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Amazon CEO, Andy Jassy speaking with CNBC’s Jim Cramer on Mad Money in Seattle, WA. on Dec. 6th, 2023.

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Apple is currently using Amazon Web Services’ custom artificial intelligence chips for services like search and will evaluate if the company’s latest AI chip can be used to pretrain its models like Apple Intelligence.

Apple revealed its usage of Amazon’s proprietary chips at the annual AWS Reinvent conference on Tuesday. Benoit Dupin, Apple’s senior director of machine learning and AI, took the stage to discuss how Apple uses the cloud service. It’s a rare example of the company officially allowing a supplier to tout them as a customer.

“We have a strong relationship, and the infrastructure is both reliable and able to serve our customers worldwide,” Apple’s Dupin said.

Apple’s appearance at Amazon’s conference and its embrace of the company’s chips is a strong endorsement of the cloud service as it vies with Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud for AI spending. Apple uses those cloud services, too.

Benoit said Apple had used AWS for more than a decade for services including Siri, Apple Maps and Apple Music. Apple has used Amazon’s Inferentia and Graviton chips to serve search services, for example, and Benoit said Amazon’s chips had led to a 40% efficiency gain.

But Benoit also suggested that Apple would use Amazon’s Trainium2 chip to pretrain its proprietary models. It’s a sign that Amazon’s chips aren’t just a cost-effective way to inference AI models compared with x86 central processors made by Intel and AMD, but can also be used to develop new AI. Amazon announced on Tuesday that its Trainium2 chip was generally available to rent.

“In early stages of evaluating Trainium2 we expect early numbers up to 50% improvement in efficiency with pretraining,” Dupin said.

AWS CEO Matt Garman said in an interview with CNBC on Tuesday that Apple had been an early adopter and beta-tester for the company’s Trainium chips.

Apple “came to us, and said to us, ‘how can you help us with our Generative AI capabilities, we need infrastructure in order to go build,’ and they had this vision for building Apple Intelligence,” AWS CEO Matt Carman told CNBC’s Kate Rooney.

Earlier this year, Apple said in a research paper that it had used Google Cloud’s TPU chips to train its iPhone AI service, which it calls Apple Intelligence.

The majority of AI training is done on pricey Nvidia graphics processors. Cloud providers and startups are racing to develop alternatives to lower costs and are exploring different approaches that could lead to more efficient processing. Apple’s usage of custom chips could signal to other companies that non-Nvidia training approaches can work.

AWS is expected to announce new details on Tuesday about offering Nvidia Blackwell-based AI servers for rent, too.

Apple released its first major generative AI product this fall. Apple Intelligence is a series of services that can summarize notifications, rewrite emails and generate new emojis. Later this month, it will integrate with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the company says, and next year, Siri will get new abilities to control apps and speak naturally.

Unlike leading chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Apple’s approach to AI isn’t based on large clusters of Nvidia-based servers in the cloud. Instead, Apple uses an iPhone, iPad or Mac chip to do as much of the processing as possible, and then sends complicated queries to Apple-operated servers using its own M-series chips.

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Alibaba shares rise over 6% after CEO unveils plans to boost AI spending

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Alibaba shares rise over 6% after CEO unveils plans to boost AI spending

Alibaba‘s Hong Kong-listed shares surged on Wednesday to reach their highest point since 2021 after the company said it will invest more in artificial intelligence and rolled out new AI products and updates. 

Shares of the company jumped over 6%, while its total gains year to date rose above 107%. 

The tech giant plans to increase spending on AI models and infrastructure development, on top of the 380 billion yuan ($53 billion) over three years it announced in February, Chief Executive Officer Eddie Wu said Wednesday at Alibaba Cloud’s annual flagship technology conference.

“We are vigorously advancing a three-year, 380 billion [yuan] AI infrastructure initiative with plans to sustain and further increase our investment according to our strategic vision in anticipation of the [artificial superintelligence] era,” Wu said. 

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Alibaba shares surge after CEO unveils plans to boost AI spending

So-called ‘artificial superintelligence’ refers to AI that would hypothetically surpass the power and intelligence of the human brain, with the hypothetical benchmark becoming a growing focus of major AI companies. 

Alibaba also officially unveiled the latest version of its Qwen large language models — the Qwen3-Max — on Wednesday, along with a series of other updates to its suite of AI product offerings. 

Wu highlighted that Alibaba Cloud is strategically positioned as a “full-stack AI service provider,” delivering the computing power required for training and deploying large AI models on the cloud through its own data centers.

“The cumulative investment in global AI in the next five years will exceed $4 trillion, and this is the largest investment in computing power and research and development in history,” he added.

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Tether reportedly seeks lofty $500 billion valuation in capital raise

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Tether reportedly seeks lofty 0 billion valuation in capital raise

Venezuelan Bolivar and U.S. Dollar banknotes and representations of cryptocurrency Tether are seen in this illustration taken Sept. 8, 2025.

Dado Ruvic | Array

Tether, the issuer of the largest stablecoin, is planning to raise as much as $20 billion in a deal that could put the crypto company’s value on par with OpenAI, according to a report from Bloomberg News.

The crypto company is looking to raise between $15 billion and $20 billion in exchange for a roughly 3% stake through a private placement, the report said, citing two individuals familiar with the matter. The transaction would involve new equity rather than existing investors selling their stakes, the people told the news service.

The report said that one person close to the matter warned that the talks are in an early stage, which means that the eventual details, including the size of the offering, could change.

However, the deal could ultimately value Tether at around $500 billion, according to the report. That would mean the crypto giant’s valuation would rival some of the world’s biggest private companies, including SpaceX and OpenAI. OpenAI’s fundraising round earlier this year valued the tech company at $300 billion.

Tether, which was once accused of being a criminal’s “go-to cryptocurrency,” has been furthering its plans to return to the U.S. in recent months, given President Donald Trump’s pro-crypto stance. The company earlier this month named a CEO for its U.S. business and launched a new token for businesses and institutions in the U.S. called USAT, which will be regulated in the U.S. under the GENIUS Act.

Stablecoin USD Tether (USDT) is pegged to the U.S. dollar with a market cap that recently surpassed $172 billion. In second place is Tether rival Circle’s USDC stablecoin, which is worth about $74 billion.

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Micron beats on earnings as company sales rise 46% on AI boom

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Micron beats on earnings as company sales rise 46% on AI boom

A person walks by a sign for Micron Technology headquarters in San Jose, California, on June 25, 2025.

Justin Sullivan | Getty Images

Micron reported better-than-expected earnings and revenue on Tuesday as well as a robust forecast for the current quarter.

The stock rose in extended trading.

Here’s how the company did in comparison with the LSEG consensus:

  • Earnings per share: $3.03, adjusted, vs. $2.86 expected
  • Revenue: $11.32 billion vs. $11.22 billion expected

Micron said revenue in the current period, its fiscal first quarter, will be about $12.5 billion, versus the $11.94 billion average analyst estimate per LSEG.

The company said it had $3.2 billion, or $2.83 per share in net income, versus $887 million, or 79 cents in the year-ago period.

Micron shares have nearly doubled so far in 2025. The company makes memory and storage, which are important components for computers. Micron has been one of the winners of the artificial intelligence boom. That’s because high-end AI chips like those made by Nvidia require increasing amounts of high-tech memory called high-bandwidth memory, which Micron makes.

“As the only U.S.-based memory manufacturer, Micron is uniquely positioned to capitalize on the AI opportunity ahead,” Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra said in a statement.

Overall company revenue rose 46% on a year-over-year basis during the quarter.

Micron’s largest unit, which sells memory for cloud providers, reported $4.54 billion in sales during the quarter, more than tripling on a year-over-year basis.

However, the company’s core data center business unit saw sales decline 22% on an annual basis to $1.57 billion in revenue.

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