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The Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, Ohio, U.S., on Saturday, Nov. 14, 2020. On Sunday, the Ohio Department of Health reported a total of 298,096 cases in Ohio since the pandemic began, leading to 5,722 deaths and 22,265 hospitalizations. Photographer: Dustin Franz/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Earlier this spring, the emergency department at the Cleveland Clinic told Dr. Rita Pappas it had a problem. 

The Cleveland Clinic is the largest hospital system in Ohio, but after an influx of patients came in, the emergency department did not believe it could accommodate all the people who would need care. 

Pappas, the Cleveland Clinic’s medical director for the admission and transfer center, disagreed. 

The Cleveland Clinic was in the midst of trying new AI-powered software from Palantir. The system was predicting that there would be a large number of discharges that day, meaning there would be enough space for all the incoming patients. 

Pappas and her team convinced the emergency department to give Palantir’s platform a chance, and — to her relief — the new system worked. 

“It was perfect. We were able to accommodate all the patients, and so everyone was cheering, they were so happy,” Pappas, who also practices clinically as a pediatric hospitalist, told CNBC in an interview. “Everyone got really excited. I was very excited because I do not want to have the emergency department yelling at me.”

Ordinarily, Pappas said managing patient flow in a similar scenario would require constant communication, every hour throughout the night. But by accurately predicting patient discharges, Palantir’s system saved Pappas, her team and the emergency department a lot of time and effort.

Palantir partnered with two health-care systems, Cleveland Clinic and Tampa General Hospital in Florida, during the summer of 2021 to develop software called Palantir for Hospital Operations. Now, just two years later, the company says its hospital-operations platform accounts for around 10% of its commercial revenue in the U.S.

The software translates complex data into digestible information that health-care workers can use to guide their decision-making and resource allocation. It can be used to generate real-time and predictive insights into areas like staffing, wait times and hospital-bed assignments.

Shyam Sankar, the company’s chief technology officer, said he thinks Palantir for Hospital Operations is just getting started. 

“I’m so excited that we’re at 13% of beds in the U.S., but you know, like 90% of the work is in front of us here,” Sankar told CNBC in an interview. 

A race against the clock

Palantir specializes in data analytics, and shares of the company are up around 150% so far this year as bullish AI investors are buying into its tech offerings. The company reported its first quarterly net profit for Q4 2022, and Palantir CEO Alex Karp said in a May letter to shareholders that the company expects to remain profitable “each quarter through the end of the year,” and that demand for its new Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP) is “without precedent.”

The company is perhaps best known for its work with the U.S. government’s defense and intelligence agencies, but despite its high-profile customers in government, Sankar said Palantir works to tackle hard challenges across a variety of industries, including health care — a field that experts widely believe is in crisis. 

Hospital360 within Palantir for Hospital Operations

Palantir

Nurses and physicians are experiencing high levels of burnout, and staffing shortages across the country have made it difficult for hospital systems to keep up with patient demand. These challenges were magnified by the Covid pandemic, as nearly 63% of physicians reported symptoms of burnout in 2021, up from 38% the prior year, according to a recent study co-authored by the American Medical Association.

Companies across the medical and technology fields have been working to build solutions that could bring health-care workers some relief. But unless the new platforms, tools and services can be easily integrated into workflows, physicians and nurses often find they can be more trouble than they’re worth. 

“If you don’t build it in the workflow of the user, it actually doesn’t get used, it just sits on the shelf,” Dr. Peggy Duggan, executive vice president and chief medical officer of Tampa General, told CNBC in an interview.  

As such, in the summer of 2021, a team of four Palantir employees set out to create a meaningful solution that health-care workers at Cleveland Clinic and Tampa General could actually use. It was a daunting challenge, and there was an additional catch: They were only given a matter of weeks to build something worthwhile.

Drew Goldstein and Jeremy David, co-heads of health care at Palantir

Courtesy: Palantir

Drew Goldstein and Jeremy David led Palantir’s team of four, and they now run its fast-growing U.S. commercial health-care team. The pair said they were given around 12 weeks to build a solution for Tampa General, and their work in Florida was already underway when the Cleveland Clinic’s chief information officer called to give them an even shorter timeline: eight weeks. 

“For better or for worse, I’m quite hopeful and optimistic,” David said in an interview with CNBC. “I was like, ‘Eight weeks? We can get something live in three.'” 

David, Goldstein and their two teammates took an intense, hands-on approach to building their hospital-operations software. 

They spent their allotted time on the ground in the hospitals in both Ohio and Florida, shadowing doctors and nurses during their shifts, even overnight. They asked questions about existing workflows and tried to grasp the biggest pain points for each organization, an experience Goldstein said was both “overwhelming” and “exciting.” 

To their surprise, the Palantir team learned that hospital staff were carrying out some of their operations by manually entering data into spreadsheets and configuring information like scheduling on paper and whiteboards. 

The Palantir team also became acquainted with whiteboards, as Goldstein said much of their early efforts in Ohio were spent trying to draw out existing workflows with hospital-operations leadership. 

“It was so foundational in our understanding of what these problems could look like,” Goldstein told CNBC in an interview.

At the Cleveland Clinic, the Palantir team initially focused on addressing challenges related to patient flow, particularly around accelerating aspects of the patient-discharge process, while they trained their focus on clinical-staffing allocation at Tampa General. But before long, Goldstein said it became clear the health systems shared both of those problems.  

“So then, instead of just building these completely separately, we started to think about, like, what should the product look like to be able to solve this?” Goldstein said.

When their work was done in Florida and Ohio, Palantir’s team had what amounted to an early iteration of Palantir for Hospital Operations. David said it was the product of several 100-hour weeks where he and Goldstein, who have become good friends, often lived in adjoining hotel rooms. 

“Drew didn’t like that,” David joked. “[I’d] knock on his door, ‘Good morning, Sunshine!'” 

David said the team’s hands-on approach was essential in order to understand what support health-care workers truly needed. 

“If you treat the nurses and patients like widgets, you’re going to lose,” David said. “For about two weeks, we tried to treat them like widgets, and we lost.”

The group presented their work to hospital leadership through a series of demos and testimonials, and David said it was clear the health systems believed Palantir had created something special. 

Their next challenge, Goldstein said, was to keep building and execute on a broader, longer-term vision. 

A new tool for hospital staff: ‘They love it’

The Cleveland Clinic officially launched Palantir’s platform in March. 

Pappas said the hospital system had considered working with other companies, but that the Palantir team stood out because they truly listened to the staff’s needs. 

She said the Cleveland Clinic wanted help building a system that could optimize the number of patients staff could see, while also ensuring that they were all being cared for safely. Pappas said Palantir’s engineers not only took their concerns seriously but got psyched when they were able to build successful solutions.

“It sounds silly, but everyone had this, ‘Oh, we did it!’ moment,” she said. 

As the medical director for the admission and transfer center, Pappas works with a bed-management team to place patients throughout the hospital. Prior to using Palantir’s platform, they relied on Microsoft Teams and Excel spreadsheets to carry out their operations. 

Now, Pappas said they have easy access to both real-time and predictive insights on the number of patients coming into the hospital’s operating rooms, emergency department and as direct admissions, which are patients who receive treatments like chemotherapy. 

“The system is actually learning and taking information, and it’s very accurate,” she said. “It serves as a command center so that we can see very clearly how many patients we are going to be caring for every day.”

Since the official launch of Palantir’s software on March 1, the Cleveland Clinic main campus has been able to accept an 8% increase in patient transfers from other hospitals. 

In fact, Palantir’s system proved to be so useful that Pappas said some members of her team expressed fear that they were going to be replaced by it. Once she reassured them that the platform is just meant to serve as a tool, she said they’ve grown to love it. 

“They’ve developed a trust in the system,” Pappas said. “People in health care are kind of conservative, you know, don’t like change, and so the fact that they trusted and are using it now really just says to us that it’s a successful venture for us.”

Schedule review within Palantir for Hospital Operations

Palantir

Duggan said staff at Tampa General, particularly nurses, are also very fond of Palantir’s technology. She acknowledged that it is still the “early days” of the partnership, but the software company passed its first test by building a staffing model that nursing managers can use to find team members who are available for shifts. Duggan said this process is often conducted manually, so automating it has saved Tampa General’s staff significant time and energy. 

“The nurse leaders love it,” she said. “It’s right in their workflow; it makes their day easier and they love it. They love all that technology support.” 

Duggan said once the Palantir team managed to solve the staffing problem, it was clear the company would be able to use its software to tackle challenges across several different areas of the hospital. Palantir is now working on a series of projects at Tampa General, and Duggan said she is particularly impressed by how it is helping clinicians handle cases of sepsis, the No. 1 killer in hospitals nationwide. 

Sepsis occurs when a patient’s body has an extreme response to an infection. Once diagnosed, Duggan said patients have to stay on a pathway of treatment over the next few days in order to increase chances of survival. 

Palantir built a monitoring system for the sepsis pathway at Tampa General, which helps the clinicians ensure the patients are getting the care they need. She said it can also help provide insights as to why a patient might not have received antibiotics, for instance. 

Duggan said it is new but exciting territory, and it has allowed Tampa General to identify variability in some of its most important work.   

“Our work in sepsis definitely has decreased early mortality by about half, and so that’s real lifesaving,” she said. “I tell people that it’s people’s mothers, sisters, cousins, right? That’s real lifesaving for sure.”

Meanwhile, Palantir’s commercial health-care team has ballooned from four employees to more than 50, and Goldstein said the rapid growth has been unexpectedly challenging to learn to manage. 

But as they plan to partner with more health systems, expand their own team and continue to refine their technology in the years ahead, David said the potential for innovation makes for a truly exciting time. 

“I think we really solved this core problem, where it’s like, OK, a health system actually can deploy this really transformative platform technology to the front lines of health care,” he said. “There’s this old trope that’s like banks and hospitals don’t adopt technology — that is definitively not true anymore.”

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Tesla’s Model Y debuts in India priced at a hefty $70,000 as the EV maker ‘tests the waters’

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Tesla’s Model Y debuts in India priced at a hefty ,000 as the EV maker 'tests the waters'

In this photo illustration, logo of Tesla is displayed on a mobile phone screen in front of the Indian flag in Ankara, Turkiye on November 28, 2023.

Cem Genco | Anadolu | Getty Images

Tesla has made its long-awaited debut in India, where it will sell its electric SUV, the Model Y, starting at $69,770, a significant markup from other major markets, its website showed Tuesday. 

The sales launch comes the same day the American electric vehicle maker opened a showroom in Mumbai, its first in the country. 

Isabel Fan, Southeast Asia Director at Tesla, also announced that the company would soon launch a showroom in the Indian capital of New Delhi, according to a report from CNBC-TV18

The report added that Tesla would hire staff locally and set up experience centers, service centers, delivery systems, charging stations and logistics hubs throughout the country. 

There has long been speculation about when Tesla would enter India, the third-largest automotive market in the world by sales. However, the high price tag may come as a surprise to many. For example, the Model Y starts from $44,990 in the U.S.

Why are prices so high?

Vaibhav Taneja, Tesla’s Chief Financial Officer, in April, confirmed the company’s interest in India but said it would take a careful approach to the market considering its 70% tariff on EV imports and about 30% luxury tax. 

These high taxes explain why Tesla was forced to set its prices so high in India, despite the country’s preference for EVs at much lower price ranges.

Experts told CNBC that this will see Tesla in India compete in the premium segment of the market with the likes of BMW, rather than with local EV companies like Tata Motors

“I won’t say that these prices are completely out of range because you will find buyers in India for all price points,” Vivek Vaidya, global client leader for mobility at research firm Frost & Sullivan, told CNBC’s “Inside India” on Tuesday.

“The question is whether they are going to threaten the mass market. The answer to that is no because the most popular selling cars probably sell at one-tenth of this price,” he added. 

Tesla's entry into India will not threaten domestic mass market: Analyst

Testing the waters

While the Model Y will struggle to be price competitive, Tesla is likely more focused on “testing the waters” than generating sales in India, Puneet Gupta, Director for the Indian automotive market at S&P Global Mobility, told CNBC.  

India first announced a new EV policy last year that promised to reduce duties for companies that commit to building up a local supply chain. While this could help Tesla push its prices down, the company has yet to commit to building any local manufacturing plants in India.

“The Mumbai showroom is a strategic ‘soft power’ move, not a full commitment,” Diwakar Murugan, automotives analyst at Canalys, told CNBC in a statement, adding that Tesla’s hesitation in India is pragmatic, as the market still lacks the demand to justify a large-scale manufacturing facility. 

“Shifting a significant portion of its production to India would require a major re-evaluation of its global manufacturing strategy, something it’s not ready to do while its primary focus remains on scaling production in its established markets,” he said. 

Murugan predicted that Tesla may only commit to full-scale Indian manufacturing between 2028 and 2030, with incentives like land subsidies and tax holidays, as well as the maturity of the local battery market expected to be important factors.

In the meantime, the Model Y will be a “niche, limited-volume product for wealthy, tech-savvy early adopters who seek a status symbol,” he added.

S&P’s Gupta noted that India’s tariffs on EV exports could also soon change as a result of ongoing trade negotiations between Washington and New Delhi, as well as further tweaks to its EV policy. 

Tesla CEO Elon Musk spoke with India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi on topics including collaboration on technology and innovation in April.

“The Indian government has been very proactive in terms of pushing green, cleaner, electric cars, and I think that Tesla has a clear advantage due to the India-U.S. relationship,” Gupta said. 

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Nvidia says U.S. government will allow it to resume H20 AI chip sales to China

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Nvidia says U.S. government will allow it to resume H20 AI chip sales to China

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang attends a roundtable discussion at the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris on June 11, 2025.

Sarah Meyssonnier | Reuters

Nvidia announced Tuesday that it hopes to resume sales of its H20 general processing units to clients in China, saying that the U.S. government had assured the company would be granted licenses.

Nvidia’s sales of the H20 chips, which had been designed specifically to keep them out of export controls on China, were halted in April.

“The U.S. government has assured NVIDIA that licenses will be granted, and NVIDIA hopes to start deliveries soon,” the company said in a statement.

This comes against the backdrop of a preliminary trade deal between Washington and Beijing last month that sought China to resume rare earth exports and the U.S. to relax tech export controls.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in recent months has ramped up his lobbying against export controls, arguing that they inhibited American tech leadership. In May, Huang said chip restrictions had already cut Nvidia’s China market share nearly in half.

Huang also announced a new “fully compliant” GPU, NVIDIA RTX PRO, saying it was ideal for smart factories and logistics.

The potential change in U.S. stance follows a meeting between Huang and U.S. President Donald Trump last week.

In his meeting with Trump and U.S. policymakers, Huang had reaffirmed Nvidia’s support for the administration’s job creation and onshoring efforts, as well as the aim for America to lead in global AI, the company said.

Meanwhile, in Beijing, it was confirmed that Huang has met with government and industry officials to discuss the benefits of AI and ways for researchers to advance safe and secure AI for the benefit of all. 

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Cognition to buy AI startup Windsurf days after Google poached CEO in $2.4 billion licensing deal

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Cognition to buy AI startup Windsurf days after Google poached CEO in .4 billion licensing deal

In this photo illustration, a man seen holding a smartphone with the logo of US artificial intelligence company Cognition AI Inc. in front of website.

Timon Schneider | SOPA Images | Sipa USA | AP

Artificial intelligence startup Cognition announced it’s acquiring Windsurf, the AI coding company that lost its CEO and several other senior employees to Google just days earlier.

Cognition said on Monday that it will purchase Windsurf’s intellectual property, product, trademark, brand and talent, but didn’t disclose terms of the deal. It’s the latest development in an AI talent war, as companies like Meta, Google and OpenAI fiercely compete for top engineers and researchers.

OpenAI had been in talks to acquire Windsurf for about $3 billion in April, but the deal fell apart, and Google said on Friday that it hired Windsurf’s co-founder and CEO Varun Mohan. Google is paying $2.4 billion in licensing fees and for compensation, as CNBC previously reported.

“Every new employee of Cognition will be treated the same way as existing employees: with transparency, fairness, and deep respect for their abilities and value,” Cognition CEO Scott Wu wrote in a memo to employees on Monday. “After today, our efforts will be as a united and aligned team. There’s only one boat and we’re all in it together.”

Cognition didn’t immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment. Windsurf directed CNBC to Cognition.

Cognition is best known for its AI coding agent named Devin, which is designed to help engineers build software faster. As of March, the startup had raised hundreds of millions of dollars at a valuation of close to $4 billion, according to a report from Bloomberg.

Both companies are backed by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund. Other investors in Windsurf include Greenoaks, Kleiner Perkins and General Catalyst.

“I’m overwhelmed with excitement and optimism, but most of all, gratitude,” Jeff Wang, the interim CEO of Windsurf, wrote in a post on X on Monday. “Trying times reveal character, and I couldn’t be prouder of how every single person at Windsurf showed up these last three days for each other and for our users.”

Wu said that the acquisition ensures all Windsurf employees are “treated with respect and well taken care of in this transaction.” All employees will participate financially in the deal, have vesting cliffs waived for their work to date and receive fully accelerated vesting for their, according to the memo.

“There’s never been a more exciting time to build,” Wu wrote.

WATCH: Google snatches Windsurf CEO after OpenAI deal dissolves

Google snatches Windsurf CEO after OpenAI deal dissolves

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