Larry Ellison, co-founder and executive chairman of Oracle Corp., speaks during the Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco on Oct. 22, 2018.
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Oracle unveiled a brand-new electronic health record on Tuesday, its most significant health-care product update since acquiring the medical records giant Cerner for $28 billion in 2022.
An electronic health record, or an EHR, is a digital version of a patient’s medical history that’s updated by doctors and nurses over time. EHR software can be complex and cumbersome for clinicians to use, but it’s become an integral component of the modern U.S. health-care system.
Oracle’s latest EHR is equipped with cloud and artificial intelligence capabilities that will make it easier to navigate and set up, the company said. There are no menus or drop-down screens, and doctors can pull up the information they need by asking questions with their voices. Ideally, this will allow doctors to spend less time searching through records and more time caring for patients, Oracle said.
“It’s not just a scribe. It’s not an assistant. It’s almost like having your own resident,” Seema Verma, executive vice president and general manager of Oracle Health and Life Sciences, told CNBC in an interview.
Oracle’s new offering could help boost its position within the fiercely competitive EHR market, where it has struggled to maintain its footing in recent years. In 2023, Oracle saw its largest net hospital loss on record while market leader Epic Systems, Oracle’s top rival, was the only company that saw a net increase in acute care market share, according to a report from KLAS Research.
Cerner contributed $5.9 billion to Oracle’s total revenue in fiscal 2023. Epic generated $4.9 billion in revenue last year.
Oracle co-founder and Chairman Larry Ellison delivers a keynote address during the Oracle OpenWorld on October 22, 2018 in San Francisco, California.
Justin Sullivan | Getty Images
The new EHR has been in the works since Oracle acquired Cerner, but it was not built on top of Cerner’s existing infrastructure, Verma said. That means current Cerner customers will have to decide whether to migrate to the separate system.
“Just think about crumbling infrastructure in a house, you’re not going to put new things on top of it,” she said. “That was the conclusion that we came to when we looked at the Cerner technology, so what we’re introducing to the market is something that’s brand new.”
Suhas Uliyar, Oracle’s senior vice president for product management in clinical and health-care AI, walked CNBC through a virtual demo of the new EHR. He showcased what it might look like for a doctor to get up to speed, respond to messages and fill prescriptions ahead of a day packed full of patient visits.
The EHR is browser based, and physicians will see a search bar and a chronological list of their appointments when they open it. The interface is very simple. A doctor can click on the microphone in the search bar and ask questions like, “How many openings do I have for today?” or “How many new patients do I have on schedule for today?” The doctor will then get an AI-generated answer within seconds.
If a doctor clicks on a patient, they’ll open their chart, where they can find AI summaries as well as more detailed explanations of their medical history. The physician can see what’s changed since the patient’s last visit, whether they’re taking any new medication and other details like lab results, clinical documentation, past treatments, risk factors, messages, allergies and vitals.
Additionally, the doctor can click the microphone and ask patient-specific questions like “Has she ever complained about panic attacks or shortness of breath?,” “Has he had a CT screening for lung cancer, and are his vaccinations up to date?” or “Which antibiotics have you treated her urinary tract infection with?”
“It’s going through the entire history, all the records, and it gives me a very specific answer,” Uliyar said. “I didn’t have to go scroll through 15 different documents and find that.”
The voice-activated questions can build on one another, and the EHR’s AI will start to learn the doctor’s habits, like the types of medications they prescribe and refill often. Even when Uliyar stumbled over his words or didn’t phrase a question exactly right, the system still pulled up the information he was looking for.
If a doctor wants to go into more detail or double-check an AI-generated answer within the new EHR, they can always click on the citation and look through the original record that’s referenced, Uliyar said. And answers that include content like medication dosage information or other evidence-based recommendations will link to validated databases, he added.
Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) on July 12, 2023 in New York City.
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While Oracle has been developing its new EHR, the company has also been rolling out features to existing Cerner customers to try and improve their experience with the product. Uliyar said many of these features, including Oracle Health Clinical AI Agent (formerly called Oracle Clinical Digital Assistant), are already embedded within the new EHR.
Oracle announced the general availability of Clinical AI Agent in June, and it aims to automate much of the documentation that doctors are responsible for.
Physicians can access the Clinical AI Agent through an app on their phone, and they hit a button to record their visits with patients. Once they stop recording, Oracle’s AI automatically generates a clinical note based on the appointment, so the doctorsno longer need to write it themselves.
Around 70 customers are already using the Clinical AI Agent, Uliyar said. The company is currently building a similar tool for nurses.
Since the Clinical AI Agent is already embedded within the new EHR, customers will not have to worry about integrating it. The tool will also remain available as a stand-alone product that’s EHR agnostic, Uliyar said.
The early adopter program for Oracle’s new EHR begins next year, and Oracle said it will work with customers to determine the customizations they need. The company has been moving its health-care customers to the cloud, so that should make the EHR implementation process much easier, Verma said.
“We see it as very disruptive to the market,” she said. “Our EHR is going to solve a lot of long-standing problems that we’ve had in health care.”
Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, speaking on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” outside the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Jan. 22, 2025.
Gerry Miller | CNBC
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is getting a big bump in his compensation, as the company’s stock price has continued to rally, propelled by the boom in artificial intelligence.
Nadella’s total pay for fiscal 2025 climbed 22% to $96.5 million from $79.1 million last year, Microsoft said in a proxy filing after the close of regular trading on Tuesday. That includes more than $84 million in stock awards and over $9.5 million in Nadella’s cash incentives.
The pay plan is largely tied Microsoft’s share performance. So far in 2025, Microsoft’s stock price has risen by 23%, topping the S&P 500’s 15% gain. The shares have more than doubled in valued over the past three years.
Microsoft is scheduled to report results for the fiscal first quarter next week. In its fourth-quarter disclosure in July, the company reported better-than-expected earnings and revenue, with sales climbing 18%, the fastest growth in more than three years. Microsoft Azure business is driving expansion as companies’ cloud infrastructure needs grow to meet AI demand.
In fiscal 2024, Nadella’s pay jumped 63% from 48.5 million the prior year, with 90% of his compensation coming from stock awards. Nadella was eligible for a $10.66 million cash incentive last year, but he asked the board’s compensation committee to reduce that number to $5.2 million as a result of a series of cyberattacks that the company endured.
Despite Microsoft’s strong financial and stock performance, the company has seen turmoil among its workforce in recent months. In July, Nadella penned a memo to employees saying that the company’s elimination of more than 15,000 employees in 2025 had “been weighing heavily” on him.
Microsoft has also terminated several activist employees who protested the company’s work with the Israeli military.
Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Meta Platforms Inc., during the Meta Connect event in Menlo Park, California, US, on Wednesday, Sept. 17, 2025.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Meta said Tuesday that it formed a joint venture agreement with Blue Owl Capital in a deal worth $27 billion to fund and develop the social media company’s massive Hyperion data center in rural Louisiana.
As part of the deal, the asset management firm will own 80% of the joint venture, while Meta will retain a 20% stake and oversee the construction and property management services of the data center, which is being built in Richland Parish, Louisiana. Blue Owl contributed about $7 billion in cash as part of the joint venture, while Meta received a one-time payout of $3 billion.
The partnership provides the “the speed and flexibility” Meta needs to build the data center and support its “long-term AI ambitions,” the social media company said in a statement.
Meta in December announced that it chose Louisiana to host what would be its largest data center. Construction of that facility, which is being built on a site the size of roughly 1,700 football fields, is expected to finish by 2030.
Local utility Entergy told CNBC in June that the new data center could consume about twice as much electricity as the city of New Orleans on a peak day.
Meta has been spending heavily on artificial intelligence amid a broader race with other tech giants like Alphabet and ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, which are also developing gigantic data centers to power future AI models.
OpenAI, Oracle and Softbank in January formed the Stargate joint venture that will see the companies invest $500 billion to develop data centers over the coming years. The first Stargate data center site came online in September 180 miles west of Dallas in Abilene, Texas.
Last week, Google said that it would invest $15 billion on a data center project in southern India that will be the search giant’s largest AI hub in the world outside of the U.S.
Shield AI is trying to shake up the defense industry.
The company, which is valued at $5.3 billion after securing $240 million in its latest round of funding, is set to unveil its next generation, autonomous fighter jet known as the X-Bat on Wednesday.
CNBC got exclusive access to the company’s headquarters ahead of the launch.
Shield AI says the unmanned aircraft has a jet engine, will have a 2,000 mile range, can fly up to 50,000 feet and has the ability to take off and land vertically, enabling it to operate in remote locations without a runway — like on a ship in the middle of the ocean.
The X-Bat will be piloted by an AI software developed by Shield AI called Hivemind. The company is now hinging a lot of its future on artificial intelligence development.
“The software is a cornerstone and foundation for everything we do,” said Shield AI CEO Gary Steele. “It will ultimately be the long term growth driver of this business because it enables the development of this next generation aircraft.”
X-Bat combines some of the defense industry’s most advanced technologies into one fighter jet. There have been experimental aircrafts built as early as the 1950s with vertical takeoff and landing capabilities but they required pilots. Shield AI has also used Hivemind to fly the F-16, one of the most widely used modern fighter jets, autonomously.
“But those two things — AI piloted and vertical takeoff launch and land — have never come together in the form of a next generation aircraft,” said Brandon Tseng, Shield AI president and co-founder.
The company says its on track to produce the X-Bat for around $27 million, which is a fraction of what advanced military aircrafts typically cost. For example, the F-35 fighter jet that’s currently in use by the U.S. government and allies, costs more than $100 million to produce.
Unlike Shield AI’s previous aircrafts, the X-Bat is designed for combat and can be equipped with missiles.
“We fundamentally believe we can save service members’ lives by reducing the risk that you have of putting people in danger,” ” said Steele. “What I’m particularly excited about is the mission we’ve been on, and the opportunity that it unlocks from a business perspective.”
Shield AI has been around since 2015 and has already landed some major defense contracts. In 2024, the company secured a nearly $200 million contract with the U.S. coast guard for a drone it produces called the V-Bat.
But the startup is still proving itself in a competitive industry. Although it has grown quickly, the company is relatively small compared to defense primes like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman and its biggest startup competitor, Anduril, which is valued at over $30 billion.
Despite generating billions of dollars in revenue, Shield is not yet profitable. In 2023, Forbes reported that the company was on track to reach profitably by 2025. However, those targets were thrown off track when a U.S. service member had his fingers partially severed during a Shield AI drone landing demonstration in 2023.
“Through that process, there were some loss of confidence from customers,” Steele said. “But I think we’ve done a phenomenal job of recovering from that and rebuilding momentum. And today as we sit here, we’re very confident in our ability to deliver great products that are safe.”
Drones have been used in war zones as early as World War I, but their prevalence has grown dramatically in recent years. The war in Ukraine has helped show the general public the scale and prevalence of drone usage on the battlefield today.
“What we see from the war in Ukraine and the Middle East, they are tactically, operationally and strategically absolutely important weapons,” said Oleksandra Molloy, a drone expert and senior aviation lecturer at UNSW Canberra. “We have seen a lack of those systems from the U.S., and particularly, we have not really seen the presence of many American companies in the real battlefield.”
But the U.S. government is now trying to change that. In June 2025, President Donald Trump issued an executive order called Unleashing American Drone Dominance that aims to accelerate commercialization of drone technologies and integrate them into the National Airspace System. Although no direct dollar amount was attached to that order, the Big Beautiful Bill has allocated billions of dollars in unmanned aerial systems and AI development.
“We have to empower the defense industrial base with the exact same development tools, infrastructure and pipelines that Shield AI has used to make AI autonomy,” Tseng said. “We work directly with the major defense prime contractors of the world. We want to see them wildly successful building AI and autonomy, because at the end of the day, that’s what the warfighter needs. That’s what the United States and our allies need.”
Watch the video to learn more about how Shield AI is making a name for itself in the defense sector.