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Utah Gov. Spencer Cox on Wednesday signed a bill that requires Apple and Google’s mobile app stores to verify user ages and require parental permission for those under 18 to use certain apps, the governor’s spokesperson told CNBC.

The law is the first of its kind in the nation and represents a significant shift in how user ages are verified online, and says it’s the responsibility of mobile app stores to verify ages — putting the onus on Apple and Google, instead of individual apps like Instagram, Snapchat and X, to do age checks.

The App Store Accountability Act, or S.B. 142, could also kick off a wave of other states, including South Carolina and California, passing similar legislation

The law is designed to protect children, who may not understand apps’ terms of services and, therefore, can’t agree to them, said Todd Weiler, a Republican state senator and the bill’s sponsor.

“For the past decade or longer, Instagram has rated itself as friendly for 12 year olds,” Weiler said at a state senate committee hearing in January. “It’s not.”

Apple and Google will need to request age verification checks when someone makes a new account in the state. That will most likely have to be done using credit cards, according to Weiler. If someone under 18 opens an app store account, Apple or Google will have to link it to a parent’s account or request additional documentation. Parents will have to consent to in-app purchases.

Neither company immediately returned a request for comment on Wednesday.

Meta, X and Snap said on Wednesday they applauded Cox and Utah for passing the bill, and encouraged other states to consider similar approaches.

“Parents want a one-stop-shop to oversee and approve the many apps their teens want to download, and Utah has led the way in centralizing it within a device’s app store,” the companies said in a joint statement. “This approach spares users from repeatedly submitting personal information to countless individual apps and online services.”

The Utah law is slated to take effect on May 7, but it is expected to be challenged in a legal fight over its validity. The state passed a similar age-verification law related to pornography in 2023, and arguments whether that law violates free speech were heard by the Supreme Court in January.

Utah’s adoption of the law is also the latest shot in a long-running skirmish between Facebook-parent Meta and Apple.

Meta, which supported the bill, argues that app stores are the best place to do age verification on minors, instead of on individual apps. Meta has recently shifted its policy strategy to seek strategic advantages for itself and shift antitrust scrutiny onto Apple, CNBC reported last month

Apple says it makes the most sense for apps themselves to do age verification, and that due to privacy reasons, it doesn’t want to collect the data needed for age verification.

The “right place to address the dangers of age-restricted content online is the limited set of websites and apps that host that kind of content,” according to a paper Apple posted on its website last month.

Utah’s bill raises privacy and safety risks, Google said in a blog post on March 12.

“There are a variety of fast-moving legislative proposals being pushed by Meta and other companies in an effort to offload their own responsibilities to keep kids safe to app stores,” Google Director of Public Policy Kareem Ghanem wrote. “These proposals introduce new risks to the privacy of minors, without actually addressing the harms that are inspiring lawmakers to act.”

The push for age verification comes after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, X CEO Lina Yaccarino, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel and other social media CEOs appeared before Congress in January 2024 for a hearing focused on online child safety. 

There, lawmakers criticized the companies, saying they failed to stem online child sexual exploitation on social media apps and needed to do more. Zuckerberg appeared rattled during the hearing after senators told him he had “blood on your hands.” However, the legislation that came out of the meeting, the Kids Online Safety Act, failed to advance in Congress late last year.

Meta has also been hit with a number of lawsuits filed by states relating to the well-being of children on Facebook and Instagram.

— CNBC’s Jonathan Vanian contributed to this report.

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Amazon Web Services is building equipment to cool Nvidia GPUs as AI boom accelerates

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Amazon Web Services is building equipment to cool Nvidia GPUs as AI boom accelerates

The letters AI, which stands for “artificial intelligence,” stand at the Amazon Web Services booth at the Hannover Messe industrial trade fair in Hannover, Germany, on March 31, 2025.

Julian Stratenschulte | Picture Alliance | Getty Images

Amazon said Wednesday that its cloud division has developed hardware to cool down next-generation Nvidia graphics processing units that are used for artificial intelligence workloads.

Nvidia’s GPUs, which have powered the generative AI boom, require massive amounts of energy. That means companies using the processors need additional equipment to cool them down.

Amazon considered erecting data centers that could accommodate widespread liquid cooling to make the most of these power-hungry Nvidia GPUs. But that process would have taken too long, and commercially available equipment wouldn’t have worked, Dave Brown, vice president of compute and machine learning services at Amazon Web Services, said in a video posted to YouTube.

“They would take up too much data center floor space or increase water usage substantially,” Brown said. “And while some of these solutions could work for lower volumes at other providers, they simply wouldn’t be enough liquid-cooling capacity to support our scale.”

Rather, Amazon engineers conceived of the In-Row Heat Exchanger, or IRHX, that can be plugged into existing and new data centers. More traditional air cooling was sufficient for previous generations of Nvidia chips.

Customers can now access the AWS service as computing instances that go by the name P6e, Brown wrote in a blog post. The new systems accompany Nvidia’s design for dense computing power. Nvidia’s GB200 NVL72 packs a single rack with 72 Nvidia Blackwell GPUs that are wired together to train and run large AI models.

Computing clusters based on Nvidia’s GB200 NVL72 have previously been available through Microsoft or CoreWeave. AWS is the world’s largest supplier of cloud infrastructure.

Amazon has rolled out its own infrastructure hardware in the past. The company has custom chips for general-purpose computing and for AI, and designed its own storage servers and networking routers. In running homegrown hardware, Amazon depends less on third-party suppliers, which can benefit the company’s bottom line. In the first quarter, AWS delivered the widest operating margin since at least 2014, and the unit is responsible for most of Amazon’s net income.

Microsoft, the second largest cloud provider, has followed Amazon’s lead and made strides in chip development. In 2023, the company designed its own systems called Sidekicks to cool the Maia AI chips it developed.

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Bitcoin rises to fresh record above $112,000, helped by Nvidia-led tech rally

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Bitcoin rises to fresh record above 2,000, helped by Nvidia-led tech rally

The logo of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin can be seen on a coin in front of a Bitcoin chart.

Silas Stein | Picture Alliance | Getty Images

Bitcoin hit a fresh record on Wednesday afternoon as an Nvidia-led rally in equities helped push the price of the cryptocurrency higher into the stock market close.

The price of bitcoin was last up 1.9%, trading at $110,947.49, according to Coin Metrics. Just before 4:00 p.m. ET, it hit a high of $112,052.24, surpassing its May 22 record of $111,999.

The flagship cryptocurrency has been trading in a tight range for several weeks despite billions of dollars flowing into bitcoin exchange traded funds. Bitcoin purchases by public companies outpaced ETF inflows in the second quarter. Still, bitcoin is up just 2% in the past month.

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Bitcoin climbs above $112,000

On Wednesday, tech stocks rallied as Nvidia became the first company to briefly touch $4 trillion in market capitalization. In the same session, investors appeared to shrug off the latest tariff developments from President Donald Trump. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite notched a record close.

While institutions broadly have embraced bitcoin’s “digital gold” narrative, it is still a risk asset that rises and falls alongside stocks depending on what’s driving investor sentiment. When the market is in risk-on mode and investors buy growth-oriented assets like tech stocks, bitcoin and crypto tend to rally with them.

Investors have been expecting bitcoin to reach new records in the second half of the year as corporate treasuries accelerate their bitcoin buying sprees and Congress gets closer to passing crypto legislation.

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Perplexity launches AI-powered web browser for select group of subscribers

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Perplexity launches AI-powered web browser for select group of subscribers

Dado Ruvic | Reuters

Perplexity AI on Wednesday launched a new artificial intelligence-powered web browser called Comet in the startup’s latest effort to compete in the consumer internet market against companies like Google and Microsoft.

Comet will allow users to connect with enterprise applications like Slack and ask complex questions via voice and text, according to a brief demo video Perplexity released on Wednesday.

The browser is available to Perplexity Max subscribers, and the company said invite-only access will roll out to a waitlist over the summer. Perplexity Max costs users $200 per month.

“We built Comet to let the internet do what it has been begging to do: to amplify our intelligence,” Perplexity wrote in a blog post on Wednesday.

Perplexity is best known for its AI-powered search engine that gives users simple answers to questions and links out to the original source material on the web. After the company was accused of plagiarizing content from media outlets, it launched a revenue-sharing model with publishers last year.

In May, Perplexity was in late-stage talks to raise $500 million at a $14 billion valuation, a source familiar confirmed to CNBC. The startup was also approached by Meta earlier this year about a potential acquisition, but the companies did not finalize a deal.

“We will continue to launch new features and functionality for Comet, improve experiences based on your feedback, and focus relentlessly–as we always have–on building accurate and trustworthy AI that fuels human curiosity,” Perplexity said Wednesday.

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