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A customer carries an Apple MacBook Pro laptop outside an Apple store in Walnut Creek, California, US, on Wednesday, April 30, 2025.

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Apple devices will power a hospital in Georgia, a first for the company as it continues its push into the health-care sector. 

Emory Healthcare on Thursday announced that its Emory Hillandale Hospital will be the first U.S. hospital that runs on Apple products, including the iPad, iPhone, Apple Watch, iMac and Mac mini. The devices will also integrate with software from Epic Systems, the leading electronic health record vendor in the nation.  

Hillandale is using Apple products because they are user-friendly, require less IT support, offer cybersecurity advantages and have long-lasting hardware and battery life, Emory executives told CNBC.

Since this is new territory for the health system, Emory said it will closely monitor the devices to ensure they improve the organization’s quality of care.  

“It can certainly be a game changer that’s not been done anywhere else in the country,” Emory Healthcare CEO Dr. Joon Lee said in an interview. “And like everything else, it’s not going to be without its challenges, but it really opens the door to multiple possibilities.”

Emory Healthcare is an academic health system in Georgia that operates 10 hospitals and supports roughly 26,400 employees. Its Hillandale facility is a 100-bed community hospital on the outskirts of the greater Atlanta metro area. 

“At Apple, we believe in technology’s power to improve lives,” Dr. Sumbul Desai, vice president of health at Apple, said in a statement to CNBC. “We’re thrilled that Emory Hillandale Hospital is using Apple products to deliver exceptional care — because doctors and nurses should have the best technology in the world to serve their patients.”

The health system’s interest in using more Apple products was partially inspired by the major CrowdStrike outage that rocked businesses, including Emory, last July, said Dr. Ravi Thadhani, the executive vice president for health affairs of Emory University.  

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Thadhani said more than 20,000 of the health system’s devices were “paralyzed” by a faulty CrowdStrike software update, but notably, all of its Apple products were still working. In the aftermath of the outage, executives asked engineers from Apple and Epic to visit Emory and explore a deeper integration. 

“They were working on each other already, you could get Epic on an Apple device, but it wasn’t quick and it wasn’t seamless,” Thadhani said. “And so they came, they descended here.” 

Epic is Emory’s electronic health record, or EHR, provider. EHRs are digital versions of a patient’s medical history that are updated by doctors and nurses. The software is often referred to as the “central nervous system” of a health-care organization, said Seth Howard, Epic’s executive vice president of research and development.

Howard said Epic has worked with Apple for many years, deploying apps for the iPhone as far back as 2010. Last year, the company released Epic on Mac, which made its complete suite of applications available on Apple’s computer operating system macOS. 

“The Epic on Mac project was really an extension and natural next step for us on this journey with Apple,” Howard said in an interview.

Emory was an early adopter. 

Before Emory decided to roll out Apple devices throughout an entire hospital, it conducted a smaller pilot across one floor of a facility. Thadhani said the feedback from doctors and nurses was “phenomenal,” which gave the health system confidence to expand the scope.

If the launch at Hillandale is a success, Lee said the health system could deploy Apple products across other Emory facilities in the future. 

“Certainly our intent and hope is that it will show a difference, and that we can expand and it will also be a model for other health systems across the country,” he said. 

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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.

WATCH: AWS announces latest CPU chip, will deliver record networking speed

AWS announces latest CPU chip, will deliver record networking speed

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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.

Don’t miss these cryptocurrency insights from CNBC Pro:

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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.

WATCH: Perplexity CEO on AI race: The market of providing answers to questions will become a commodity

Perplexity CEO on AI race: The market of providing answers to questions will become a commodity

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