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An Amazon delivery drone is on display at Amazon’s BOS27 Robotics Innovation Hub in Westborough, Massachusetts, on Nov. 10, 2022.

Joseph Prezioso | AFP | Getty Images

On a recent weekday morning, John Case heard a familiar buzzing outside his quiet suburban home in College Station, Texas. He recognized it immediately as one of Amazon‘s Prime Air drones, whizzing by on its delivery route to unload small packages of batteries, vitamins and dog treats.

“It sounds like a giant hive of bees,” Case, a semi-retired orthodontist, said in an interview. “You know it’s coming because it’s pretty loud.” 

Case has lived in College Station for the past 40 years. The drones are a common sight when he and his wife go on their regular walks around the neighborhood. Nurses, police officers and firefighters who work the nightshift talk about it disrupting their sleep during the day, Case said.

Noise complaints are just the latest challenge for Amazon’s drone program that’s been struggling to get off the ground since the company started testing deliveries in 2022. A mix of regulatory hurdles, missed deadlines and layoffs last year, coinciding with widespread cost-cutting efforts by CEO Andy Jassy, has halted progress of the ambitious service, which was conceived of by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos more than a decade ago.

College Station, located about 100 miles northwest of Houston, has been the main testing ground for Prime Air, as Amazon tries to show it can ferry packages by unmanned aircraft to residents’ homes in under an hour. Lockeford, California, south of Sacramento, was supposed to be another test market, but Amazon shuttered its operation there in April. The company is seeking approval from regulators to start deliveries in Tolleson, Arizona, west of Phoenix.

As Amazon prepares to scale up Prime Air and expand it to more areas, it’s encountering another reason why that won’t be so easy. In a July letter to the Federal Aviation Administration, College Station Mayor John Nichols wrote that residents in his city, home to Texas A&M University, have grown tired of the drones loudly buzzing near their homes.

“Since locating in College Station, residents in neighborhoods adjacent to Prime Air’s facility have expressed concern to the City Council regarding drone noise levels, particularly during take-off and landing, as well as in some delivery operations,” Nichols wrote.

Nichols’ letter followed a proposal from Amazon to the FAA to allow the company to increase deliveries to 469 flights per day, up from its current level of 200 flights per day. Amazon is asking for the ability to operate between 7 a.m. and 10 p.m., rather than being limited to daylight hours as the program is today, and to expand its delivery area to up to 174 square miles surrounding the company’s drone port, up from its current operating range of 44 square miles.

Amazon's new delivery drone will start flying packages this year

A month before Amazon’s request to the FAA, residents appealed to local legislators to intervene in the company’s expansion plans. At a city council meeting in June, Ralph Thomas Moore, whose neighborhood is “less than 500 feet away from the launch pad,” played a recording of a chainsaw to illustrate the noise level of the drones.

If Amazon gets its wish, there would be up to 940 combined takeoffs and landings, all so the drones can deliver one package at a time, weighing no more than five pounds, Moore said at the meeting.

“This is what Amazon is asking the FAA to approve,” he said. “This is a huge invasion of our personal space and has significant impact on everyone in the neighborhood.”

Bryan Woods, College Station’s city manager, said at the meeting that city officials ran tests of a Prime Air drone and found it had noise levels between 47 and 61 decibels. According to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, chainsaws are typically measured at 125 decibels and heavy equipment at 95 to 110 decibels.

Prime Air is part of Amazon’s effort to find a quicker, more cost-effective solution for the so-called last mile, or the part of the delivery that gets the package from the warehouse to the customer’s doorstep. Proponents say drone delivery can potentially offset the cost of maintaining a fleet of delivery drivers, while cutting down on the need for gas-guzzling delivery vans. That’s assuming Amazon can ever turn it into a service for the masses.

In May, Amazon notched a key milestone when the FAA said it would allow the company to fly its delivery drones over longer distances and without staffers on the ground observing each flight. Amazon heralded the announcement and said it “lays the foundation” for the service to reach new markets. 

Sam Stephenson, an Amazon spokesperson, told CNBC in a statement, “We appreciate the community of College Station and take local feedback into account wherever possible when making operational decisions for Prime Air. We’re proud of the thousands of deliveries we’ve made and the hundreds of customers we deliver to.”

‘Fantastic technology, wrong location’

Amina Alikhan likened the drones to “a fly coming by your ear over and over and you can’t make it stop.”

“It is waking us up and disrupting our ability to enjoy both our outdoor and even our indoor spaces,” said Alikhan, an internal medicine doctor who lives with her husband in a neighborhood a few hundred feet from Amazon’s drone airport in College Station.

Case said his neighbors have complained that the sound of the drones makes it hard to enjoy working in the yard or sitting on the patio. Sometimes it’s loud enough to be heard inside. Case said he wrote a letter to the College Station mayor and city council about the matter.

When the city agreed to be a test market for Amazon, “I think nobody really knew how noisy and annoying it was going to be” Case said.

Others said the drones fly alarmingly low. One resident, who serves as the head of a local homeowners association, said Amazon told those in the neighborhood that the drones would fly 400 feet or higher while in operation.

But the drones fly over residential properties at 100 feet or less, which can make it uncomfortable to even lounge by the pool, said the person, who asked not to be named to preserve her privacy.

Amazon unveiled its latest delivery drone at the re:MARS conference in Las Vegas on June 5, 2019.

Amazon

The current iteration of Amazon’s delivery drone typically cruises at an altitude of 160 to 180 feet, according to data submitted by the company to the FAA.

Amazon has said it plans to introduce a smaller, quieter drone, called the MK30, which is expected to start running in College Station and Phoenix once the company receives approval from the FAA.

Stephenson said the MK30 is “designed to reduce the drone’s perceived noise by almost half.” It will also fly at a higher cruising altitude of between 180 to 377 feet above ground level, except when descending to drop a package, according to the FAA.

But many residents wanted Amazon to go a step further and get out of their neighborhoods altogether. As concerns grew louder, leaders from Prime Air held a Zoom meeting on July 24 with College Station residents.

Matt McCardle, head of regulatory affairs and strategy for Prime Air, said at the meeting that the company would not renew its lease in College Station and move elsewhere by October 2025, according to a recording obtained by CNBC.

Amazon’s Stephenson confirmed that the company is “considering a variety of potential paths forward,” including the possibility of an alternate drone site.

The company has also agreed to reduce the number of flights per hour, said Bob Yancy, a College Station City Council member. He plans to propose that Amazon move its drone port to the site of a former Macy’s store that’s now owned by the city and located in a nearby shopping mall.

In April, Amazon said it plans to integrate Prime Air into its same-day delivery network, instead of building standalone drone facilities. That’s what the company is aiming to do in the Phoenix area, where its launchpad is expected to be on the same site as an Amazon warehouse known as SAZ2. A couple hundred feet from the facility is a major neighborhood called Roosevelt Park.

Yancy said at the meeting that he still likes the program, and appreciates that he’s been able to have toothbrushes, cookies and bottles of aspirin delivered to his house within an hour.

He wants Prime Air to stay in College Station. But for it to work, he said, Amazon will have to make its drones less noisy or get them far away from residents.

“I think the headline on the program is — fantastic technology, wrong location,” Yancy said.

WATCH: A decade in, Amazon’s made 100 drone deliveries.

Amazon drones make 100th delivery, lagging far behind Alphabet's Wing and Walmart partner Zipline

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‘Green light’ away from AI trade: Two ETF executives see a key market shift underway

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'Green light' away from AI trade: Two ETF executives see a key market shift underway

ETF Edge on signals of a new market cycle and top ideas for 2026

A key rotation away from artificial intelligence stocks may be underway in the market.

According to Astoria Portfolio Advisors’ John Davi, a broader range of stocks are getting a “green light” because liquidity is returning to the system.

“The Fed cut rates four times last year. They cut rates twice already. They’re going to go again whether its December [or] January,” the firm’s CEO and chief investment officer told CNBC’s “ETF Edge” this week. “Historically whenever the Fed cuts interest rates, usually that’s a turn of a new cycle. Market leadership does tend to change quietly.”

He lists the latest performance in areas ranging from emerging markets to industrials. The iShares MSCI Emerging Markets ETF, which tracks the group, is up 17% over the past six months as of Wednesday’s close. The Industrial Select Sector SPDR Fund is up 9% over the same period.

“I think they can be a good offset to what’s an expensive large cap tech position, which dominates most portfolios,” he added. “We’re living in a structurally higher inflation world. The Fed is cutting rates like, why do you want to take so much risk in just seven stocks?” and

Davi prefers a global balanced approach to investing versus an overweight position in the Magnificent 7 — which is comprised of Apple, Amazon, Meta Platforms, Nvidia, Microsoft, Tesla and Alphabet, which has been trading around all-time highs. The Mag 7 makes up about a third of the S&P 500.

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Sophia Massie, CEO of ETF-issuer LionShares, is also wary of going all-in on the AI trade.

“I think analysts have an idea of how much value AI will add to our economy. I don’t think we really understand how that’s going to play out between different companies yet,” Massie said in the same interview. “So, I have this sense that right now, we’re pricing in this probability that… one company may be the one that dominates, dominates AI and ends up being a big player in the future.”

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How Google put together the pieces for its AI comeback

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How Google put together the pieces for its AI comeback

Vcg | Visual China Group | Getty Images

When ChatGPT launched in 2022, Google was caught flatfooted, but the launch of Gemini 3 and the Ironwood AI chip this month has experts raving about Alphabet’s AI comeback. 

Google kicked off November by unveiling Ironwood, the seventh generation of its tensor processing units, or TPUs, that the company says lets customers “run and scale the largest, most data-intensive models in existence.” And last week, Google launched Gemini 3, its latest artificial intelligence model, saying it requires “less prompting” and provides smarter answers than its predecessors.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff captured the excitement around Gemini 3 with a Sunday post on X, saying that despite using OpenAI’s ChatGPT daily for three years, he wasn’t going back after two hours of using Gemini 3.

“The leap is insane,” wrote Benioff, whose company has partnerships with Google, OpenAI and other frontier AI model providers. “Everything is sharper and faster. It feels like the world just changed, again.”

Most tech stocks were down to start the week, except for one: Alphabet.

Shares of the Google parent surged more than 5% on Monday, adding to last week’s gain of more than 8%. Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway revealed earlier this month that it owns a $4.3 billion stake in Alphabet as of the end of the third quarter.

Alphabet shares are up nearly 70% this year and have outperformed Meta’s by more than 50 percentage points this year, and last week, Alphabet’s market cap surpassed Microsoft’s.

All of this came despite Nvidia reporting stronger-than-expect revenue and guidance in its third-quarter earnings last week.

“You may be asking why almost all of the AI stocks we cover are selling off after such good news from Nvidia,” Melius Research analyst Ben Reitzes wrote in a note Monday, referring to Nvidia’s positive third quarter earnings last week. “There is one real reason for worry and it is the ‘AI comeback’ of Alphabet.” 

But while Google appears to have regained the edge, its lead over rivals remains razor thin in the gruelingly competitive AI market, experts said.

Sundar Pichai, chief executive officer of Alphabet Inc., during the Bloomberg Tech conference in San Francisco, California, US, on Wednesday, June 4, 2025.

David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Putting the pieces together

With Gemini 3 and Ironwood, Google CEO Sundar Pichai appears to have finally put the pieces together for the company’s AI offerings, said Michael Nathanson, co-founder of equity research firm Moffett Nathanson. Google is serving a broad range of customers from consumers to enterprise, something the company initially struggled to do after the arrival of ChatGPT.

“Three years ago, they were seen as kind of lost and there were all these hot takes saying they lost their way and Sundar is a failure,” Nathanson said. “Now, they have a huge leg up.”

The company had a number of AI product mishaps in its initial attempts to catch up with OpenAI. In 2024 alone, Google had to pull its image generation product Imagen 2 for several months after users discovered a number of historical inaccuracies. The launch of AI Overviews caused a similar reaction when users discovered it gave faulty advice, which the company later remedied with additional guardrails.

“There was a lot of fumbling, and they were scrambling,” said Gil Luria, managing director at technology research firm DA Davidson. “But they had the tech in the pantry, and it was just a matter of getting it all together and shipped.”

Of particular note is how quickly Google launched Gemini 3 after the spring release of Gemini 2.5, which was already considered an impressive model. The hyper-realistic image generation features of Nano Banana is another notch in Google’s belt. After the company initially launched the image generation tool, Gemini shot to the top of the Apple App Store in September, dethroning ChatGPT.

And after the launch of Gemini 3, Google released Nano Banana Pro last week.

Google’s ownership of YouTube and all the content on the video platform gives the company an edge when it comes to training models for image and video generation.

“The amount of video and current data that Google has, that’s really a huge competitive advantage,” said Mike Gualtieri, vice president and principal analyst for Forrester Research. “I don’t see how OpenAI and Anthropic can overcome that.”

Additionally, Google has successfully incorporated its AI models into its enterprise products, driving sales for the company’s cloud unit. In its third quarter earnings results last month, Google reached its first $100 billion quarter, boosted by its cloud growth. The company’s cloud unit, which houses its AI services, showed solid growth and a $155 billion backlog from customers.

And it’s not just the AI models. Google is also garnering attention with its AI chips.

Google says Ironwood is nearly 30 times more power efficient than its first TPU from 2018. Google’s ASIC chips are emerging as the company’s secret weapon in the AI wars and have helped it notch recent deals worth billions with customers such as Anthropic.

After a report said that Meta could strike a deal with Google to use its TPUs for the social media company’s data centers, Nvidia saw its stock drop 3% on Tuesday, prompting the chipmaker to post a response on social media.

With the rise of Google’s TPUs, Nvidia may no longer have the AI chips market cornered.

“The advantage of having the whole stack is you can optimize your model to work specifically well on a TPU chip and you’re building everything to a more optimally designed,” said Luria.

The company’s ability to serve AI enterprise customers with its TPUs and Google Cloud offerings as well as its incorporation of Gemini 3 throughout its consumer products is driving Wall Street’s enthusiasm.

Experts who spoke with CNBC said the competitive landscape is broader than just one AI winner, but they added that it’s become increasingly expensive for multiple companies to prove success.

Tight competition

Despite these wins, Google is still in fierce competition with other AI companies, experts said.

“Having the state of the art model for a few days doesn’t mean they’ve won to the extent that the stock market is implying,” Luria said, pointing to Anthropic’s new Opus 4.5 model launched Monday.

Earlier this month, OpenAI also announced two updates to its GPT-5 model to make it “warmer by default and more conversational” as well as “more efficient and easier to understand in everyday use,” the company said.

“The frontier models still seem to be neck and neck in some ways,” Forrester Research’s Gualtieri said.

The competitive edge will likely go to the companies willing to spend more money given the expenses of the AI race, experts said. In their earnings reports last month, AlphabetMetaMicrosoft and Amazon each lifted their guidance for capital expenditures. They collectively expect that number to reach more than $380 billion this year.

“These companies are spending a lot of money assuming there’s gonna be a winner take all when in reality we may end up with frontier models being a commodity and several will be interchangeable,” Luria said.

For Google, maintaining a lead in AI won’t be without challenges.

Company executives told employees earlier this month that Google has to double its serving capacity every six month to meet demand for AI services and run its frontier models, CNBC reported last week.

“The competition in AI infrastructure is the most critical and also the most expensive part of the AI race,” Google Cloud Vice President Amin Vahdat told employees.

Although Google’s in-house TPUs have gotten increased attention as viable alternatives to Nvidia’s Blackwell chips, Nvidia still holds more than 90% of the AI chip market.

In its post on Tuesday, Nvidia pointed out that its chips are more flexible and powerful than ASIC chips, like Google’s Ironwood, which are typically designed for a single company or function.

And despite getting Salesforce’s Benioff to switch to Gemini, Google also has a lot of catching up to do with its consumer chat product, experts said, citing hallucinations and lower user numbers than OpenAI’s.

The Gemini app has 650 million monthly active users and AI Overviews has 2 billion monthly users, Google said last month. OpenAI, by comparison, said in August that ChatGPT hit 700 million users per week.  

“Yes, Google has got its act together,” Luria said. “But that doesn’t mean they’ve won.”

WATCH: AI narrative is shifting towards Google with its complete stack, says Plexo Capital’s Lo Toney

AI narrative is shifting towards Google with its complete stack, says Plexo Capital's Lo Toney

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Apple is challenging India’s anti-trust body over a potential $38 billion fine

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Apple is challenging India's anti-trust body over a potential  billion fine

The first day of sale of the iPhone 15 smartphone in Mumbai, India, on Sept. 22, 2023.

Dhiraj Singh | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Apple has filed a case in Delhi High Court against the country’s anti-trust body because of how it considers global turnover when calculating penalties.

The iPhone maker, which is among the fastest growing smart phone brands in India, is challenging India’s new antitrust law under which the U.S. company could incur fines of up to $38 billion, according to a report by Reuters.

It added it was “unconstitutional, grossly disproportionate, unjust” for the Competition Commission of India (CCI) to use turnover when calculating penalties.

Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment from CNBC.

The CCI has been investigating complaints made by an alliance of Indian startups and Tinder-owner Match Group that accuse Apple of “abusive conduct” which forces developers to pay high commissions for in-app purchases.

Apple denied the charges.

The CCI’s final verdict is still pending but it said its “prima facie view [is] that mandatory use of Apple’s IAP for paid apps & in-app purchases restrict the choice available to the app developers to select a payment processing system of their choice”, in an order in December 2021.

Apple recorded its highest-ever quarterly shipments in India of 5 million units in the third quarter of 2025, according to data from IDC.

IDC: Apple still has room to grow in the India smartphone market

The company is expected to sell about 15 million iPhones this year in India and could rank among top five smartphone companies there, Navkendar Singh associate vice president with IDC India said on CNBC’s “Inside India” on Nov. 18.

Apple is among the global companies who are diversifying their manufacturing supply chain from China to India. In 2024, Apple exports from India hit a record of $12.8 billion, growing at more than 42% from year ago.

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