Apple is taking a cue from some of its competitors.

The technology giant’s Apple TV+ monthly subscription is now $12.99, starting Thursday in the U.S. and other countries.

Apple said the new price will hit current subscribers 30 days after their next renewal date. The annual subscription price will not change.

For new subscribers, the $12.99 monthly price begins after a seven-day trial period.

The change marks Apple’s first price hike for its streaming service since 2023. At the time, Apple lifted its monthly price to about $9.99 from $6.99. The company raised the price in 2022 from $4.99.

Apple TV+ is one of the company’s most popular services, but Apple does not release viewership numbers. A report from The Information earlier this year said the streaming service is losing more than $1 billion annually as subscriptions rocketed toward 45 million, citing people familiar with the matter.

Apple isn’t the only streaming company hiking prices this year to either fund new content or reap returns on their investments. Earlier this year, both Netflix and NBCUniversal’s Peacock boosted prices. Music streaming platform Spotify also raised prices in multiple markets.

Earlier this year, Apple introduced its streaming service to Android phones in a move that could open the company to more people worldwide.

The company is fresh off the release of its highest-grossing theatrical film, “F1: The Movie.”

Disclosure: Comcast owns NBCUniversal, the parent company of CNBC.

President Donald Trump‘s dealings with Intel and Nvidia amount to a “scattershot method of crony capitalism,” Walter Isaacson said Thursday.

“That state capitalism often evolves into crony capitalism, where you have favored companies and industries that pay tribute to the leader, and that is a recipe for not only disaster, but just sort of a corrupt sense of messiness,” he told CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”

The Tulane University professor, widely known for his recent Elon Musk biography, argued that this method won’t succeed in reviving American manufacturing.

Isaacson’s comments come as the Trump administration wades further into influencing the way companies operate in the U.S.

The White House is pushing for a stake in embattled chipmaker Intel after Trump called CEO Lip-Bu Tan “highly CONFLICTED” and said he should resign.

Earlier this month, both Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices agreed to pay 15% of their China revenues to the U.S. government for export licenses to sell certain chips there.

Isaacson said he’s always been “dubious” of public-private partnerships. He highlighted Trump’s push for Coca-Cola to use cane sugar in its namesake soda as another example of “crony capitalism.”

The U.K. government is facing a legal challenge from campaigners over its decision to override a local authority and wave through development of a new “hyperscale” data center.

Last year, the local authority of Buckinghamshire, England, denied planning permission for proposals to build a new 90-megawatt data center on green belt land. The green belt is a term in British town planning that refers to an area of open land on which building is restricted.

Data centers, large facilities that house floods of computing systems to enable remote delivery of various IT services, have seen huge demand in recent years amid a global rush to develop powerful new AI systems, such as OpenAI’s popular ChatGPT chatbot.

At the same time, they have been met with concerns from environmental campaigners and activists due to the vast amounts of power they require to keep them running on an ongoing basis. AI, in particular, has been criticized for consuming massive amounts of energy.

Plans to develop the Buckinghamshire facility were twice rejected by the council previously. However, they were again resurrected under the Labour government, which is pushing to make the U.K. a global artificial intelligence hub by ramping up national computing capacity.

Buckinghamshire council again rejected the planned data center in June 2024, saying it would be “inappropriate” to develop it on the green belt. Then, last month, British Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner granted planning permission for the project, overturning the local authority’s decision.

Campaign groups Foxglove and Global Action Plan announced on Thursday that they filed a formal planning statutory review asking a court to quash Rayner’s approval of the data center, raising concerns over the vast amounts of power and water such facilities require.

“Angela Rayner appears to either not know the difference between a power station that actually produces energy and a substation that just links you to the grid — or simply not care,” Foxglove Co-executive Director Rosa Curling, said in a statement Thursday. 

“Either way, thanks to her decision, local people and businesses in Buckinghamshire will soon be competing with a power guzzling-behemoth to keep the lights on, which as we’ve seen in the States, usually means sky-high prices.”

The U.K. Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government — which Rayner also leads — declined to comment on the legal action when asked about it by CNBC. The government has previously stressed the importance of building data center infrastructure to compete on a global level in AI development.

Thursday’s move comes after British Prime Minister Keir Starmer in January announced plans to block campaigners from making repeated legal challenges from so-called “Nimbys” to planning decisions for major infrastructure projects in England and Wales.

Nimby is a derogatory term that refers to people who protest developments they view as unpleasant or hazardous to their local area.