vehicle maker Tesla, social media company X, artificial intelligence startup xAI, computer interface company Neuralink, tunneling venture Boring Company and aerospace firm SpaceX.
Some of his ventures already benefit tremendously from federal contracts. SpaceX has received more than $19 billion from contracts with the federal government, according to research from FedScout. Under a second Trump presidency, more lucrative contracts could come its way. SpaceX is on track to take in billions of dollars annually from prime contracts with the federal government for years to come, according to FedScout CEO Geoff Orazem.
Musk, who has frequently blamed the government for stifling innovation, could also push for less regulation of his businesses. Earlier this month, Musk and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy were tapped by Trump to lead a government efficiency group called the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.
In a recent commentary piece in the Wall Street Journal, Musk and Ramaswamy wrote that DOGE will “pursue three major kinds of reform: regulatory rescissions, administrative reductions and cost savings.” They went on to say that many existing federal regulations were never passed by Congress and should therefore be nullified, which President-elect Trump could accomplish through executive action. Musk and Ramaswamy also championed the large-scale auditing of agencies, calling out the Pentagon for failing its seventh consecutive audit.
“The number one way Elon Musk and his companies would benefit from a Trump administration is through deregulation and defanging, you know, giving fewer resources to federal agencies tasked with oversight of him and his businesses,” says CNBC technology reporter Lora Kolodny.
To learn how else Elon Musk and his companies may benefit from having the ear of the president-elect watch the video.
Elon Musk attends the America First Policy Institute gala at Mar-A-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, Nov. 14, 2024.
Carlos Barria | Reuters
X’s new terms of service, which took effect Nov. 15, are driving some users off Elon Musk’s microblogging platform.
The new terms include expansive permissions requiring users to allow the company to use their data to train X’s artificial intelligence models while also making users liable for as much as $15,000 in damages if they use the platform too much.
The terms are prompting some longtime users of the service, both celebrities and everyday people, to post that they are taking their content to other platforms.
“With the recent and upcoming changes to the terms of service — and the return of volatile figures — I find myself at a crossroads, facing a direction I can no longer fully support,” actress Gabrielle Union posted on X the same day the new terms took effect, while announcing she would be leaving the platform.
“I’m going to start winding down my Twitter account,” a user with the handle @mplsFietser said in a post. “The changes to the terms of service are the final nail in the coffin for me.”
It’s unclear just how many users have left X due specifically to the company’s new terms of service, but since the start of November, many social media users have flocked to Bluesky, a microblogging startup whose origins stem from Twitter, the former name for X. Some users with new Bluesky accounts have posted that they moved to the service due to Musk and his support for President-elect Donald Trump.
Bluesky’s U.S. mobile app downloads have skyrocketed 651% since the start of November, according to estimates from Sensor Tower. In the same period, X and Meta’s Threads are up 20% and 42%, respectively.
X and Threads have much larger monthly user bases. Although Musk said in May that X has 600 million monthly users, market intelligence firm Sensor Tower estimates X had 318 million monthly users as of October. That same month, Meta said Threads had nearly 275 million monthly users. Bluesky told CNBC on Thursday it had reached 21 million total users this week.
Here are some of the noteworthy changes in X’s new service terms and how they compare with those of rivals Bluesky and Threads.
Artificial intelligence training
X has come under heightened scrutiny because of its new terms, which say that any content on the service can be used royalty-free to train the company’s artificial intelligence large language models, including its Grok chatbot.
“You agree that this license includes the right for us to (i) provide, promote, and improve the Services, including, for example, for use with and training of our machine learning and artificial intelligence models, whether generative or another type,” X’s terms say.
Additionally, any “user interactions, inputs and results” shared with Grok can be used for what it calls “training and fine-tuning purposes,” according to the Grok section of the X app and website. This specific function, though, can be turned off manually.
X’s terms do not specify whether users’ private messages can be used to train its AI models, and the company did not respond to a request for comment.
“You should only provide Content that you are comfortable sharing with others,” read a portion of X’s terms of service agreement.
Though X’s new terms may be expansive, Meta’s policies aren’t that different.
The maker of Threads uses “information shared on Meta’s Products and services” to get its training data, according to the company’s Privacy Center. This includes “posts or photos and their captions.” There is also no direct way for users outside of the European Union to opt out of Meta’s AI training. Meta keeps training data “for as long as we need it on a case-by-case basis to ensure an AI model is operating appropriately, safely and efficiently,” according to its Privacy Center.
Under Meta’s policy, private messages with friends or family aren’t used to train AI unless one of the users in a chat chooses to share it with the models, which can include Meta AI and AI Studio.
Bluesky, which has seen a user growth surge since Election Day, doesn’t do any generative AI training.
“We do not use any of your content to train generative AI, and have no intention of doing so,” Bluesky said in a post on its platform Friday, confirming the same to CNBC as well.
Liquidated damages
Another unusual aspect of X’s new terms is its “liquidated damages” clause. The terms state that if users request, view or access more than 1 million posts – including replies, videos, images and others – in any 24-hour period they are liable for damages of $15,000.
While most individual users won’t easily approach that threshold, the clause is concerning for some, including digital researchers. They rely on the analysis of larger numbers of public posts from services like X to do their work.
X’s new terms of service are a “disturbing move that the company should reverse,” said Alex Abdo, litigation director for the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, in an October statement.
“The public relies on journalists and researchers to understand whether and how the platforms are shaping public discourse, affecting our elections, and warping our relationships,” Abdo wrote. “One effect of X Corp.’s new terms of service will be to stifle that research when we need it most.”
Neither Threads nor Bluesky have anything similar to X’s liquidated damages clause.
Meta and X did not respond to requests for comment.
A recent Chinese cyber-espionage attack inside the nation’s major telecom networks that may have reached as high as the communications of President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President-elect J.D. Vance was designated this week by one U.S. senator as “far and away the most serious telecom hack in our history.”
The U.S. has yet to figure out the full scope of what China accomplished, and whether or not its spies are still inside U.S. communication networks.
“The barn door is still wide open, or mostly open,” Senator Mark Warner of Virginia and chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee told the New York Times on Thursday.
The revelations highlight the rising cyberthreats tied to geopolitics and nation-state actor rivals of the U.S., but inside the federal government, there’s disagreement on how to fight back, with some advocates calling for the creation of an independent federal U.S. Cyber Force. In September, the Department of Defense formally appealed to Congress, urging lawmakers to reject that approach.
Among one of the most prominent voices advocating for the new branch is the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a national security think tank, but the issue extends far beyond any single group. In June, defense committees in both the House and Senate approved measures calling for independent evaluations of the feasibility to create a separate cyber branch, as part of the annual defense policy deliberations.
Drawing on insights from more than 75 active-duty and retired military officers experienced in cyber operations, the FDD’s 40-page report highlights what it says are chronic structural issues within the U.S. Cyber Command (CYBERCOM), including fragmented recruitment and training practices across the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines.
“America’s cyber force generation system is clearly broken,” the FDD wrote, citing comments made in 2023 by then-leader of U.S. Cyber Command, Army General Paul Nakasone, who took over the role in 2018 and described current U.S. military cyber organization as unsustainable: “All options are on the table, except the status quo,” Nakasone had said.
Concern with Congress and a changing White House
The FDD analysis points to “deep concerns” that have existed within Congress for a decade — among members of both parties — about the military being able to staff up to successfully defend cyberspace. Talent shortages, inconsistent training, and misaligned missions, are undermining CYBERCOM’s capacity to respond effectively to complex cyber threats, it says. Creating a dedicated branch, proponents argue, would better position the U.S. in cyberspace. The Pentagon, however, warns that such a move could disrupt coordination, increase fragmentation, and ultimately weaken U.S. cyber readiness.
As the Pentagon doubles down on its resistance to establishment of a separate U.S. Cyber Force, the incoming Trump administration could play a significant role in shaping whether America leans toward a centralized cyber strategy or reinforces the current integrated framework that emphasizes cross-branch coordination.
Known for his assertive national security measures, Trump’s 2018 National Cyber Strategy emphasized embedding cyber capabilities across all elements of national power and focusing on cross-departmental coordination and public-private partnerships rather than creating a standalone cyber entity. At that time, the Trump’s administration emphasized centralizing civilian cybersecurity efforts under the Department of Homeland Security while tasking the Department of Defense with addressing more complex, defense-specific cyber threats. Trump’s pick for Secretary of Homeland Security, South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, has talked up her, and her state’s, focus on cybersecurity.
Former Trump officials believe that a second Trump administration will take an aggressive stance on national security, fill gaps at the Energy Department, and reduce regulatory burdens on the private sector. They anticipate a stronger focus on offensive cyber operations, tailored threat vulnerability protection, and greater coordination between state and local governments. Changes will be coming at the top of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which was created during Trump’s first term and where current director Jen Easterly has announced she will leave once Trump is inaugurated.
Cyber Command 2.0 and the U.S. military
John Cohen, executive director of the Program for Countering Hybrid Threats at the Center for Internet Security, is among those who share the Pentagon’s concerns. “We can no longer afford to operate in stovepipes,” Cohen said, warning that a separate cyber branch could worsen existing silos and further isolate cyber operations from other critical military efforts.
Cohen emphasized that adversaries like China and Russia employ cyber tactics as part of broader, integrated strategies that include economic, physical, and psychological components. To counter such threats, he argued, the U.S. needs a cohesive approach across its military branches. “Confronting that requires our military to adapt to the changing battlespace in a consistent way,” he said.
In 2018, CYBERCOM certified its Cyber Mission Force teams as fully staffed, but concerns have been expressed by the FDD and others that personnel were shifted between teams to meet staffing goals — a move they say masked deeper structural problems. Nakasone has called for a CYBERCOM 2.0, saying in comments early this year “How do we think about training differently? How do we think about personnel differently?” and adding that a major issue has been the approach to military staffing within the command.
Austin Berglas, a former head of the FBI’s cyber program in New York who worked on consolidation efforts inside the Bureau, believes a separate cyber force could enhance U.S. capabilities by centralizing resources and priorities. “When I first took over the [FBI] cyber program … the assets were scattered,” said Berglas, who is now the global head of professional services at supply chain cyber defense company BlueVoyant. Centralization brought focus and efficiency to the FBI’s cyber efforts, he said, and it’s a model he believes would benefit the military’s cyber efforts as well. “Cyber is a different beast,” Berglas said, emphasizing the need for specialized training, advancement, and resource allocation that isn’t diluted by competing military priorities.
Berglas also pointed to the ongoing “cyber arms race” with adversaries like China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. He warned that without a dedicated force, the U.S. risks falling behind as these nations expand their offensive cyber capabilities and exploit vulnerabilities across critical infrastructure.
Nakasone said in his comments earlier this year that a lot has changed since 2013 when U.S. Cyber Command began building out its Cyber Mission Force to combat issues like counterterrorism and financial cybercrime coming from Iran. “Completely different world in which we live in today,” he said, citing the threats from China and Russia.
Brandon Wales, a former executive director of the CISA, said there is the need to bolster U.S. cyber capabilities, but he cautions against major structural changes during a period of heightened global threats.
“A reorganization of this scale is obviously going to be disruptive and will take time,” said Wales, who is now vice president of cybersecurity strategy at SentinelOne.
He cited China’s preparations for a potential conflict over Taiwan as a reason the U.S. military needs to maintain readiness. Rather than creating a new branch, Wales supports initiatives like Cyber Command 2.0 and its aim to enhance coordination and capabilities within the existing structure. “Large reorganizations should always be the last resort because of how disruptive they are,” he said.
Wales says it’s important to ensure any structural changes do not undermine integration across military branches and recognize that coordination across existing branches is critical to addressing the complex, multidomain threats posed by U.S. adversaries. “You should not always assume that centralization solves all of your problems,” he said. “We need to enhance our capabilities, both defensively and offensively. This isn’t about one solution; it’s about ensuring we can quickly see, stop, disrupt, and prevent threats from hitting our critical infrastructure and systems,” he added.