Fruitist, the healthy snacking company known for its jumbo blueberries, has raised $150 million in an equity funding round led by new investor J.P. Morgan Asset Management, with billionaire Ray Dalio‘s family office doubling down on its existing investment in the farming startup. The company, valued at over $1 billion, is growing distribution rapidly in a snacking market estimated to be as large as $800 billion and in which consumers are spending more dollars on premium-priced, healthier options.

Fruitist has now raised a total of $443 million in equity capital from investors, and says the new capital will help it push deeper into retail locations around the world. In the U.S., its berries are already sold at Costco, Giant, Publix, ShopRite, Sprouts, Trader Joe’s, Wakefern, Walmart, and Whole Foods, among other stores. It is also planning to expand distribution of its recently introduced single-serve, grab-and-go packs of fresh blueberries, Fruitist Snack Cups, citing explosive growth in the European market, and its new, even larger Legend Super Jumbo blueberries.

The company told CNBC earlier this year that annual sales surpassed $400 million, and says sales of its blueberries have tripled. It did not provide a new sales figure or new valuation with the latest investor round. Aliment Capital and Steve Kaplan, co-founder of Oaktree Capital Management, also participated in the new funding.

“We are investing in growth in volume, more production capacity,” said Fruitist CEO and co-founder Steve Magami, citing its agricultural operations in eight countries. “The dollars are going into growing volumes because demand is far greater than we can supply,” he said.

The majority of the new investor money will fund new planting and investments in cold storage and infrastructure, including automation, to increase control over quality and distribution.

“We believe that Fruitist, with control of its value chain, significant organic growth opportunity ahead, and positioning as a driving force of premiumization of berries and the better-for-you category, will realize durable expansion,” said Brad Demong, managing director, J.P. Morgan Asset Management, in a statement announcing the deal.

The recently introduced Fruitist Snack Cups have grown distribution from an initial 30 stores in Spain in April to 750 stores, and Magami said that is headed to 1,000 stores, and into the U.S. as well, where he said most retail partners will be adding the product in at least a small number of their locations.

Fruitist ranked No. 18 on the 2025 CNBC Disruptor 50 list.

“We see a snacking industry at $600 million to $800 million, and we see the healthy snacking industry as an eighth of that total, and we know our products rank to the far right of the upper right quadrant,” Magami said. He added that company doesn’t see traditional berry industry players, such as Driscoll’s, as the competition, describing them as “more of a commodity.”

“Over time, people will realize regular blueberries are more for the blender and cakes, and these are snacking berries to replace a meal,” he said.

Sally Lyons Wyatt, chief advisor consumer goods & foodservice insights at consulting firm Circana, said the healthy snacking sector, often called the “better for you” segment, is posting notable growth in a relatively flat snacking market. “What is keeping the core snacking category going is the ‘better for you’ products,” she said. 

“Berries are full of antioxidants and one of healthiest fruits in this snacking story,” Lyons Wyatt said.

While he declined to comment on any initial public offering timeline, Magami said the firm is closely monitoring the planned IPO of Jennifer Garner’s Once Upon a Farm, which recently filed to go public.

Matthew Kennedy of IPO research firm Renaissance Capital says for investors eyeing companies like Fruitist and Once Upon a Farm, growth is as much, if not more of a driving factor, than the healthy snacking theme. Kennedy said the food space has had “a lot of losers” this year, but added, “it’s especially impressive if a company is able to sell a premium product and take market share while the rest of the industry is under pressure.”

“Companies often go public when growth trends look most optimistic, so the biggest risk for investors is when that growth is unsustainable, either because it was a fad, or because there’s a really devoted initial customer base that doesn’t translate to the broader market,” he said.

Circana has monitored the consumer gravitating to berries for years, “and every year, it’s one of those products that just continues to outpace most traditional packaged snacks,” Lyons Wyatt said. “It will continue to gain strength and we see it being a big hit around the world because it delivers on all the aspects of what consumers are looking for,” she said, but she added that the biggest limitation to broader consumer adoption is price.

“These are priced around $6 a clamshell,” said Magami. “We are not selling champagne strawberries for $19. We are focused on building a durable business and growing the brand and have substantial runway ahead,” he said. “We will realize well above average growth, which is rare in this sector.”

NEW CARLISLE, Indiana — A year ago, it was farmland. Now, the 1,200-acre site near Lake Michigan is home to one of the largest operational AI data centers in the world. It’s called Project Rainier, and it’s the spot where Amazon is training frontier artificial intelligence models entirely on its own chips.

Amazon and its competitors have pledged more than $1 trillion towards AI data center projects that are so ambitious, skeptics wonder if there’s enough money, energy and community support to get them off the ground.

OpenAI has Stargate — its name for a slate of mammoth AI data centers that it plans to develop. Rainier is Amazon’s $11 billion answer. And it’s not a concept, but a cluster that’s already online. 

The complex was built exclusively to train and run models from Anthropic, the AI startup behind Claude, and one of Amazon’s largest cloud customers and AI partners.

“This is not some future project that we’ve talked about that maybe comes alive,” Matt Garman, CEO of Amazon Web Services, told CNBC in an interview at Amazon’s Seattle headquarters. “This is running and training their models today.”

Tech’s megacaps are all racing to build supercomputing sites to meet an expected explosion in demand. Meta is planning a 2-gigawatt Hyperion site in Louisiana, while Google parent Alphabet just broke ground in West Memphis, Arkansas, across the Mississippi River from Elon Musk’s Colossus data center for his startup xAI.

In the span of a month, OpenAI committed to 33 gigawatts of new compute, a buildout CEO Sam Altman says represents $1.4 trillion in upcoming obligations, with partners including Nvidia, Advanced Micro Devices, Broadcom and Oracle.

Amazon is already delivering, thanks to decades of experience in large-scale logistics. From massive fulfillment centers and logistics hubs to AWS data centers and its HQ2 project, Amazon has deep and close relationships with state and local officials and a playbook that’s now being used to get AI infrastructure set up in record time.

“These deals all sound great on paper,” said Mike Krieger, chief product officer at Anthropic, which has raised billions of dollars from Amazon. “But they only materialize when they’re actually racked and loaded and usable by the customer. And Amazon is incredible at that.”

The public unveiling of Rainier comes a day ahead of Amazon’s third-quarter earnings report. Investors will be listening closely for commentary on capital expenditures, but they also want to know how quickly capex projects will convert into revenue, and eventually, profit.  

On Tuesday, Amazon announced 14,000 layoffs as part of a broader push to flatten management and reallocate resources to priority areas like AI and the company’s Trainium chips.

The genesis of the Rainier complex dates back to the spring of 2023.

Roughly six months after ChatGPT launched, Amazon started scouting land in rural Indiana, working with American Electric Power through its Indiana Michigan Power subsidiary. A year later, it signed an $11 billion agreement with Indiana, the largest capital investment in the state’s history.

Construction began in September of last year and, as of this month, seven buildings are already online, with two more campuses underway. The full site will eventually span 30 buildings and draw more than 2.2 gigawatts of electricity, enough to power more than 1.6 million homes.

Josh Sallabedra, who’s spent 14 years building data centers for Amazon, is now the Indiana site lead. He relocated from the West Coast last year to oversee the project. Sallabedra brought on four general contractors to accelerate the timeline and says he’s never seen the company move this fast. 

“That’s the customer demand right now,” Sallabedra told CNBC. “As we saw AI and machine learning coming, we changed to a different building type.”

While some tech giants are throwing up temporary structures to move faster — Meta is building under giant tents in Ohio — Amazon took a more deliberate path. Midway through construction, it updated its facility design to speed up deployment.

“It’s not just fast,” said Garman. “It is secure and reliable AWS infrastructure … an industrial, enterprise-scale data center.”

Or, as Garman described it, “Cornfields to data centers, almost overnight.”

This quiet stretch of rural Indiana, dotted with grain silos, transmission lines, and the occasional barn, has become a magnet for ambitious infrastructure projects. General Motors and Samsung are jointly building a $3.5 billion electric vehicle battery plant next door. At peak, more than 4,000 construction workers have been showing up each day in a town with a population of just 1,900.

Locals don’t necessarily love the trend.

“It’s just difficult to keep losing farmland,” said Marcy Kauffman, president of New Carlisle’s town council. “And this took a lot of farmland.” 

Dan Caruso, a longtime resident of the area, worries that this is just the beginning.

“My friends tried to tell me, ‘You can’t let them come in, because once they get their toe in there, they’ll want more,'” Caruso said. “And that’s exactly what happened.”

Indiana Michigan Power says peak power demand will more than double by the end of the decade, raising questions about household utility bills. One report found that monthly electricity bills in neighborhoods near these new types of sites are 267% higher than five years ago.

And expansion isn’t slowing anytime soon. 

“We’re rapidly adding new capacity all over the place,” Garman said. “I don’t know that we’ll be done ever. We’re going to continue to build as our customers need more capacity.”

Rainier’s seven data center buildings are packed wall-to-wall with Trainium 2, Amazon’s custom-built chips. Nvidia’s market-leading graphics processing units are nowhere to be found. Amazon claims this is the largest known deployment of non-Nvidia compute anywhere in the world.

“They’re already running about 500,000 chips in Indiana today,” Garman said. “And in fact, it’s going so well that they’ve actually doubled down on that order.” Amazon expects the number to reach a million by the end of the year.

Trainium 3, developed in collaboration with Anthropic, is set to launch in the next few months.

It’s the latest example of the tightening bond between the two companies. Anthropic’s primary infrastructure runs on AWS, and it’s one of the first major AI labs to train models on Amazon’s custom silicon. Amazon has invested $8 billion in the startup as part of its broader AI strategy.

While Trainium can’t match Nvidia’s GPUs in raw performance, AWS says its technology offers greater density and efficiency, packing more chips into each data center to deliver higher aggregate compute while reducing power and cooling costs.

Amazon and Anthopic have co-designed silicon based on real-world training demands. Garman and Krieger both told CNBC that Anthropic provided direct input to speed up training, cut latency and improve energy efficiency.

With Trainium 3, one major goal is to better support frontier models.

“It gives better performance, it gives better latency characteristics, it gets better power consumption per flop,” Garman said. “That will be deployed inside of Indiana. It’ll be deployed in many of our other data centers all around the world.”

Prasad Kalyanaraman, vice president of infrastructure services at AWS, said it’s critical to be “able to control the stack all the way from the lower layers of the infrastructure” in order to “build the right set of capabilities that these model providers want.”

Anthropic is moving at a breakneck pace, and burning mounds of cash in the process, as it races to keep up with OpenAI and others.

The company’s annual revenue run rate is nearing $7 billion. Its Claude chatbot powers more than 300,000 businesses, a 300-fold increase over the last two years. The number of large enterprise customers, each producing more than $100,000 in annual revenue, has jumped nearly sevenfold in just a year.

Claude Code, Anthropic’s new agentic coding assistant, generated $500 million in annualized revenue within its first two months.

But Anthropic isn’t counting exclusively on Amazon as it carves its future path. Last week, the company announced a partnership with Alphabet that gives Anthropic access to up to 1 million of Google’s custom-designed Tensor Processing Units, or TPUs. The deal is worth tens of billions of dollars,

Anthropic had already received funding from Google, and Krieger said the company needs all the processing power it can get.

“There is such demand for our models,” said Krieger, “that I think the only way we would have been able to serve as much as we’ve been able to serve so far this year is this multi-chip strategy.”

Garman is well aware of the multi-cloud and multi-chip efforts, and said Amazon has no plans to do anything drastic, like bidding to buy Anthropic.

“We love the partnership as it is,” he said.

— CNBC’s Katie Tarasov and Erin Black contributed to this report.

WATCH: CNBC’s interview with AWS CEO Matt Garman

Apple’s Thursday earnings report is critical for investors because it includes the first official sales figures for the iPhone 17.

The report covers sales through the end of September, which includes a little more than a weeks worth of sales data for the latest Apple smartphones that went on sale Sept. 19. In recent weeks, Wall Street has been boosting Apple stock because it looks like the iPhone 17 is a hit based on early industry estimates.

But investors will be watching closely about what Apple says regarding demand to see if this year ends up being a “super-cycle,” or the first year of growth after iPhone revenue peaked in fiscal 2022. Analysts polled by FactSet expect that Apple surpassed that high mark in fiscal 2025.

Third-party estimates from analysts and industry researchers have signaled that iPhone sales are up this cycle, especially for the entry-level iPhone 17, which got the fastest chip and a screen with a faster refresh rate, and the iPhone 17 Pro models, which have a full aluminum frame and improved battery life.

But the newest iPhone model, the iPhone Air, doesn’t appear to be selling well so far.

“Some reports have highlighted a more muted iPhone 17 Air uptick than we believe some had initially anticipated,” Wells Fargo analyst Aaron Rakers wrote this month.

It’s a familiar story for Apple, which sees the strongest growth when it introduces new iPhone models that expand the lineup. But since it went to a four-phone lineup in 2020, Apple has struggled with the fourth phone’s sales, which have lagged behind the basic iPhone and the Pro models. Since 2020, Apple swapped out the “Mini” iPhone for a “Plus” iPhone with a bigger screen, and now, it’s trying the “Air.”

While Apple doesn’t separate sales numbers for individual devices, CEO Tim Cook and CFO Kevan Parekh often provide some color during earnings calls about product launches during the quarter and how much demand the company is seeing.

When Apple launched the $999 iPhone Air in September, Tim Cook called it an “iPhone that feels like a piece of the future.” Price-wise, it lands between the iPhone 17, starting at $799, and the iPhone 17 Pro, which starts at $1,099.

The iPhone Air is thinner and lighter than Apple’s other phones, but that also comes with compromises. It only has one camera lens, and its battery life is shorter than its siblings. Still, it’s the only iPhone this year with a significant design change, and reviews have been positive.

China sales could also boost the model. It didn’t go on sale in China until earlier this month, and it sold out in minutes, according to the South China Morning Post.

Still, buyers appear to prefer what they’re already familiar with.

Nikkei, a newspaper in Japan, reported last week that Apple “drastically” slashed iPhone Air component orders with its partners, but is boosting orders for its other phones.

Ming-Chi Kuo, a TF International Securities supply chain analyst known for forecasting future Apple moves, followed that report by saying that the iPhone Air had fallen short of expectations.

“This indicates that the existing Pro series and standard models already cover the majority of high-end user demand well, leaving little room to carve out new market segments and positioning,” Kuo posted on social media.

In many ways, the iPhone Air underperforming is not a sea change for the company.

Since 2020, Apple has released four new phones in the fall. But one of the four new models has consistently lagged its siblings in sales, and Apple has swapped the model out over the years to find something that works.

Before the Air, it was the iPhone “Plus,” in the middle of the lineup with the same specs as the main iPhone but with a larger screen. It was priced at $899. Apple tried that from 2022 through 2024.

Goldman Sachs analysts said that lead times, or how long Apple says it will take to ship a device on its website, suggested that the iPhone Air had similar demand to its predecessors.

“Lead times for the iPhone Air were initially below the iPhone 16 Plus, but have now surpassed those of the iPhone 16 Plus and are just below those of the iPhone 15 Plus,” wrote Goldman Sachs analyst Michael Ng in a note this month.

Before that, Apple’s fourth phone was the iPhone Mini, which cost less than the main iPhone when it was introduced in 2020, but consumers didn’t flock to its smaller screen.

Analysts say that the iPhone Air could be a building block towards a more diverse lineup that could include a folding iPhone. Its thin design resembles what half of a folding phone could look like, tech critics say. And the fact that the iPhone Air doesn’t have a number suggests it might not get annual updates anyway.

If Apple’s other iPhones are seeing surging sales, it might not matter to investors if the Air is lagging, especially if new designs at least keep the lineup feeling fresh.

“We believe Apple has the ability to maintain the relevance of smartphones through form factor updates to iPhone,” wrote Ng, the Goldman analyst. “For example, after the debut of the thinner iPhone Air form factor this year, Apple is expected to launch its first foldable iPhone in 2026, followed by an all-screen display iPhone in 2027.”

Apple didn’t respond to a request for comment.

WATCH: Apple’s big move is testing its final resistance, says Fairlead Strategies’ Katie Stockton