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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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Joby Aviation says it is doubling production at its air taxi manufacturing hub

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July 15, 2025

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Joby Aviation says it is doubling production at its air taxi manufacturing hub

JoeBen Bevirt, founder and CEO of Joby Aviation, stands near an electric air taxi by Joby Aviation at the Downtown Manhattan Heliport in Manhattan, New York City, U.S., November 12, 2023.

Roselle Chen | Reuters

Joby Aviation is ramping up its manufacturing capabilities in the U.S. as it races to roll out air taxi service in 2026.

The electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) maker said Tuesday that it’s launching production at its remodeled components facility in Dayton, Ohio, and plans to double capacity at its Marina, California, manufacturing hub.

“Reimagining urban mobility takes speed, scale, and precision manufacturing. Our expanded manufacturing footprint in both California and Ohio is preparing us to do just that,” said product chief Eric Allison in a release.

Shares jumped more than 7%, building on a 16% year-to-date gain.

Joby Aviation and competitors such as Archer Aviation and Eve Air Mobility are aiming to roll out eVTOLs worldwide that can ease traffic congestion in crowded city centers, but they are awaiting regulatory approval.

The company is currently in the process of gaining Federal Aviation Administration approval for its vehicles.

Read more CNBC tech news

Last month, Joby Aviation shares popped on news that it delivered its first eVTOL to the United Arab Emirates, with plans to launch service in the region next year. The company agreed to an exclusive six-year deal to roll out air taxi service in Dubai last February.

Joby said the new facilities will create hundreds of new full-time jobs and underscore its commitment to fostering American innovation. At full capacity, the 435,500-square-foot California factory will manufacture as many as 24 aircraft annually.

The electric air transport company also said the opening coincided with the flight of its sixth aircraft.

Engineers from Toyota will help ramp up aircraft production to 500 annually at the Ohio facility. The companies inked a $500 million deal last year.

Shares of Joby and its competitors have ballooned in value this year as interest in the technology gains steam.

In June, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that included the creation of an air taxi testing program.

WATCH: Joby Aviation CEO on UAE delivery: This is a huge milestone for us

Joby Aviation CEO on UAE delivery: This is a huge milestone for us

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Commerce Secretary Lutnick says China is only getting Nvidia’s ‘4th best’ AI chip

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July 15, 2025

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Commerce Secretary Lutnick says China is only getting Nvidia’s ‘4th best’ AI chip

Howard Lutnick, U.S. Secretary of Commerce speaks during the Pennsylvania Energy And Innovation Summit 2025 at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh on July 15, 2025.

David A. Grogan | CNBC

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick on Tuesday said the Trump administration reversed course on allowing Nvidia to sell its AI chips to China because the U.S. company will not be giving over its best technology.

Lutnick made the remark speaking with CNBC’s Brian Sullivan, saying that Nvidia wants to sell China its “4th best” chip, which is slower than the fastest chips that U.S. companies use.

“We don’t sell them our best stuff, not our second best stuff, not even our third best,” Lutnick said.

Nvidia said Monday night that it would soon resume sales of the H20 chip to China after the Trump administration signaled that it would grant the chipmaker necessary export licenses.

Lutnick said that the administration said that the renewed sale of H20 chips to China was linked to a rare-earths magnet deal. Lutnick said it was in U.S. interests to have Chinese companies using American technology so they continue to use an American “tech stack.”

“The fourth one down, we want to keep China using it,” Lutnick said. “We want to keep having the Chinese use the American technology stack, because they still rely upon it.”

Similarly, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has said in recent weeks that the U.S. should continue selling his chips to China so Chinese companies don’t invest in homegrown infrastructure. Huang on Sunday also said that the Chinese military wouldn’t use Nvidia chips anyway, and previously signaled that China’s Huawei is a legitimate competitor.

“The idea is the Chinese are more than capable of building their own,” Lutnick said. “You want to keep one step ahead of what they can build, so they keep buying our chips.”

The reversal is a major win for Nvidia. Huang had previously said that the Trump administration’s decision to require a license for the H20 chip in April “effectively closed” the China market. Nvidia said that it could have sold $8 billion in H20 chips in the current quarter before sales were stopped.

Commerce Sec. Howard Lutnick on Indonesia trade deal: No tariffs there, they pay tariffs here

The administration reversed its decision after President Donald Trump met with Huang in Washington last week.

“You want to sell the Chinese enough that their developers get addicted to the American technology stack,” Lutnick said. “That’s the thinking.”

The H20 chip was introduced in 2022 in response to Biden administration export controls. It’s based on the same underlying technology as Nvidia’s Hopper-generation chips, which are sold in the U.S. as finished systems using H100 or H200 chips.

The U.S. chipmaker took some features out of the H20 in order to sell it to China, including fewer graphics processing unit cores and lower bandwidth connecting separate parts of the chip. But the success of the DeepSeek R1 model suggested that there were many Chinese companies that were just fine with the slowed-down chips. The China-specific H20 is behind Nvidia’s Blackwell chips, the H100 and the H200, Lutnick said.

Nvidia says that it releases new artificial intelligence chips every year and that serious AI developers should always try to get the latest and greatest versions because the technology is improving so quickly.

The best AI chips broadly available from clouds and system makers today are called Blackwell, and come as a GB200 chip with a paired central processing unit as well as B100 and B200 versions. Nvidia also makes a range of Blackwell-based chips for gaming and graphics that can be used for AI, but they’re generally weaker than the biggest chips designed for data centers.

A successor, called Blackwell Ultra, is only now starting to be installed in data centers, and it’s expected to ramp in volume over the next year. In 2027, Nvidia will release “Vera Rubin” chips.

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It’s a huge week for crypto in D.C. But the industry may not get everything it wants

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July 15, 2025

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It's a huge week for crypto in D.C. But the industry may not get everything it wants

The U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C., U.S., June 27, 2025.

Elizabeth Frantz | Reuters

It’s “Crypto Week” in Washington.

The cryptocurrency industry is set to notch a major win this week if the House can pass two bills that would set up a long-lobbied-for regulatory framework for digital assets.

The stablecoin bill, known as the GENUIS Act, has already passed the Senate and looks set to become the first standalone crypto measure signed into law should the House do the same.

But the real prize for the industry is a wider and more complex bill on market structure called the CLARITY Act, which faces a more difficult path to President Donald Trump‘s desk.

Seeking CLARITY

The CLARITY Act sets the rules for when an asset is considered a security and overseen by the Securities and Exchange Commission versus when it’s considered a commodity that is overseen by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, or CFTC.

The act is likely to pass the House on Wednesday, given the bipartisan support when the bill cleared two committees. But the path in the Senate is murky, as Democrats could withhold their support over concerns about how Trump and his family are benefiting from crypto.

The Trump family’s growing crypto empire includes $TRUMP and $MELANIA meme coins, a stablecoin, and a decentralized finance firm called World Liberty Financial, among other ventures.

Some lawmakers who backed the narrower stablecoin bill did so with the hopes of seeing the wider market structure package address conflicts of interest.

“President Trump’s crypto corruption distorts the digital asset marketplace,” said Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., who voted for the stablecoin bill. “Writing a bill with a corruption caveat for the president sends a clear message — that Congress is not serious about addressing corruption, which we know undermines investors’ faith in capital markets.”

Pushing it to pass

Coinbase attempted to literally sweeten the deal on the CLARITY Act for lawmakers with an advertising push that included handing out about 5,000 chocolate bars around D.C.

The candy wrappers cited a Morning Consult poll that found about “1 in 5” Americans own crypto.

Coinbase, Ripple and other crypto companies are lobbying Congress to put their concerns aside and back the market structure package, anticipating that more regulatory certainty will encourage more investment in crypto.

“When consumers buy and sell and trade these digital assets, they want to know what they’re getting and they want to know that they’re using a reputable intermediary,” Coinbase Vice President of U.S. Policy Kara Calvert told CNBC. “And what this bill does is provide that construct to do that.”

Read more CNBC tech news

The Senate is set to introduce its own market structure bill this month that is expected to differ slightly from the House version.

Senate Banking Chair Tim Scott, R-S.C., is working with Sen. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo., and others on the measure.

Other Democrats are planning to work with Republicans on a bill, including Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., who worked on previous market structure bills with Lummis.

“We have a lot of work to do, and we’re going to work on a bipartisan basis over the next month,” she told CNBC in a brief interview in the Capitol.

GENIUS and the Fed

The House is scheduled for a GENIUS Act vote on Thursday.

The package cleared the Senate last month with 18 Democrats joining most Republicans to support the measure.

The House stood down on their own version of the bill under pressure from Trump, who told lawmakers via a Truth Social post to “Get it to my desk, ASAP — NO DELAYS, NO ADD ONS.”  

In addition to the two major bills the crypto industry has pushed for, the House will take up a separate measure that would prevent the Federal Reserve from issuing a central bank digital currency (CBDC).

The bill is expected to pass in a vote scheduled for Wednesday.

Blockchain Association CEO Summer Mersinger said the crypto industry supports the bill.

“If this is something the private sector should do, the government should not be competing,” she said.

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