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The Samsung Galaxy Ring has various sensors to track things like heart rate.

Samsung

BARCELONA — Samsung’s Galaxy Ring, its latest wearable, is launching with health-tracking features including heart rate and sleep monitoring while also giving users a score of their readiness for the day, a top executive told CNBC.

In a wide-ranging interview, Hon Pak, the head of the digital health team at Samsung Electronics, discussed the company’s first foray into the product category of rings, considerations for a subscription model for the Samsung Health app, and his vision for an artificial intelligence “coach.”

Samsung teased the Galaxy Ring in January during the press conference when it launched the S24 smartphone. The South Korean tech giant is putting it on display for the first time at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, which kicks off on Monday.

Samsung Galaxy Ring features

Pak said the ring, which is fitted with sensors, will be able to give readings on heart rate, respiratory rate, the amount of movement made during sleep, and the time it takes a person to fall asleep once in bed.

He also said the ring will be able to give a user a “vitality score” which “collects data about physical and mental readiness to see how productive you can be.”

All of that will be accessible through the Samsung Health app.

The ring is set to go on sale this year, but Pak did not give a timeline or the pricing.

Pak also said the company is considering adding a feature that would allow the Galaxy Ring to do contactless payments, as with smartphones.

“We have a whole … team that is looking at that. But I think clearly looking at multiple different use cases for the Ring beyond just health, for sure,” Pak said.

The Samsung executive also said the company is working on non-invasive glucose monitoring as well as a blood pressure sensing through its wearable devices.

“I think we have some ways to go,” Pak said of non-invasive glucose monitoring. Currently, people use devices that pierce the skin to check glucose levels. A non-invasive way to do that would be a huge step.

Samsung ecosystem play

Samsung is hoping that various devices will boost its positioning in health, an area it has been working on for several years.

Samsung has its smartphones and smartwatches. The Galaxy Ring is the newest product category in health. Samsung said the decision to launch a “smart ring” was driven by its customers.

“Our own customers told us, I want choice. I want the ability to have other forms of wearables to measure health,” Pak said. “And some want to wear the watch, some want to wear the watch and the ring and get benefit from both. Some just want more simplicity.”

The Samsung Galaxy Ring will work in conjunction with Samsung’s smartwatches.

Samsung

Pak confirmed that when the smartwatch and Ring are worn together, users will be able to get different health insights.

Samsung is not the first company to launch smart rings. There are a handful of other players such as Oura.

Previous generations of Samsung’s flagship smartphone, such as the S7, have sensors that track things like heart rate. Users could put their finger on the sensor and it would give a reading. Samsung has done away with those sensors on its phones, especially since it has smartwatches that offer these features.

However, Pak did not rule out the possibility that future smartphones would have health sensors on them.

“Mobile is still very pervasive and so I think there are reasons why we may want to put a sensor on a mobile versus having it on a wearable,” Pak said.

AI ‘coach’

Pak discussed how artificial intelligence will play a role in Samsung’s health services. AI can help make sense of all of the data these devices are collecting. And ultimately, Pak’s goal is to get the AI to give deeper insights into a person’s health.

He said large language models, which are AI models trained on huge amounts of data and that underpin applications like chatbots, can help to give greater insights.

“Imagine that large language model, acting as my digital assistant, while looking at the context of my medical records, my physiological data, my engagement with a mobile device, the wearables during all of that … begins to bring greater insights and personalization opportunities,” Pak said.

“There’s a digital assistant coach in the future, because we think that’s absolutely needed,” the Samsung executive said.

Pak described a scenario in which a digital assistant offers health advice in the right tone and context, saying “our ability to change our behavior becomes much greater.”

Bixby, Samsung’s digital assistant, could have a part to play, Pak said.

“So we are exploring various different ways in which the human computer interface will change over time … And so we think Bixby with speech represents a significant part of that option. But we don’t think it’s the only option. But Bixby potentially combined with large language models can be a phenomenal game changer. And we’re obviously having that conversation,” Pak said.

The executive also said the company is “considering” a subscription service for its Samsung Health app, but that the capabilities and insights it offers need to be improved before that can happen. AI assistants can help.

“If you’re gonna really make me pay for something, you better give me something that’s more end to end that’s more comprehensive” in terms of health insights, Pak said.

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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

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.

Silas Stein | Picture Alliance | Getty Images

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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