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, includinghealth 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 createa 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.”
TikTok’s grip on the short-form video market is tightening, and the world’s biggest tech platforms are racing to catch up.
Since launching globally in 2016, ByteDance-owned TikTok has amassed over 1.12 billion monthly active users worldwide, according to Backlinko. American users spend an average of 108 minutes per day on the app, according to Apptoptia.
TikTok’s success has reshaped the social media landscape, forcing competitors like Meta and Google to pivot their strategies around short-form video. But so far, experts say that none have matched TikTok’s algorithmic precision.
“It is the center of the internet for young people,” said Jasmine Enberg, vice president and principal analyst at Emarketer. “It’s where they go for entertainment, news, trends, even shopping. TikTok sets the tone for everyone else.”
Platforms like Meta‘s Instagram Reels and Google’s YouTube Shorts have expanded aggressively, launching new features, creator tools and even considering separate apps just to compete. Microsoft-owned LinkedIn, traditionally a professional networking site, is the latest to experiment with TikTok-style feeds. But with TikTok continuing to evolve, adding features like e-commerce integrations and longer videos, the question remains whether rivals can keep up.
“I’m scrolling every single day. I doom scroll all the time,” said TikTok content creator Alyssa McKay.
But there may a dark side to this growth.
As short-form content consumption soars, experts warn about shrinking attention spans and rising mental-health concerns, particularly among younger users. Researchers like Dr. Yann Poncin, associate professor at the Child Study Center at Yale University, point to disrupted sleep patterns and increased anxiety levels tied to endless scrolling habits.
“Infinite scrolling and short-form video are designed to capture your attention in short bursts,” Dr. Poncin said. “In the past, entertainment was about taking you on a journey through a show or story. Now, it’s about locking you in for just a few seconds, just enough to feed you the next thing the algorithm knows you’ll like.”
Despite sky-high engagement, monetizing short videos remains an uphill battle. Unlike long-form YouTube content, where ads can be inserted throughout, short clips offer limited space for advertisers. Creators, too, are feeling the squeeze.
“It’s never been easier to go viral,” said Enberg. “But it’s never been harder to turn that virality into a sustainable business.”
Last year, TikTok generated an estimated $23.6 billion in ad revenues, according to Oberlo, but even with this growth, many creators still make just a few dollars per million views. YouTube Shorts pays roughly four cents per 1,000 views, which is less than its long-form counterpart. Meanwhile, Instagram has leaned into brand partnerships and emerging tools like “Trial Reels,” which allow creators to experiment with content by initially sharing videos only with non-followers, giving them a low-risk way to test new formats or ideas before deciding whether to share with their full audience. But Meta told CNBC that monetizing Reels remains a work in progress.
While lawmakers scrutinize TikTok’s Chinese ownership and explore potential bans, competitors see a window of opportunity. Meta and YouTube are poised to capture up to 50% of reallocated ad dollars if TikTok faces restrictions in the U.S., according to eMarketer.
Watch the video to understand how TikTok’s rise sparked a short form video race.
The X logo appears on a phone, and the xAI logo is displayed on a laptop in Krakow, Poland, on April 1, 2025. (Photo by Klaudia Radecka/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Nurphoto | Nurphoto | Getty Images
Elon Musk‘s xAI Holdings is in discussions with investors to raise about $20 billion, Bloomberg News reported Friday, citing people familiar with the matter.
The funding would value the company at over $120 billion, according to the report.
Musk was looking to assign “proper value” to xAI, sources told CNBC’s David Faber earlier this month. The remarks were made during a call with xAI investors, sources familiar with the matter told Faber. The Tesla CEO at that time didn’t explicitly mention any upcoming funding round, but the sources suggested xAI was preparing for a substantial capital raise in the near future.
The funding amount could be more than $20 billion as the exact figure had not been decided, the Bloomberg report added.
Artificial intelligence startup xAI didn’t immediately respond to a CNBC request for comment outside of U.S. business hours.
The AI firm last month acquired X in an all-stock deal that valued xAI at $80 billion and the social media platform at $33 billion.
“xAI and X’s futures are intertwined. Today, we officially take the step to combine the data, models, compute, distribution and talent,” Musk said on X, announcing the deal. “This combination will unlock immense potential by blending xAI’s advanced AI capability and expertise with X’s massive reach.”
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai during the Google I/O developers conference in Mountain View, California, on May 10, 2023.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Alphabet‘s stock gained 3% Friday after signaling strong growth in its search and advertising businesses amid a competitive artificial intelligence environment and uncertain macro backdrop.
“GOOGL‘s pace of GenAI product roll-out is accelerating with multiple encouraging signals,” wrote Morgan Stanley‘s Brian Nowak. “Macro uncertainty still exists but we remain [overweight] given GOOGL’s still strong relative position and improving pace of GenAI enabled product roll-out.”
The search giant posted earnings of $2.81 per share on $90.23 billion in revenues. That topped the $89.12 billion in sales and $2.01 in EPS expected by LSEG analysts. Revenues grew 12% year-over-year and ahead of the 10% anticipated by Wall Street.
Net income rose 46% to $34.54 billion, or $2.81 per share. That’s up from $23.66 billion, or $1.89 per share, in the year-ago period. Alphabet said the figure included $8 billion in unrealized gains on its nonmarketable equity securities connected to its investment in a private company.
Adjusted earnings, excluding that gain, were $2.27 per share, according to LSEG, and topped analyst expectations.
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Alphabet shares have pulled back about 16% this year as it battles volatility spurred by mounting trade war fears and worries that President Donald Trump‘s tariffs could crush the global economy. That would make it more difficult for Alphabet to potentially acquire infrastructure for data centers powering AI models as it faces off against competitors such as OpenAI and Anthropic to develop largely language models.
During Thursday’s call with investors, Alphabet suggested that it’s too soon to tally the total impact of tariffs. However, Google’s business chief Philipp Schindler said that ending the de minimis trade exemption in May, which created a loophole benefitting many Chinese e-commerce retailers, could create a “slight headwind” for the company’s ads business, specifically in the Asia-Pacific region. The loophole allows shipments under $800 to come into the U.S. duty-free.
Despite this backdrop, Alphabet showed steady growth in its advertising and search business, reporting $66.89 billion in revenues for its advertising unit. That reflected 8.5% growth from the year-ago period. The company reported $8.93 billion in advertising revenue for its YouTube business, shy of an $8.97 billion estimate from StreetAccount.
Alphabet’s “Search and other” unit rose 9.8% to $50.7 billion, up from $46.16 billion last year. The company said that its AI Overviews tool used in its Google search results page has accumulated 1.5 billion monthly users from a billion in October.
Bank of America analyst Justin Post said that Wall Street is underestimating the upside potential and “monetization ramp” from this tool and cloud demand fueled by AI.
“The strong 1Q search performance, along with constructive comments on Gemini [large language model] performance and [AI Overviews] adoption could help alleviate some investor concerns on AI competition,” Post wrote in a note.
