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Meta said Wednesday evening that the personal calls and chats of every Messenger user will be encrypted by default, representing a major privacy update that makes the service more similar to its sibling WhatsApp.

Because of the encryption technology “nobody, including Meta, can see what’s sent or said, unless you choose to report a message to us,” Loredana Crisan, the head of Messenger, wrote in an accompanying blog post.

Crisan said that it will take an unspecified amount of time for Meta to encrypt all Messenger chats, and that the company relied on several “cryptographic principles” to inform its strategy, including one developed in-house and another that’s utilized by the popular Signal encrypted messaging app.

Since 2016, Messenger users could choose, or opt-in, to safeguarding their chats via a process referred to as end-to-end encryption, which scrambles peoples’ communications so that third-parties can’t eavesdrop and access the data. Although Meta’s other messaging app, WhatsApp, also utilizes end-to-end encryption, privacy advocates have generally considered Signal to be a more secure communication service because it collects less user data.

“After years of work rebuilding Messenger, we’ve updated the app with default end-to-end encryption for all personal calls and messages,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post on Wednesday. “Huge congrats to the team on making this happen.”

In 2019, Zuckerberg said the social networking company would bring encryption technology to all private communications in its family of apps, underscoring a major privacy push that the executive attributed to changing consumer habits in which people “want to connect privately in the digital equivalent of the living room.”

“I believe the future of communication will increasingly shift to private, encrypted services where people can be confident what they say to each other stays secure and their messages and content won’t stick around forever,” Zuckerberg said at the time.

Zuckerberg detailed his more privacy centric vision for Facebook following a string of data-privacy blunders, including the Cambridge Analytica scandal which damaged the company’s reputation.

Over the years, Meta debuted more privacy related updates, including letting some Instagram users in a few countries opt-in to having their direct messages encrypted via a test in 2021.

In 2022, Meta conducted a test on Messenger that let users back up their end-to-end encrypted conversations in case they needed to access them on another device. Although the test came shortly after the social networking company provided Messenger chat histories to Nebraska law enforcement investigating an alleged illegal abortion in the state, a Meta spokesperson said at the time that they were unrelated.

Meta’s latest encryption announcement will likely add to an ongoing debate involving privacy and the ability of law enforcement to conduct investigations, as exemplified in 2016 when the Federal Bureau of Investigation wanted Apple to develop software to help then unlock the iPhone of suspects that were part of a major shooting in San Bernardino, California. Apple refused to comply, saying at the time “The same engineers who built strong encryption into the iPhone to protect our users would, ironically, be ordered to weaken those protections and make our users less safe.”

More recently, leaders at WhatsApp and Signal said their services would no longer be available in the United Kingdom if the lawmakers enacted laws that would weaken encryption. The U.K. government claimed that Meta’s encryption push would make it more difficult to detect online child abuse activities.  

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Musk says Tesla is expanding Austin robotaxi service, adding Grok to cars

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Musk says Tesla is expanding Austin robotaxi service, adding Grok to cars

Tesla CEO Elon Musk attends an opening ceremony for Tesla China-made Model Y program in Shanghai, China, on Jan. 7, 2020.

Aly Song | Reuters

Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the company is expanding its robotaxi service area and bringing xAI’s Grok to vehicles as it rolled out a new iteration of the artificial intelligence chatbot.

Shares gained about 3%.

Musk said on X that Grok, his AI chatbot that praised Adolf Hitler and posted a barrage of antisemitic comments recently, will be available in Tesla vehicles “next week at the latest.”

xAI officially launched the Grok 4 update overnight as the company continued to face backlash for the vitriol written by the chatbot.

In response to a user post on his social media platform X, Musk said the company is expanding its Austin, Texas robotaxi service area this weekend. He also said Tesla is awaiting regulatory approval for a launch in the Bay Area “probably in a month or two.”

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The expansion of robotaxi and Grok integration comes at a fraught time for Musk and his empire.

Tesla set its annual shareholder meeting for Nov. 6, a Thursday filing showed. A group of investors recently called on the electric vehicle company to schedule the meeting.

Its last shareholder meeting was in June 2024, as Musk established himself as a major backer of President Donald Trump‘s reelection campaign. Musk later led the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency, known as DOGE.

After stepping down from DOGE at the end of May, Musk has openly feuded with Trump on social media over the major tax bill, with the president suggesting the government look at cutting contracts for Musk’s companies.

Shares have tanked from their post-election high over investor concerns that the public fight could hamper Tesla. Slowing sales and rising competition also stifled some investor appetite.

Tesla shares fell Monday, with the company losing $68 billion in value after Musk continued to blast Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” and said he was establishing his own political party, the “America Party.”

The world’s richest man suffered another blow Wednesday when Linda Yaccarino stepped down as CEO of his social media platform X, leaving the role after a turbulent two years for the company.

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Amazon Web Services is building equipment to cool Nvidia GPUs as AI boom accelerates

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Amazon Web Services is building equipment to cool Nvidia GPUs as AI boom accelerates

The letters AI, which stands for “artificial intelligence,” stand at the Amazon Web Services booth at the Hannover Messe industrial trade fair in Hannover, Germany, on March 31, 2025.

Julian Stratenschulte | Picture Alliance | Getty Images

Amazon said Wednesday that its cloud division has developed hardware to cool down next-generation Nvidia graphics processing units that are used for artificial intelligence workloads.

Nvidia’s GPUs, which have powered the generative AI boom, require massive amounts of energy. That means companies using the processors need additional equipment to cool them down.

Amazon considered erecting data centers that could accommodate widespread liquid cooling to make the most of these power-hungry Nvidia GPUs. But that process would have taken too long, and commercially available equipment wouldn’t have worked, Dave Brown, vice president of compute and machine learning services at Amazon Web Services, said in a video posted to YouTube.

“They would take up too much data center floor space or increase water usage substantially,” Brown said. “And while some of these solutions could work for lower volumes at other providers, they simply wouldn’t be enough liquid-cooling capacity to support our scale.”

Rather, Amazon engineers conceived of the In-Row Heat Exchanger, or IRHX, that can be plugged into existing and new data centers. More traditional air cooling was sufficient for previous generations of Nvidia chips.

Customers can now access the AWS service as computing instances that go by the name P6e, Brown wrote in a blog post. The new systems accompany Nvidia’s design for dense computing power. Nvidia’s GB200 NVL72 packs a single rack with 72 Nvidia Blackwell GPUs that are wired together to train and run large AI models.

Computing clusters based on Nvidia’s GB200 NVL72 have previously been available through Microsoft or CoreWeave. AWS is the world’s largest supplier of cloud infrastructure.

Amazon has rolled out its own infrastructure hardware in the past. The company has custom chips for general-purpose computing and for AI, and designed its own storage servers and networking routers. In running homegrown hardware, Amazon depends less on third-party suppliers, which can benefit the company’s bottom line. In the first quarter, AWS delivered the widest operating margin since at least 2014, and the unit is responsible for most of Amazon’s net income.

Microsoft, the second largest cloud provider, has followed Amazon’s lead and made strides in chip development. In 2023, the company designed its own systems called Sidekicks to cool the Maia AI chips it developed.

WATCH: AWS announces latest CPU chip, will deliver record networking speed

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Bitcoin rises to fresh record above $112,000, helped by Nvidia-led tech rally

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Bitcoin rises to fresh record above 2,000, helped by Nvidia-led tech rally

The logo of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin can be seen on a coin in front of a Bitcoin chart.

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Bitcoin hit a fresh record on Wednesday afternoon as an Nvidia-led rally in equities helped push the price of the cryptocurrency higher into the stock market close.

The price of bitcoin was last up 1.9%, trading at $110,947.49, according to Coin Metrics. Just before 4:00 p.m. ET, it hit a high of $112,052.24, surpassing its May 22 record of $111,999.

The flagship cryptocurrency has been trading in a tight range for several weeks despite billions of dollars flowing into bitcoin exchange traded funds. Bitcoin purchases by public companies outpaced ETF inflows in the second quarter. Still, bitcoin is up just 2% in the past month.

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Bitcoin climbs above $112,000

On Wednesday, tech stocks rallied as Nvidia became the first company to briefly touch $4 trillion in market capitalization. In the same session, investors appeared to shrug off the latest tariff developments from President Donald Trump. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite notched a record close.

While institutions broadly have embraced bitcoin’s “digital gold” narrative, it is still a risk asset that rises and falls alongside stocks depending on what’s driving investor sentiment. When the market is in risk-on mode and investors buy growth-oriented assets like tech stocks, bitcoin and crypto tend to rally with them.

Investors have been expecting bitcoin to reach new records in the second half of the year as corporate treasuries accelerate their bitcoin buying sprees and Congress gets closer to passing crypto legislation.

Don’t miss these cryptocurrency insights from CNBC Pro:

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