Apple CEO Tim Cook delivers remarks before the start of an Apple event at the Apple headquarters in Cupertino, California, on Sept. 9, 2024.
Justin Sullivan | Getty Images
Apple is deepening its investment in health-care research by launching a new, years-long project called the Apple Health Study, the company announced on Wednesday.
The study will analyze how data from devices like iPhones, AirPods and Apple Watches can monitor, manage and predict changes in users’ health. It will also explore connections between different components of health, like how mental health affects heart rate, for instance.
The Apple Health Study is the first major health research project the company has announced since it unveiled the Apple Women’s Health Study, the Apple Hearing Study and the Apple Heart and Movement Study in 2019. Those projects are ongoing, and they’ve inspired many of the health features that Apple has introduced in recent years.
Apple rolled out a hearing test in the fall, for instance, which was developed using insights from the Apple Hearing Study, the company said.
The new study will likely influence future product development. Apple CEO Tim Cook previously said he believes health features will be the company’s “most important contribution to mankind.”
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“We’re thrilled to bring forward the Apple Health Study, which will only accelerate our understanding of health and technology across the human body, both physically and mentally,” Dr. Sumbul Desai, Apple’s vice president of health, said in a statement.
The Apple Health Study will be available through the company’s Research app, and participation is voluntary. Users will select each data type they’re willing to share with researchers, and they can stop sharing or completely discontinue their participation at any time.
Apple has no access to participants’ identifiable information, the company said.
Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School and a research hospital, is collaborating with Apple on the study. The project will last at least five years and may expand past that.
“We’ve only just begun to scratch the surface of how technology can improve our understanding of human health,” Dr. Calum MacRae, the principal investigator of the study at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, said in a statement.
JoeBen Bevirt, founder and CEO of Joby Aviation, stands near an electric air taxi by Joby Aviation at the Downtown Manhattan Heliport in Manhattan, New York City, U.S., November 12, 2023.
Roselle Chen | Reuters
Joby Aviation is ramping up its manufacturing capabilities in the U.S. as it races to roll out air taxi service in 2026.
The electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) maker said Tuesday that it’s launching production at its remodeled components facility in Dayton, Ohio, and plans to double capacity at its Marina, California, manufacturing hub.
“Reimagining urban mobility takes speed, scale, and precision manufacturing. Our expanded manufacturing footprint in both California and Ohio is preparing us to do just that,” said product chief Eric Allison in a release.
Shares jumped more than 7%, building on a 16% year-to-date gain.
Joby Aviation and competitors such as Archer Aviation and Eve Air Mobility are aiming to roll out eVTOLs worldwide that can ease traffic congestion in crowded city centers, but they are awaiting regulatory approval.
The company is currently in the process of gaining Federal Aviation Administration approval for its vehicles.
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Last month, Joby Aviation shares popped on news that it delivered its first eVTOL to the United Arab Emirates, with plans to launch service in the region next year. The company agreed to an exclusive six-year deal to roll out air taxi service in Dubai last February.
Joby said the new facilities will create hundreds of new full-time jobs and underscore its commitment to fostering American innovation. At full capacity, the 435,500-square-foot California factory will manufacture as many as 24 aircraft annually.
The electric air transport company also said the opening coincided with the flight of its sixth aircraft.
Engineers from Toyota will help ramp up aircraft production to 500 annually at the Ohio facility. The companies inked a $500 million deal last year.
Shares of Joby and its competitors have ballooned in value this year as interest in the technology gains steam.
In June, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that included the creation of an air taxi testing program.
Howard Lutnick, U.S. Secretary of Commerce speaks during the Pennsylvania Energy And Innovation Summit 2025 at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh on July 15, 2025.
David A. Grogan | CNBC
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick on Tuesday said the Trump administration reversed course on allowing Nvidia to sell its AI chips to China because the U.S. company will not be giving over its best technology.
Lutnick made the remark speaking with CNBC’s Brian Sullivan, saying that Nvidia wants to sell China its “4th best” chip, which is slower than the fastest chips that U.S. companies use.
“We don’t sell them our best stuff, not our second best stuff, not even our third best,” Lutnick said.
Nvidia said Monday night that it would soon resume sales of the H20 chip to China after the Trump administration signaled that it would grant the chipmaker necessary export licenses.
Lutnick said that the administration said that the renewed sale of H20 chips to China was linked to a rare-earths magnet deal. Lutnick said it was in U.S. interests to have Chinese companies using American technology so they continue to use an American “tech stack.”
“The fourth one down, we want to keep China using it,” Lutnick said. “We want to keep having the Chinese use the American technology stack, because they still rely upon it.”
Similarly, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has said in recent weeks that the U.S. should continue selling his chips to China so Chinese companies don’t invest in homegrown infrastructure. Huang on Sunday also said that the Chinese military wouldn’t use Nvidia chips anyway, and previously signaled that China’s Huawei is a legitimate competitor.
“The idea is the Chinese are more than capable of building their own,” Lutnick said. “You want to keep one step ahead of what they can build, so they keep buying our chips.”
The reversal is a major win for Nvidia. Huang had previously said that the Trump administration’s decision to require a license for the H20 chip in April “effectively closed” the China market. Nvidia said that it could have sold $8 billion in H20 chips in the current quarter before sales were stopped.
The administration reversed its decision after President Donald Trump met with Huang in Washington last week.
“You want to sell the Chinese enough that their developers get addicted to the American technology stack,” Lutnick said. “That’s the thinking.”
The H20 chip was introduced in 2022 in response to Biden administration export controls. It’s based on the same underlying technology as Nvidia’s Hopper-generation chips, which are sold in the U.S. as finished systems using H100 or H200 chips.
The U.S. chipmaker took some features out of the H20 in order to sell it to China, including fewer graphics processing unit cores and lower bandwidth connecting separate parts of the chip. But the success of the DeepSeek R1 model suggested that there were many Chinese companies that were just fine with the slowed-down chips. The China-specific H20 is behind Nvidia’s Blackwell chips, the H100 and the H200, Lutnick said.
Nvidia says that it releases new artificial intelligence chips every year and that serious AI developers should always try to get the latest and greatest versions because the technology is improving so quickly.
The best AI chips broadly available from clouds and system makers today are called Blackwell, and come as a GB200 chip with a paired central processing unit as well as B100 and B200 versions. Nvidia also makes a range of Blackwell-based chips for gaming and graphics that can be used for AI, but they’re generally weaker than the biggest chips designed for data centers.
A successor, called Blackwell Ultra, is only now starting to be installed in data centers, and it’s expected to ramp in volume over the next year. In 2027, Nvidia will release “Vera Rubin” chips.
The U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C., U.S., June 27, 2025.
Elizabeth Frantz | Reuters
It’s “Crypto Week” in Washington.
The cryptocurrency industry is set to notch a major win this week if the House can pass two bills that would set up a long-lobbied-for regulatory framework for digital assets.
The stablecoin bill, known as the GENUIS Act, has already passed the Senate and looks set to become the first standalone crypto measure signed into law should the House do the same.
But the real prize for the industry is a wider and more complex bill on market structure called the CLARITY Act, which faces a more difficult path to President Donald Trump‘s desk.
Seeking CLARITY
The CLARITY Act sets the rules for when an asset is considered a security and overseen by the Securities and Exchange Commission versus when it’s considered a commodity that is overseen by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, or CFTC.
The act is likely to pass the House on Wednesday, given the bipartisan support when the bill cleared two committees. But the path in the Senate is murky, as Democrats could withhold their support over concerns about how Trump and his family are benefiting from crypto.
The Trump family’s growing crypto empire includes $TRUMP and $MELANIA meme coins, a stablecoin, and a decentralized finance firm called World Liberty Financial, among other ventures.
Some lawmakers who backed the narrower stablecoin bill did so with the hopes of seeing the wider market structure package address conflicts of interest.
“President Trump’s crypto corruption distorts the digital asset marketplace,” said Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., who voted for the stablecoin bill. “Writing a bill with a corruption caveat for the president sends a clear message — that Congress is not serious about addressing corruption, which we know undermines investors’ faith in capital markets.”
Pushing it to pass
Coinbase attempted to literally sweeten the deal on the CLARITY Act for lawmakers with an advertising push that included handing out about 5,000 chocolate bars around D.C.
The candy wrappers cited a Morning Consult poll that found about “1 in 5” Americans own crypto.
Coinbase, Ripple and other crypto companies are lobbying Congress to put their concerns aside and back the market structure package, anticipating that more regulatory certainty will encourage more investment in crypto.
“When consumers buy and sell and trade these digital assets, they want to know what they’re getting and they want to know that they’re using a reputable intermediary,” Coinbase Vice President of U.S. Policy Kara Calvert told CNBC. “And what this bill does is provide that construct to do that.”
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The Senate is set to introduce its own market structure bill this month that is expected to differ slightly from the House version.
Senate Banking Chair Tim Scott, R-S.C., is working with Sen. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo., and others on the measure.
Other Democrats are planning to work with Republicans on a bill, including Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., who worked on previous market structure bills with Lummis.
“We have a lot of work to do, and we’re going to work on a bipartisan basis over the next month,” she told CNBC in a brief interview in the Capitol.
GENIUS and the Fed
The House is scheduled for a GENIUS Act vote on Thursday.
The package cleared the Senate last month with 18 Democrats joining most Republicans to support the measure.
The House stood down on their own version of the bill under pressure from Trump, who told lawmakers via a Truth Social post to “Get it to my desk, ASAP — NO DELAYS, NO ADD ONS.”
In addition to the two major bills the crypto industry has pushed for, the House will take up a separate measure that would prevent the Federal Reserve from issuing a central bank digital currency (CBDC).
The bill is expected to pass in a vote scheduled for Wednesday.