Apple CEO Tim Cook said price hikes on the newest iPhone models aren’t tied to President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariff plans.

“There’s no increase for tariffs in the prices to be totally clear,” Cook told CNBC’s Jim Cramer from Apple’s Fifth Avenue store location in New York City, as the latest iPhone model launched in stores worldwide.

It is one of the first instances in which Cook has decisively addressed tariffs in relation to iPhone prices.

Earlier this month, Apple increased the price of its iPhone 17 Pro model by $100, while maintaining the prices of its entry-level phones. It also introduced an Air model that replaced the Plus at steeper price point.

Many analysts had widely anticipated price hikes despite Cook’s attempts to dodge tariffs.

To circumvent the levies, Apple has pivoted its supply chain to import iPhones to the U.S. from lower tariff countries, such as India and Vietnam. Apple has historically produced a majority of its products in China.

Cook has also made public appearances with Trump as the company commits at least $600 billion toward bolstering U.S. manufacturing and supporting suppliers.

During the June quarter, Cook revealed that the company took an $800-million hit from costs tied to tariffs.

At the same time, Apple faces questions about its slow AI rollout, as well as rising competition in international markets such as China.

“We have AI everywhere in the phone,” Cook told CNBC on Friday. “We just don’t call it” that.

The iPhone 17 hit store shelves worldwide on Friday, drawing lines from Beijing to London.

But beyond the launch buzz, Apple is under pressure to prove itself, grappling with questions over its artificial intelligence plans, as well as increasing competition. 

Products on display for the first time include the iPhone 17 Pro, iPhone 17 Pro Max, and iPhone Air, as well as new Apple Watch and AirPods models.

While they were available for preorders in the U.S. from Sept. 12, the global launch holds particular significance as Apple takes on growing competition in overseas markets. 

After years of leadership in the region, the iPhone-maker now only holds 10% of the Chinese smartphone market, trailing local players like Oppo, Huawei, Xiaomi and others, according to data from Omdia.

So far, the signs are positive for the iPhone 17 series in China. Last Friday, JD.com — one of China’s largest ecommerce platforms — saw the first minute of iPhone 17 series preorders surpass the first-day preorder volume of last year’s iPhone 16 series, the company reported. 

At 10 a.m. local time on Friday, JD.com said that iPhone 7 trade-in sales were four times higher than the same period last year.

In London, lines were notably longer than they were at last year’s launch of the iPhone 16, and customers appeared more interested in the premium offerings — the Pro and Pro Max models — this time around.

“For the last five years, I’ve been in a pattern of constantly upgrading my phone, because every year Apple is bringing something new to the table,” one customer, Jasmine, said. “I just love having that experience of Apple every year.”

Meanwhile, Michael, who described himself as a content creator, said he was drawn by the battery and camera.

“I thought about going for the [iPhone] Air, but I just don’t know whether or not the battery is going to be able to hold up. And that single camera? I don’t know, it’s just a little bit off-putting on the back,” he said of Apple’s thin iPhone 17 offering.

A successful iPhone 17 launch could help reassure Apple investors after a somewhat underwhelming rollout of its artificial intelligence features, which began late last year.

Speaking to CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” last week, Ben Wood, chief analyst at CCS Insight, lauded Apple’s latest product launches but said the company now needed to deliver on artificial intelligence. 

“There is no question that Apple needs to deliver on AI,” he said, noting that the company had “dropped the ball” last year by making big promises that failed to materialize.

“Apple has to catch up [in AI], but right now, I think they’ve got enough runway to be able to cope in the intervening period.”

– CNBC’s Eunice Yoon contributed to this report

Nvidia has just shelled out over $900 million to hire Enfabrica CEO Rochan Sankar and other employees at the artificial intelligence hardware startup, and to license the company’s technology, CNBC has learned.

In a deal reminiscent of recent AI talent acquisitions made by Meta and Google, Nvidia is paying cash and stock in the transaction, according to two people familiar with the arrangement. The deal closed last week, and Enfabrica CEO Rochan Sankar has joined Nvidia, said the people, who asked not to be named because the matter is private.

Nvidia has served as the backbone of the AI boom that began with the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022. The company’s graphics processing units (GPUs), which are generally purchased in large clusters, power the training of large language models and allow for big cloud providers to offer AI services to clients.

Enfabrica, founded in 2019, says its technology can connect more than 100,000 GPUs together. It’s a solution that could help Nvidia offer integrated systems around its chips so clusters can effectively serve as a single computer.

A spokesperson for Nvidia declined to comment, and Enfabrica didn’t provide a comment for this story.

While Nvidia’s earlier AI chips like the A100 were single processors slotted into servers, its most recent products come in tall racks with 72 GPUs installed working together. That’s the kind of system inside the $4 billion data center in Wisconsin that Microsoft announced on Thursday.

Nvidia previously invested in Enfabrica as part of a $125 million Series B round in 2023 that was led by Atreides Management. The company didn’t disclose its valuation at the time, but said that it was a fivefold increase from its Series A funding.

Late last year, Enfabrica raised another $115 million from investors including Spark Capital, Arm, Samsung and Cisco. According to PitchBook, the post-money valuation was about $600 million.

Tech giants Meta, Google, Microsoft and Amazon have all poured money into hiring top AI talent through deals that resemble acquihires. The transactions allow the companies to bring in top engineers and researchers without worrying about the regulatory hassles that come with acquisitions.

The biggest such deal came in June, when Meta spent $14.3 billion on Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang and others and took a 49% stake in the AI startup. A month later, Google announced an agreement to bring in Varun Mohan, co-founder and CEO of artificial intelligence coding startup Windsurf, and other research and development employees in a $2.4 billion deal that also included licensing fees.

Last year, Google made a similar deal to bring in the founders of Character.AI. Microsoft did the same thing for Inflection, as did Amazon for Adept.

While Nvidia has been a big investor in AI technologies and infrastructure, it hasn’t been a significant acquirer. The company’s only billion-dollar-plus deal was for Israeli chip designer Mellanox, a $6.9 billion purchase announced in 2019. Much of Nvidia’s current Blackwell product lineup is enabled by networking technology that it acquired through that acquisition.

Nvidia tried to buy chip design company Arm, but that deal collapsed in 2022 due to regulatory pressure. In the past year, Nvidia closed a $700 million purchase of Run:ai, an Israeli company whose technology helps software makers optimize their infrastructure for AI.

On Thursday, Nvidia announced one of its most sizable investments to date. The chipmaker said it’s taken a $5 billion stake in Intel, and announced that the two companies will collaborate on AI processors. Nvidia also said this week that it invested close to $700 million in U.K. data center startup Nscale.

— Correction: A prior version of this story mistakenly included the name of a company as an investor in Enfabrica.

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