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Heidi, Marc, Charli, and Dixie D’Amelio at Shopify’s D’Amelio Footwear Pop-up in New York City

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Charli D’Amelio is the second-most followed creator on TikTok, where the 19-year-old former competitive dancer and her sister Dixie have made tens of millions of dollars.

But D’Amelio can’t be certain how long she’ll be able to serve up short viral videos to her 152 million followers. That’s because a bill supporting a potential ban of TikTok, which is owned by China’s ByteDance, is headed to the House floor and already has the support of President Joe Biden.

Uncertain of which way the political winds will blow, D’Amelio is looking to build her presence elsewhere. Her latest endeavor is a partnership with Shopify to bring her family’s online shoe brand to physical stores.

“You have to remember that social media comes and goes,” D’Amelio said in an interview at Shopify’s D’Amelio Footwear Pop-Up in New York on Friday. “There’s new apps, there’s new people, there’s exciting new trends. You don’t always get to be first in line for everything.”

D’Amelio and other family members spoke to CNBC at the store opening. Given the political and national security concerns surrounding TikTok, creators are focusing on other ways they can sell their brand.

“Starting a brand…gets you out of it,” said Marc D’Amelio, Charli’s father and CEO of D’Amelio Brands. “It’s a hamster wheel, and it gets you out of that. And you’re less dependent on the platform.”

Members of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party introduced a bill last week that would require ByteDance to divest TikTok or face a U.S. ban. On Thursday, the committee voted 50-0 to send the bill to the House floor. Biden said on Friday that he’ll sign legislation if Congress passes it.

While TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew has denied any ties between the app and the CCP, U.S. regulators and lawmakers have expressed fears about the company’s Chinese ownership and the possibility that user data could be shared upon request with the government.

“There’s definitely a little bit of fear when it comes to social media, just because you never know what’s coming next,” Charli D’Amelio said.

D’Amelio gained popularity on TikTok in 2019, and two years later was named the platform’s highest-paid creator by Forbes. She and her sister made a combined $27.5 million that year, the magazine said.

On TikTok, users can make money through the app’s Creativity Program, a rewards systems targeted at popular videos that are longer than a minute. Creators can also earn revenue from brand partnerships, affiliate sales on TikTok Shop, and followers can send users “gifts” during livestreams.

Since the family’s rise to fame, its members have been featured on the Hulu reality show, “The D’Amelio Show,” which just completed its third season. The sisters have also worked with various fashion brands including Prada, Burberry, and Puma. 

The Shopify logo is pictured outside the The Well building on Spadina Ave. in Toronto.

Lance Mcmillan | Toronto Star | Getty Images

In September 2022, the family launched D’Amelio Brands, with products including D’Amelio Footwear and popcorn line Be Happy Snacks. The venture raised a $6 million seed round in 2022 from prominent figures like Fanatics CEO Michael Rubin, entrepreneur Richard Rosenblatt and Eddy Cue, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Services. Last year it raised $5 million from Fifth Growth Fund.

With Shopify, the D’Amelio family partnered to bring its shoes to pop-up events in Los Angeles and New York. Shopify powers the stores through the company’s point-of-sale system. 

Shopify said D’Amelio Brands next aims to open a permanent brick-and-mortar store, bridging the gap between the digital creator economy and the physical retail world.

Shopify reported a fivefold increase in offline sales since 2019, indicating a notable shift in consumer behavior.

“Fans really want to come and feel the brand and meet the creators and touch and feel the products,” said Jessica Williams, Shopify’s Director of Brand Partnerships, in an interview

In 2023, offline sales accounted for $441 million of Shopify’s $7.1 billion in revenue, or a little over 6% of the total. That includes revenue from payments, subscriptions and point-of-sale hardware.

WATCH: TikTok crackdown gains momentum

TikTok crackdown gains momentum

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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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Perplexity launches AI-powered web browser for select group of subscribers

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Perplexity launches AI-powered web browser for select group of subscribers

Dado Ruvic | Reuters

Perplexity AI on Wednesday launched a new artificial intelligence-powered web browser called Comet in the startup’s latest effort to compete in the consumer internet market against companies like Google and Microsoft.

Comet will allow users to connect with enterprise applications like Slack and ask complex questions via voice and text, according to a brief demo video Perplexity released on Wednesday.

The browser is available to Perplexity Max subscribers, and the company said invite-only access will roll out to a waitlist over the summer. Perplexity Max costs users $200 per month.

“We built Comet to let the internet do what it has been begging to do: to amplify our intelligence,” Perplexity wrote in a blog post on Wednesday.

Perplexity is best known for its AI-powered search engine that gives users simple answers to questions and links out to the original source material on the web. After the company was accused of plagiarizing content from media outlets, it launched a revenue-sharing model with publishers last year.

In May, Perplexity was in late-stage talks to raise $500 million at a $14 billion valuation, a source familiar confirmed to CNBC. The startup was also approached by Meta earlier this year about a potential acquisition, but the companies did not finalize a deal.

“We will continue to launch new features and functionality for Comet, improve experiences based on your feedback, and focus relentlessly–as we always have–on building accurate and trustworthy AI that fuels human curiosity,” Perplexity said Wednesday.

WATCH: Perplexity CEO on AI race: The market of providing answers to questions will become a commodity

Perplexity CEO on AI race: The market of providing answers to questions will become a commodity

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