Employees working in Precision’s manufacturing facility
Courtesy: Precision Neuroscience
Neurotech startup Precision Neuroscience announced Thursday it has acquired a factory in Dallas, where it will build the key component of its brain implant, the Layer 7 Cortical Interface. The facility will help the company speed up development and move closer to the regulatory approval it is hoping to clinch in 2024.
The company has started testing its brain implant on human patients and believes it could ultimately help people with paralysis operate digital devices with their brain signals. Precision said the manufacturing plant is the only facility capable of producing its “sophisticated” electrode array.
“It allows us to iterate really quickly, improve performance, longevity, different form factors of the device — all the things that we’ve always wanted to do, we can now do in much quicker succession,” co-founder and CEO Michael Mager told CNBC in an interview.
Precision’s electrode array is thinner than a human hair and could easily be mistaken for a piece of Scotch tape. The system’s flexible design allows it to rest on the brain’s surface and generate a real-time, high resolution rendering of neural activity without damaging any tissue.
Stephanie Rider of Precision Neuroscience inspects the company’s microelectrode array
Source: Precision Neuroscience
As a member of the fast-growing brain-computer interface (BCI) industry, Precision is developing its technology alongside other companies like Synchron, Paradromics, Blackrock Neurotech and Elon Musk’s Neuralink. Precision’s co-founder and chief science officer, Dr. Benjamin Rapoport, also helped co-found Neuralink before departing the company in 2018.
Neuralink is perhaps the best-known company in the BCI space thanks to the high profile of Musk, who is the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX. The company is taking a more invasive approach with its implant than Precision. Neuralink also manufactures its technology in-house.
Mager said it can be difficult to make rapid design changes, protect trade secrets and keep supply levels up when working with third parties during the manufacturing process. He added that it’s much easier to ensure that Precision’s arrays are safe and of high quality when the company is directly involved with production.
“We manufacture systems that go on human brains. The responsibility is really tremendous,” Mager said.
At the request of the seller, a Japanese multinational corporation, Precision declined to share how much the manufacturing facility cost. Mager said the company was able to retain the 11 “key personnel” who were working there, and there’s a possibility that number will grow with time. Keeping the employees on board was a big victory for Precision, as it meant the company did not have to teach new workers how to handle the complex technology.
Employees working in Precision’s manufacturing facility
Courtesy: Precision Neuroscience
Precision has been up and running at the facility since May, and it has already made a material difference in the company’s supply levels. Mager said previously that Precision worked with a facility that took over a year to manufacture six arrays, and now, the company can manufacture more than 100 arrays in a single week.
The arrays coming from the new facility will help Precision keep up with the intense pace of regulatory testing, and it will also aid the company as it gears up for additional human trials at the University of Pennsylvania and at the Mount Sinai Health System in New York City.
“I think, ultimately, the value that we have the potential to create is a lot greater as a result of being in complete control and owning 100% of the facility that is helping to drive all this innovation,” Mager said. “But it is a longer, more capital-intensive game.”
Precision has been working closely with regulators, but the company still needs to go through several rounds of rigorous safety and efficacy testing before it will receive approval from the Food and Drug Administration to commercialize its technology.
But the FDA recently gave Precision a nod, as the company announced Thursday it has received a Breakthrough Device designation from the agency. The designation is awarded to medical devices that have the potential to provide improved treatment for debilitating or life-threatening conditions, and the FDA has granted 109 of them in fiscal 2023 so far, according to its website.
Mager said the designation will open a more frequent line of communication between Precision and the agency that will help expedite the company’s path toward commercialization. He said that with the manufacturing facility, the Breakthrough Device designation and in-patient trials in the works, Precision has the momentum it needs to move forward.
White House Senior Advisor Elon Musk walks to the White House after landing in Marine One on the South Lawn with U.S. President Donald Trump (not pictured) on March 9, 2025 in Washington, DC.
Samuel Corum | Getty Images News | Getty Images
Tesla shares fell in premarket trade on Monday after CEO Elon Musk announced plans to form a new political party.
The stock was down 7.13% by 4:27 a.m. E.T.
Musk said over the weekend that the party would be called the “America Party” and could focus “on just 2 or 3 Senate seats and 8 to 10 House districts.” He suggested this would be “enough to serve as the deciding vote on contentious laws, ensuring that they serve the true will of the people.”
Now tech billionaire’s reinvolvement in the political arena is making investors nervous.
“Very simply Musk diving deeper into politics and now trying to take on the Beltway establishment is exactly the opposite direction that Tesla investors/shareholders want him to take during this crucial period for the Tesla story,” Dan Ives, global head of technology research at Wedbush Securities, said in a note on Sunday.
“While the core Musk supporters will back Musk at every turn no matter what, there is broader sense of exhaustion from many Tesla investors that Musk keeps heading down the political track.”
Musk’s previous political foray earned him Trump’s praise in the early days, but he has since drawn the ire of the U.S. president.
The two have clashed over various areas of policy, including Trump’s spending bill which Musk has said would increase America’s debt burden. Musk has taken issue to particular cuts to tax credits and support for solar and wind energy and electric vehicles.
Trump on Sunday called Musk’s move to form a political party “ridiculous,” adding that the Tesla boss had gone “completely off the rails.”
Musk is contending with more than just political turmoil. Tesla reported a 14% year-on-year decline in car deliveries in the second quarter, missing expectations. The company is facing rising competition, especially in its key market, China.
Jonathan Ross, chief executive officer of Groq Inc., during the GenAI Summit in San Francisco, California, US, on Thursday, May 30, 2024.
David Paul | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Artificial intelligence semiconductor startup Groq announced Monday it has established its first data center in Europe as it steps up its international expansion.
Groq, which is backed by investment arms of Samsung and Cisco, said the data center will be located in Helsinki, Finland and is in partnership with Equinix.
Groq is looking to take advantage of rising demand for AI services in Europe following other U.S. firms which have also ramped up investment in the region. The Nordics in particular is a popular location for the data facilities as the region has easy access to renewable energy and cooler climates. Last month, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was in Europe and signed several infrastructure deals, including data centers.
Groq, which is valued at $2.8 billion, designs a chip that the company calls a language processing unit (LPU). It is designed for inferencing rather training. Inferencing is when a pre-trained AI model interprets live data to come up with a result, much like the answers that are produced by popular chatbots.
While Nvidia has a stranglehold on the chips required for training huge AI models with its graphics processing units (GPUs), there is a swathe of startups hoping to take a slice of the pie when it comes to inferencing. SambaNova; Ampere, a company SoftBank is in the process of purchasing; Cerebras and Fractile, are all looking to join the AI inference race.
European politicians have been pushing the notion of sovereign AI — where data centers must be located in the region. Data centers that are located closer to users also help improve the speed of services.
Global data center builder Equinix connects different cloud providers together, such as Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud, making it easier for businesses to have multiple vendors. Groq’s LPUs will be installed inside the Equinix data center allowing businesses to access Groq’s inference capabilities via Equinix.
Groq currently has data centers in the U.S. and Canada and Saudi Arabia with its technology.
Don’t miss Groq CEO Jonathan Ross on Squawk Box Europe at 7:45 a.m. London time.
Hidden among the majestic canyons of the Utah desert, about 7 miles from the nearest town, is a small research facility meant to prepare humans for life on Mars.
The Mars Society, a nonprofit organization that runs the Mars Desert Research Station, or MDRS, invited CNBC to shadow one of its analog crews on a recent mission.
“MDRS is the best analog astronaut environment,” said Urban Koi, who served as health and safety officer for Crew 315. “The terrain is extremely similar to the Mars terrain and the protocols, research, science and engineering that occurs here is very similar to what we would do if we were to travel to Mars.”
SpaceX CEO and Mars advocate Elon Musk has said his company can get humans to Mars as early as 2029.
The 5-person Crew 315 spent two weeks living at the research station following the same procedures that they would on Mars.
David Laude, who served as the crew’s commander, described a typical day.
“So we all gather around by 7 a.m. around a common table in the upper deck and we have breakfast,” he said. “Around 8:00 we have our first meeting of the day where we plan out the day. And then in the morning, we usually have an EVA of two or three people and usually another one in the afternoon.”
An EVA refers to extravehicular activity. In NASA speak, EVAs refer to spacewalks, when astronauts leave the pressurized space station and must wear spacesuits to survive in space.
“I think the most challenging thing about these analog missions is just getting into a rhythm. … Although here the risk is lower, on Mars performing those daily tasks are what keeps us alive,” said Michael Andrews, the engineer for Crew 315.
