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The Galaxy Z Fold 7 is super thin, measuring just 8.9 millimeters when closed and 4.2 millimeters when unfolded.

Ryan Browne | CNBC

Samsung on Wednesday launched three new folding smartphones — including thinner top-end devices and a cheaper version of its flip phone — as the tech giant looks to entice buyers to make the switch to foldables.

The main new additions to Samsung’s foldable phone range are the Galaxy Z Fold 7, which folds like a book, and the Galaxy Z Flip 7, which takes on the form of the classic clamshell-style flip phones. Samsung also announced a cheaper version of its latest flip phone, the Galaxy Z Flip 7 SE.

The South Korean consumer electronics giant is refreshing its foldable phone lineup at a time when the company faces increased competition from Chinese rivals, such as Honor and Oppo. Last week, Honor — which spun off from Chinese tech giant Huawei in 2020 — launched the new ultra-thin Magic V5 folding phone, while Oppo introduced its own slim foldable device, the Find N5, earlier this year.

Samsung’s share of the global foldable phone market slipped to 45% in 2024 from 54% a year earlier, according to Counterpoint Research. China also accounts for a significant share of the foldables market — although 17.2 million of these devices were sold last year globally, this drops to 9.4 million when excluding mainland China.

Thinner and bigger — but there’s a catch

The Galaxy Z Fold 7 is super thin at a thickness of 8.9 millimeters (0.35 inches) closed and only 4.2 millimeters open. It’s also much lighter than its predecessor, weighing 215 grams (7.62 ounces). These stats put the phone on par with both Honor’s Magic V5 and the Oppo Find N5.

The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7.

Ryan Browne | CNBC

The new Fold device has a 6.5-inch cover screen and an 8-inch main display when opened, making it bigger than its predecessor.

It’s also decked out with premium new cameras, featuring a 200-megapixel main lens, as well as a 10-megapixel telephoto sensor, 12-megapixel ultra-wide and two 10-megapixel front cameras on both the cover screen and on the main display.

The Galaxy Z Fold 7 is super thin, measuring just 8.9 millimeters when closed and 4.2 millimeters when unfolded.

Ryan Browne | CNBC

Samsung’s new Fold generation is, nevertheless, much more limited than other devices in the market when it comes to battery capacity. The Galaxy Z Fold 7 has a 4,400 milliampere-hour (mAh) battery — far less than the 6,100 mAh power pack in Honor’s Magic V5’s or the Oppo Find N5’s 5,600 mAh battery.

Samsung says its device is capable of 24 hours of video playback.

The Galaxy Z Fold 7 will retail in the U.K. at a starting price of £1,799 ($2,434).

Cheaper flip phone

The Galaxy Z Flip 7 has a 4.1-inch cover screen and a 6.9-inch main display when opened.

Ryan Browne | CNBC

Samsung’s Galaxy Z Flip 7 is also thinner than its predecessor, coming in at 6.5 millimeters when opened flat. By contrast, the Galaxy Z Flip 6 has a depth of 6.9 millimeters when unfolded.

The new phone has a 4.1-inch cover screen and a 6.9-inch main display. It comes with a 50-megapixel main camera and 12-megapixel ultra-wide sensor on the back and a 10-megapixel lens on the main display.

It also has a bigger 4,300 mAh battery, which Samsung says supports 31 hours of video playtime on a single charge.

In addition to Flip 7, Samsung is also introducing a cheaper version of the phone, called the Galaxy Z Flip 7 FE, which is slightly smaller and thicker than its more premium counterpart.

The Galaxy Z Flip 7 will retail from £1,049 in the U.K., while the Galaxy Z Flip 7 FE starts at £849.

AI fashion tips

The Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 7.

Ryan Browne | CNBC

It also has new AI-powered camera features, including one that automatically suggests people and objects to erase from photos — for example, if you’ve been photobombed by someone — and an audio eraser tool that proactively detects and removes unwanted background noise from videos.

The Galaxy Z Flip 7, meanwhile, lets you pull up Google’s AI assistant app, Gemini Live, on top of the camera app when taking a live video of yourself. Samsung says one use case this offers is the ability to ask the AI for tips on the outfit you’re wearing.

Sheng Win Chow, senior analyst at Counterpoint Research, said that physical design alone won’t be enough to convince users to convert to foldable phones from the touchscreen slabs we’re all used to.

“Lasting leadership depends on redefining what foldables do, not just how they look,” he said in an emailed note. “The next wave of competition will come from software — how vendors use the foldable form factor to deliver truly differentiated experiences.”

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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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