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A sign that reads “Epic Intergalactic Headquarters” on campus.

Epic Systems

Dorothy Gale was right — the Land of Oz is not in Kansas. Rather, it’s nestled within the rolling green fields of Verona, Wisconsin, a town of nearly 16,400 people located about 10 miles southwest of the capital city of Madison.

Verona is home to the whimsical, sprawling 1,670-acre headquarters for Epic Systems, one of the biggest privately held U.S. tech companies. Epic’s software is seemingly ubiquitous across hospitals and clinics, storing the medical records of more than 280 million people in the U.S.

While the company’s workforce is tasked with the hefty responsibility of building tools to support doctors and nurses as they provide care to patients, Epic employees spend their days milling in and out of offices that look as if they were plucked straight from the pages of a sci-fi novel or children’s book.

A yellow brick road inspired by “The Wizard of Oz” winds through the hallways of a gleaming, emerald green building. Giant chocolate chips mark the entryway to the chocolate factory, and a mischievous cat grins through the window of a building guarded by life-sized playing cards.  

The Oz office building on Epic’s campus.

Courtesy: Epic Systems

Last week, thousands of health-care executives descended on Epic’s sprawling campus for the company’s annual Users Group Meeting, in part to hear about new products and upcoming initiatives. This year’s theme was “storytime,” and Judy Faulkner, the company’s 81-year-old CEO, took the stage dressed as a swan, complete with a plume of feathers in her hair.

Faulkner, a reserved mathematician who founded Epic in a basement in 1979, told the crowd that the surrounding buildings and their upkeep account for 8% of the company’s total expenses. But she made the obvious point, that it’s a lot cheaper for Epic to buy land and build in Verona than it would be in a tech hub like San Francisco, Seattle or New York. And in this small midwestern town, the company is far from big city distractions.

“Most of us in software development are active sci-fi readers,” Faulkner said during her keynote. 

The Wizards Academy Campus.

Courtesy: Epic Systems

For public market investors, Epic has always been somewhat of a fantasy.

The company, with its 14,000-person workforce, doesn’t follow a preordained budget, has made zero acquisitions and never accepted any investment from venture capitalists. It abides by its own set of Ten Commandments, according to its website, the first of which is, “do not go public.”

Epic generated revenue last year of $4.9 billion. Cerner, Epic’s top rival in the electronic medical records market, went public in 1986 and was acquired by Oracle in 2022 for over $28 billion. According to Oracle’s financials, Cerner contributed $5.9 billion in revenue in fiscal 2023.

The S&P 500’s sub-index of software and services companies trades for 9 times revenue. At the average, that would give Epic a valuation of roughly $45 billion.

Faulkner doesn’t care for a Cerner-like outcome. Epic’s second commandment, after all, is “do not be acquired.”

“Why be owned by people whose interest is primarily return of equity?” Faulkner said onstage last week.

Touring Epic’s campus, it’s clear that the company exists a universe away from Wall Street.

Each of Epic’s 28 office building is themed. They’re clustered into mini-campuses, with names like Prairie Campus, Farm Campus, Central Park Campus, Wizards Academy Campus and Storybook Campus. The buildings have gotten more ornate over the years, which has necessitated some haggling with architects, according to Epic’s website.

Conference room chairs match their buildings’ intricate themes. And while the campus’ dinosaurs, suits of armor and its functioning carousel are fun to observe, they also serve a purpose. Faulkner says her plan was to build a friendly environment that could attract and inspire talent and to ensure that her employees have the quiet space they need to be productive, according to a series of testimonials on Epic’s website.  

“We compete with big tech,” Faulkner said in a testimonial. “These attributes help us hire the best staff possible. That helps us be more productive.”

An aerial view of Epic’s campus.

Epic Systems

Faulkner says individual offices should be available to every worker who wants one. With the vast majority of the company’s workforce showing up daily to headquarters, some people double up, since hiring often outpaces construction.

Those who want to escape the office altogether, can hop on one of the company’s 600 cow-print bikes to take meetings from a treehouse, slide down a rabbit hole or grab lunch in a train car. 

A universe underground

Epic’s address provides the first clue of its netherworld existence. The company is located at 1979 Milky Way, a nod to the date of its inception and Faulkner’s affinity for a celestial theme.

Visitors are greeted by a sign that reads “Epic Intergalactic Headquarters” as they travel down a road that winds between buildings and vast fields of green. Around 750 acres of Epic’s campus are active farmland sprinkled with 42 sheep, 14 cows and a donkey.   

The majority of the company’s parking structures are underground, which helps the campus maintain an impressive feel from above. It also means employees don’t have to worry about scraping snow or ice off of their cars during the bitter midwestern winter. 

Even when not parking, workers are no strangers to the underground. The campus’ buildings are connected via a network of tunnels and enclosed skyways, so people don’t have to step outside to travel between them. 

The exterior of Epic’s Deep Space auditorium.

Courtesy: Epic Systems

Employees are also required to attend a monthly staff meeting in an underground auditorium called Deep Space. The meetings last for around two hours, and employees present projects and discuss industry trends.

They always include a grammar lesson, too, Faulkner told the Users Group Meeting in the auditorium, which opened in 2013 and can seat around 11,400 people. The room is a feat of engineering, as there are no pillars holding it up.

To get to Deep Space, visitors must descend through levels of the Earth. The different levels of the building are named Sky, Grass, Dirt, Rock, Magma and Core. The lobby outside the auditorium is inspired by “The Lord of the Rings” series, and the word “precious” is scrawled ominously on the wall in giant, glowing red letters.   

Sci-fi references are everywhere. There’s a cafeteria called 42, which is the answer to the question of life, the universe and everything in the “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” The Wizards Academy Campus draws clear inspiration from “Harry Potter,” and has its own King’s Cross train station, giant chess set and collection of unruly portraits.  

Epic is building a brand new campus, on the same grounds, that’s inspired by epic fantasies like “Game of Thrones” and “Star Wars.” The cranes were decorated with massive kites that soared high above the campus during last week’s event.

Epic’s Endor Treehouse.

Courtesy: Epic Systems

Though each office building sports its own unique theme, the skeleton of the physical structures are all very similar. Long hallways of offices are broken up by the occasional conference room, and most buildings are no more than three stories tall, a design choice that Faulkner says is intended to promote in-person meetings.

The Prairie Campus, home to the oldest offices at Epic, has buildings named after celestial bodies like stars, planets and galaxies.  

On the Storybook Campus, the building called Mystery looks like an old mansion, where one could easily imagine Sherlock Holmes wandering the halls. The Castaway building resembles a ship, and its interior is full of nautical decor.

The walls in many of the buildings are decorated from floor to ceiling. Trinkets, ceramics, mosaics and paintings sourced from local artists are displayed at every turn.

A snowy day at Epic’s campus.

Epic Systems

Wandering the grounds during the Users Group Meeting, it was easy to forget that Epic is a software company.

However, on the outside of its fantasy campus, medical professionals and their patients have very real-world needs from this massive technology vendor. And there are plenty of very real critics.

Epic has for years been accused of dragging its feet around interoperability efforts that would help streamline the exchange of patient information between vendors.

Health-care data in the U.S. has historically been siloed and difficult to move around, as clinics, hospitals and health systems can store their information in a variety of formats across dozens of different vendors. The data is also protected by federal laws like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA.

Oracle, which is now Epic’s chief rival, says Epic is fiercely protective over its turf. In a May blog post, Oracle Executive Vice President Ken Glueck wrote that “everyone in the industry understands that Epic’s CEO Judy Faulkner is the single biggest obstacle to EHR interoperability.”

Epic has of late been helping the federal government establish a data exchange network called the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement, or TEFCA, which aims to iron out both the legal and technical requirements for sharing patients’ data at scale. Epic said last month that it’s planning on moving all of its customers to TEFCA by the end of next year.

But the company still plans to use its extensive proprietary network. At its Users Group Meeting, Epic announced a number of new generative artificial intelligence features for its Cosmos platform, which is a deidentified patient dataset that clinicians can use to support treatment and conduct research.

Seth Hain, Epic’s senior vice president of research and development, spoke to reporters after the keynote in a meeting room decorated like a lodge. Hain had just presented a lofty demo to the audience where an AI agent evaluated his recovery after a supposed wrist surgery by cross-referencing data from Cosmos.

He said these sorts of tools could be ready in as soon as a few years.

“The technology is progressing very rapidly,” Hain said.

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Microsoft AI chief Suleyman sees advantage in building models ‘3 or 6 months behind’

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Microsoft AI chief Suleyman sees advantage in building models ‘3 or 6 months behind’

Microsoft owns lots of Nvidia graphics processing units, but it isn’t using them to develop state-of-the-art artificial intelligence models.

There are good reasons for that position, Mustafa Suleyman, the company’s CEO of AI, told CNBC’s Steve Kovach in an interview on Friday. Waiting to build models that are “three or six months behind” offers several advantages, including lower costs and the ability to concentrate on specific use cases, Suleyman said.

It’s “cheaper to give a specific answer once you’ve waited for the first three or six months for the frontier to go first. We call that off-frontier,” he said. “That’s actually our strategy, is to really play a very tight second, given the capital-intensiveness of these models.”

Suleyman made a name for himself as a co-founder of DeepMind, the AI lab that Google bought in 2014, reportedly for $400 million to $650 million. Suleyman arrived at Microsoft last year alongside other employees of the startup Inflection, where he had been CEO.

More than ever, Microsoft counts on relationships with other companies to grow.

It gets AI models from San Francisco startup OpenAI and supplemental computing power from newly public CoreWeave in New Jersey. Microsoft has repeatedly enriched Bing, Windows and other products with OpenAI’s latest systems for writing human-like language and generating images.

Microsoft’s Copilot will gain “memory” to retain key facts about people who repeatedly use the assistant, Suleyman said Friday at an event in Microsoft’s Redmond, Washington, headquarters to commemorate the company’s 50th birthday. That feature came first to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which has 500 million weekly users.

Through ChatGPT, people can access top-flight large language models such as the o1 reasoning model that takes time before spitting out an answer. OpenAI introduced that capability in September — only weeks later did Microsoft bring a similar capability called Think Deeper to Copilot.

Microsoft occasionally releases open-source small-language models that can run on PCs. They don’t require powerful server GPUs, making them different from OpenAI’s o1.

OpenAI and Microsoft have held a tight relationship shortly after the startup launched its ChatGPT chatbot in late 2022, effectively kicking off the generative AI race. In total, Microsoft has invested $13.75 billion in the startup, but more recently, fissures in the relationship between the two companies have begun to show.

Microsoft added OpenAI to its list of competitors in July 2024, and OpenAI in January announced that it was working with rival cloud provider Oracle on the $500 billion Stargate project. That came after years of OpenAI exclusively relying on Microsoft’s Azure cloud. Despite OpenAI partnering with Oracle, Microsoft in a blog post announced that the startup had “recently made a new, large Azure commitment.”

“Look, it’s absolutely mission-critical that long-term, we are able to do AI self-sufficiently at Microsoft,” Suleyman said. “At the same time, I think about these things over five and 10 year periods. You know, until 2030 at least, we are deeply partnered with OpenAI, who have [had an] enormously successful relationship for us.

Microsoft is focused on building its own AI internally, but the company is not pushing itself to build the most cutting-edge models, Suleyman said.

“We have an incredibly strong AI team, huge amounts of compute, and it’s very important to us that, you know, maybe we don’t develop the absolute frontier, the best model in the world first,” he said. “That’s very, very expensive to do and unnecessary to cause that duplication.”

WATCH: Microsoft Copilot beginning of a seismic shift in AI integration, says Microsoft AI CEO Suleyman

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Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says, as shareholder, tariffs are ‘not good’

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Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says, as shareholder, tariffs are 'not good'

President Trump’s new tariffs on goods that the U.S. imports from over 100 countries will have an effect on consumers, former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told CNBC on Friday. Investors will feel the pain, too.

Microsoft’s stock dropped almost 6% in the past two days, as the Nasdaq wrapped up its worst week in five years.

“As a Microsoft shareholder, this kind of thing is not good,” Ballmer said, in an interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin that was tied to Microsoft’s 50th anniversary celebration. “It creates opportunity to be a serious, long-term player.”

Ballmer was sandwiched in between Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and current CEO Satya Nadella for the interview.

“I took just enough economics in college — that tariffs are actually going to bring some turmoil,” said Ballmer, who was succeeded by Nadella in 2014. Gates, Microsoft’s first CEO, convinced Ballmer to join the company in 1980.

Gates, Ballmer and Nadella attended proceedings at Microsoft’s Redmond, Washington, campus on Friday to celebrate its first half-century.

Between the tariffs and weak quarterly revenue guidance announced in January, Microsoft’s stock is on track for its fifth straight month of declines, which would be the worst stretch since 2009. But the company remains a leader in the PC operating system and productivity software markets, and its partnership with startup OpenAI has led to gains in cloud computing.

“I think that disruption is very hard on people, and so the decision to do something for which disruption was inevitable, that needs a lot of popular support, and nobody could game theorize exactly who is going to do what in response,” Ballmer said, regarding the tariffs. “So, I think citizens really like stability a lot. And I hope people — individuals who will feel this, because people are feeling it, not just the stock market, people are going to feel it.”

Ballmer, who owns the Los Angeles Clippers, is among Microsoft’s biggest fans. He said he’s the company’s largest investor. In 2014, shortly after he bought the basketball team for $2 billion, he held over 333 million shares of the stock, according to a regulatory filing.

“I’m not going to probably have 50 more years on the planet,” he said. “But whatever minutes I have, I’m gonna be a large Microsoft shareholder.” He said there’s a bright future for computing, storage and intelligence. Microsoft launched the first Azure services while Ballmer was CEO.

Earlier this week Bloomberg reported that Microsoft, which pledged to spend $80 billion on AI-enabled data center infrastructure in the current fiscal year, has stopped discussions or pushed back the opening of facilities in the U.S. and abroad.

JPMorgan Chase’s chief economist, Bruce Kasman, said in a Thursday note that the chance of a global recession will be 60% if Trump’s tariffs kick in as described. His previous estimate was 40%.

“Fifty years from now, or 25 years from now, what is the one thing you can be guaranteed of, is the world needs more compute,” Nadella said. “So I want to keep those two thoughts and then take one step at a time, and then whatever are the geopolitical or economic shifts, we’ll adjust to it.”

Gates, who along with co-founder Paul Allen, sought to build a software company rather than sell both software and hardware, said he wasn’t sure what the economic effects of the tariffs will be. Today, most of Microsoft’s revenue comes from software. It also sells Surface PCs and Xbox consoles.

“So far, it’s just on goods, but you know, will it eventually be on services? Who knows?” said Gates, who reportedly donated around $50 million to a nonprofit that supported Democratic nominee Kamala Harris’ losing campaign.

— CNBC’s Alex Harring contributed to this report.

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AppLovin can offer TikTok ‘much stronger bid than others,’ CEO says

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AppLovin can offer TikTok 'much stronger bid than others,' CEO says

Piotr Swat | Lightrocket | Getty Images

AppLovin CEO Adam Foroughi provided more clarity on the ad-tech company’s late-stage effort to acquire TikTok, calling his offer a “much stronger bid than others” on CNBC’s The Exchange Friday afternoon.

Foroughi said the company is proposing a merger between AppLovin and the entire global business of TikTok, characterizing the deal as a “partnership” where the Chinese could participate in the upside while AppLovin would run the app.

“If you pair our algorithm with the TikTok audience, the expansion on that platform for dollars spent will be through the roof,” Foroughi said.

The news comes as President Trump announced he would extend the deadline a second time for TikTok’s Chinese-owned parent company ByteDance to sell the U.S. subsidiary of TikTok to an American buyer or face an effective ban on U.S. app stores. The new deadline is now in June, which, as Foroughi described, “buys more time to put the pieces together” on AppLovin’s bid. 

“The president’s a great dealmaker — we’re proposing, essentially an enhancement to the deal that they’ve been working on, but a bigger version of all the deals contemplated,” he added.

AppLovin faces a crowded field of other interested U.S. backers, including Amazon, Oracle, billionaire Frank McCourt and his Project Liberty consortium, and numerous private equity firms. Some proposals reportedly structure the deal to give a U.S. buyer 50% ownership of the company, rather than a complete acquisition. The Chinese government will still need to approve the deal, and AppLovin’s interest in purchasing TikTok in “all markets outside of China” is “preliminary,” according to an April 3 SEC filing.

Correction: A prior version of this story incorrectly characterized China’s ongoing role in TikTok should AppLovin acquire the app.

WATCH: AppLovin CEO Adam Foroughi on its bid to buy TikTok

AppLovin CEO Adam Foroughi on its bid to buy TikTok

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