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The projected victory by Emily Gregory would flip control of Florida House District 87 from Republicans. View More

President Donald Trump arrives at Palm Beach International Airport on October 31, 2025 in West Palm Beach, Florida. Trump is spending the weekend at his Mar-A-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida. Samuel Corum | Getty Images The Democratic candidate Emily Gregory was projected to win a special election on Tuesday evening for a Florida House seat representing a district whose residents include President Donald Trump.Gregory's projected victory would flip the District 87 seat from Republican control.The district includes Trump's club, Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach, where he holds residency."I'm honored that the voters of District 87 have placed their trust in me," Gregory said in a statement."Tonight's result sends a clear message that people want Florida to move in a new direction, one where leaders focus on lowering costs and standing up for working families," Gregory said."Floridians are being squeezed by rising housing costs, insurance rates, and everyday expenses, and that's what this campaign has always been about: making Florida more affordable and making sure our state works for the people who live here," she said. Read more CNBC politics coveragePakistan offers to facilitate U.S.-Iran war talks as Trump, Tehran give mixed signalsDCCC launches geotargeted digital ad campaign hitting GOP for gas pricesSenate confirms Markwayne Mullin as next DHS secretary This is breaking news. Please refresh for updates. Choose CNBC as your preferred source on Google and never miss a moment from the most trusted name in business news.

The Delhi High Court has refused to quash a CBI case against RJD chief Lalu Prasad and his family in the alleged land-for-railway-jobs scam. The court rejected arguments that the FIR was unsustainable due to the timing of the Prevention of Corruption Act amendment. View More

Machado's remarks come as the oil industry remains hesitant to invest in Venezuela after the U.S. ousted former President Nicolas Maduro. View More

HOUSTON — Venezuela opposition leader María Corina Machado called Tuesday for the full privatization of the South American nation's oil industry in an address that laid out her vision to energy executives and investors."The Venezuelan state will get out of the way and pave the way to give the conditions so that the oil and gas sector in Venezuela will go fully private," Machado said at S&P Global's CERAWeek conference in Houston, Texas.Machado, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, was blocked in 2024 from running for president by the regime of former President Nicolás Maduro. She previously served in the National Assembly. Machado leads the opposition movement that seeks a transition to democracy and a market economy in Venezuela. The U.S. captured Maduro in a military raid in January, but has left the rest of the regime in place. The Trump administration has praised its cooperation with interim President Delcy Rodríguez, who served as vice president under Maduro. It will take at least nine months to set the conditions for free and fair elections in Venezuela, Machado said. The opposition leader said the Venezuelan people will vote for free markets, rule of law and property rights. Machado laid out a vision in which a future democratic state in Venezuela will set clear rules, and enforce contracts. "The role of the state will be strictly as a regulator, creating incentives for long term investment," she said. Machado said state-owned Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) has been turned into a "criminal organization." "In the first stages we will have to reduce dramatically its size, while some operations keep on taking place, until we can actually privatize the whole operation process," she said. Venezuela could produce more than 5 million barrels per day but it will require a huge investment of $150 billion over the next decade, Machado said. The country currently produces around 1 million bpd, though it is believed to possess the largest proven reserves in the world. Industry skepticismPresident Donald Trump is pressuring U.S. oil and gas companies to invest in Venezuela, but industry leaders are skeptical. ConocoPhillips and Exxon Mobil have made clear they will not return until major political reforms are implemented to protect private sector investments. The companies had their assets seized by President Hugo Chávez in 2007. Conoco will not invest until there is way to recover some of the $12 billion that Venezuela owes the company from the expropriation of its assets, CEO Ryan Lance said Tuesday. The recent reform of Venezuela's oil laws under Rodríguez are "woefully inadequate," Lance said. "They have a long ways to go to make the country competitive globally to attract the kinds of billions of dollars of investments that are going to be required," Lance said at CERAWeek.It will require not only physical security and contract guarantees but also policy durability in Venezuela and the U.S., the CEO said. "You need need policy durability — not only the Venezuelan side but the U.S. side," Lance said. "What happens when another administration comes in? How are they going to view Venezuela?" Choose CNBC as your preferred source on Google and never miss a moment from the most trusted name in business news.

The Department of Homeland Security has been shut down since February over Democratic concerns about its immigration enforcement policies. View More

San Diego, CA - March 23: Travelers stand in a long Transportation Security Administration line that wrapped throughout Terminal 1 at San Diego International Airport in California, March 23, 2026.K.C. Alfred | The San Diego Union | Getty Images Senate Republicans and the White House appear near to a deal to fund most of the Department of Homeland Security and end the partial government shutdown as the shutdown's second month leads to worsening airport delays.Talks are still underway, but "this deal seems to be acceptable," a White House official speaking on condition of anonymity said Tuesday. President Donald Trump has said he wants to not only fund DHS but include other changes such as prohibitions on transgender care and a voter-ID measure.Democrats, however, say they're not satisfied with the Republicans' proposal.At a swearing-in ceremony for Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin on Tuesday, Trump said he would "take a good hard look" at the compromise funding proposal.Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said at a press conference Tuesday that "Democrats have in front of them" the legislative text of a proposal to reopen DHS."The time to end this is now," Thune said. "It is essentially what the Democrats have been asking for."The agreement would include funding for all of DHS except for a portion of its Immigration and Customs Enforcement budget. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., part of a group of Republicans who met with Trump at the White House on Monday night, said it would amount to funding 94% of the agency.Democrats so far have not given their blessing."Just as Democrats have been very clear, we will immediately fund TSA, FEMA, Coast Guard, and CISA while talks continue on ICE and Border Patrol, we've also made very clear that if we are talking about funding any part of ICE or CBP, we absolutely must take some key steps to rein them in," Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, said Tuesday at a press conference, where she also described the talks with the White House as "productive."If a compromise is reached, it would bring to a close the shutdown that began Feb. 14 ahead of busy travel weeks for Easter and school spring breaks. The shutdown has caused DHS employees to miss pay, with some not going to work and others working without pay. Repeated government shutdowns — most recently last fall — have ended after flight disruptions due to staffing shortages of essential government employees who weren't receiving regular paychecks.The deal would also include a plan for Republicans to pursue a party-line bill that could make up that ICE funding and include a version of the SAVE America Act, the Trump-backed elections bill that would implement national voter-ID mandates and require proof of citizenship to register, Graham said. It would not include some of the ICE reforms Democrats have been demanding, like requiring judicial warrants for agents to enter private property or banning the use of masks.Thune said discussion of those changes would be "contingent upon actually providing funding for ICE." Read more CNBC politics coveragePakistan offers to facilitate U.S.-Iran war talks as Trump, Tehran give mixed signalsDCCC launches geotargeted digital ad campaign hitting GOP for gas pricesSenate confirms Markwayne Mullin as next DHS secretary "Negotiations are ongoing, and they've sent us an offer, and we'll be sending them an offer back. And I can assure you it'll contain significant reform in it," Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., told reporters on Tuesday, according to MS Now.The latest proposal to reopen the agency comes amid swelling Transportation Security Administration lines at airports, as agents are facing a second missed paycheck this week and are skipping work. The Trump administration this week deployed ICE agents to some U.S. airports in what it described as a bid to assist TSA agents.DHS funding lapsed the month after federal agents shot and killed two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis as part of an immigration enforcement surge.Timing of movement on any proposal remains unclear, though Schumer called the situation at airports "untenable," from the Senate floor on Tuesday.Sen. John Hoeven, R-N.D., said after leaving a meeting in Thune's office on Tuesday that Republicans were "ready to go." He called on Democrats, who are also seeking ICE immigration enforcement changes in exchange for their support, to "quit moving around.""So the Democrats need to join us," Hoeven said. "We need to pay these TSA agents."But Democrats are not the only ones who will need to get on board. Conservative Republicans who have championed the SAVE America Act voter-ID bill have voiced resistance to punting on the legislation and attempting to pass it under the "budget reconciliation" process, a procedural tool for budgetary legislation that requires only a simple majority to pass whereas most measures need 60 votes to clear the Senate."It's hard to imagine how the SAVE America Act could be passed through reconciliation And by 'hard' I mean 'essentially impossible,'" Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, who has led the charge for the voter ID-bill in the Senate, posted to X on Tuesday.Hoeven said he had talked to Lee and that negotiators will continue to engage him."All these things are a work in progress. Building consensus takes some time," Hoeven said.Trouble could also be brewing among the right flank of the House GOP conference. The House Freedom Caucus — which along with Lee and other proponents of the bill have called for the Senate to change its filibuster rules to ensure passage — on Tuesday questioned the strategy. Members cast doubt on whether the SAVE America Act could even be considered under the reconciliation process, citing the chamber's "arcane rules.""This is gaslighting. The American people are not stupid and will not accept more failure theater from Republicans in Congress. PASS THE SAVE AMERICA ACT NOW," the group posted Tuesday on X.That hard-line opposition signals a potential intraparty Republican showdown over the strategy, as leadership and moderates try to gauge whether reconciliation — under which the Senate parliamentarian gets to decide what can be considered — is even feasible.Rep. Bryan Steil, R-Wis., who chairs the House committee with jurisdiction over federal elections, on Tuesday circulated a list of election-related proposals to consider separately from the funding bill.Those include a proposal that could potentially cut federal funds from states that do not require voters to show authorized forms of ID, though it would also allow states to issue free voter IDs to some people. Another proposal would provide grants to states to cover the cost of sharing voter registration data with the federal government. And a third would appropriate funds to states to amend the federal voter registration form to require proof of citizenship.— Emily Wilkins contributed to this story. Choose CNBC as your preferred source on Google and never miss a moment from the most trusted name in business news.

Databricks wants to draw on AI to help organizations respond to a higher speed of attacks, based on newly disclosed vulnerabilities. View More

In this articleCSCOPANWFollow your favorite stocksCREATE FREE ACCOUNT watch nowVIDEO9:4009:40Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi on entering cybersecurity market ahead of IPOTech Databricks has grown from startup into major software company, generating billions by processing data and running generative artificial intelligence models for clients. For its next leg of growth, it's turning to cybersecurity with a new offering called Lakewatch.Adobe and National Australia Bank are currently using it, according to a statement. Anthropic also uses Databricks for cybersecurity purposes, and its models are running inside Lakewatch. Customers can now ask about adopting Lakewatch.CEO and cofounder Ali Ghodsi said large language models, or LLMs, "have matured to a point that you can actually automate and augment a significant portion" of cybersecurity.The product represents a nascent alternative to security information and event management, or SIEM, services from the likes of Palo Alto Networks, Cisco-owned Splunk, Google and Microsoft.If Lakewatch takes hold, it could help Databricks justify its $134 billion valuation to public investors ahead of a public offering. Ghodsi said in December that he wouldn't rule out a 2026 IPO.Rather than charge based on the amount of data stored, Databricks will determine Lakewatch costs by how much work the software performs. "The prevailing pricing model is at odds with protecting against this avalanche that's coming our way, because it's just too prohibitively expensive to get all your data in there," Ghodsi said in an interview. Read more CNBC tech newsAmazon's Zoox to debut robotaxis in Austin, Miami later this year as it awaits paid ride approvalOpenAI calls out Microsoft reliance as risk in investor document ahead of expected IPOAmazon faces further AWS disruption in the Middle East from Iran conflictOpenAI's data center pivot underscores Wall Street spending concerns ahead of IPO The pricing scheme allows administrators to integrate data from sources other than traditional security tools — applications such as Slack or Workday, for example — to provide a more complete picture. Databricks won't charge for storage, but it will ask customers to keep data in cloud-based data lake services. From there, Lakewatch can work on it.Investors have grown anxious about LLMs posing a threat to cybersecurity incumbents. In February, after model builder Anthropic announced a preview of a tool that checks code for vulnerabilities, the Global X Cybersecurity Exchange-Traded Fund fell about 5%.And AI worries have been pressuring software generally. The WisdomTree Cloud Computing Fund, an exchange-traded fund filled with software-as-a-service, or SaaS, stocks, has come down about 19% so far in 2026."With the sort of SaaS disruption that we're seeing, Databricks will definitely partake in that disruption," Ghodsi said.Generative AI has helped attackers more quickly exploit newly discovered vulnerabilities. Organizations need more sophisticated tools to keep up with the larger number of incoming alerts, Ghodsi said.In 2025, Databricks bought small security startup Antimatter, whose technology is part of Lakewatch. Databricks has also agreed to acquire another called SiftD, whose three founders boast a collective 39 years of experience at Splunk.Security practitioners value Splunk's user interface, including its technology for running searches on data, and San Francisco-based SiftD's team members "were instrumental in creating that," Reynold Xin, another Databricks co-founder, said in an interview.Security practitioners can prioritize alerts, with generative AI models providing context on each case. Experts can also pose questions about threats to Databricks' Genie AI agent.In time, Databricks will add features for automatically responding to security threats, Ghodsi said.WATCH: Under the hood of the AI economy: Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi watch nowVIDEO17:4217:42Under the hood of the AI economy: Databricks CEO Ali GhodsiTechCheck Choose CNBC as your preferred source on Google and never miss a moment from the most trusted name in business news.

Target-date funds are a popular option for retirement investors, but pros say you need to look under the hood before investing. View More

In 2025, target-date funds continued on the track of three trends investors can be relatively pleased about.For one, they've gotten bigger. The total amount of investor money in these funds reached $4.8 trillion in 2025, largely thanks to another year of stock and bond market gains, according to a report published earlier this month by investment research firm Morningstar. As a group, target-date funds have grown by 11.9% annually over the last half-decade. They've also gotten cheaper. On average, the funds charged an annual expense ratio of 0.27% in 2025, according to the report — down from 0.29% the year before and 0.55% in 2015. Finally, these funds have become more aggressive, with more funds, on average, exposing their investors to higher allocations of stocks for longer, Morningstar reports. The asset mix that's appropriate for you depends on your tolerance for risk, but generally, portfolios with higher stock allocations have tended to outperform those tilted toward bonds over the long term. With target-date funds, the long term is key. These investments are designed to be all-in-one portfolios, funds that you hold from when you first start investing through retirement. And over the course of the decades you're likely to be invested in one of these funds, factors such as fees, performance and investment mix can make a huge difference, experts say."A lot of people don't go any further than looking at the name of the fund," says Larry Luxenberg, a certified financial planner with Lexington Avenue Capital Management. "Target-date funds are made to be simple, but there's still work you should do to make sure it's right for you." How to choose a target-date fund Target-date funds are designed to be dynamic portfolios that age along with you. The idea is, you choose a fund with a date in the name that corresponds, roughly, to the year you hope to retire. The fund holds a mix of stocks, bonds and cash that grows more conservative as you age. When you're young and hoping to accumulate money, the portfolio is tilted toward fast-growing stocks. When you get older and want to protect your savings, the portfolio shifts toward less volatile bonds and cash.No two target-date funds are exactly the same. Funds from different families hold different mixes of assets that change differently over time. They'll also charge different fees. If you hold a target-date fund in a workplace plan, such as a 401(k), you may only have one fund family to choose from. Even then, it may be worth looking under the hood and examining the portfolio with a financial professional, experts say. In general, it's a good idea to speak with a financial professional before making any changes to your portfolio.But if you invest through an individual retirement account or brokerage account, it pays to be especially vigilant, since you can invest in virtually any fund. Here are three factors financial pros say to pay attention to, beyond just the year you hope to retire. 1. Underlying investments Target-date funds are so-called "funds of funds." That means, within your target-date fund is a roster of mutual funds that make up the ultimate portfolio. At a very high level, it's important to know what kind of funds those are so you can know exactly what you're paying for says Joon Um, a CFP with financial firm Secure Tax & Accounting. "Some use low-cost index funds while others are more actively managed," he says. It's also smart to familiarize yourself with the different "flavors" of stocks and bonds the portfolio holds and make sure you're comfortable with the amount of each you're invested in at the time you're buying, says Crystal Cox, a CFP and senior vice president with Wealthspire Advisors. "What is the split between stock and bonds? Is it 60-40? 70-30? You have to ask yourself what's appropriate for you," she says. "Same with U.S. and international [stocks], and so on and so forth."Generally, you can find a breakdown of what a fund holds by downloading the prospectus from the fund company website or by searching the fund on investment research sites such as Morningstar.2. 'Glide path'Remember, the portfolio mix will change from the time you buy the fund to — and in some cases through — the year you plan to retire. That planned shift to the fund's asset mix is known as its "glide path" and you can typically find it represented as a graph in any target-date fund's prospectus. The most "aggressive" funds will hold higher percentages of stock for longer while "conservative" funds tend to gravitate toward bonds. While many glide paths look similar, there can be a big difference from fund to fund. At the beginning of the path — when when the portfolio is decades away from the date in the fund's name and will be at its most aggressive — many funds hold upward of 90% of the portfolio in stocks, according to Morningstar's 2026 target-date fund landscape report. But some more staid funds hold closer to 50%.How you want your portfolio to behave over time will come down to how comfortable you are with market volatility and how you plan to use your money in retirement — both subjects worth discussing with a professional, says Erika Safran, a CFP with Safran Wealth Advisors. "It's a matter of, how much risk do I want to take, and how much risk do I need to take," she says.  3. ExpensesWhen choosing a target-date fund — or a mutual fund of any kind — it's important to pay attention to its expense ratio, the annual fee charged by the fund company for managing the portfolio, says Bill Shafransky, a CFP with Moneco Advisors. It's likely even more important than hunting for the funds that have historically earned the highest returns, he says."Don't get me wrong, looking at historical performance is great, but there's a big difference in how much of that return you get to keep when comparing funds at a 0.68% expense ratio versus a 0.35% expense ratio," he says.On average, target-date funds come with an expense ratio of 0.27%, according to Morningstar.So, just how much of a difference does it make? Imagine an investor who puts $5,000 into a target-date fund and invests another $5,000 a year for 40 years, earning an 8% annualized return. If that investor chose a fund with an expense ratio of 0.35%, they'd end up with $1.37 million, having paid about $140,000 in fees, according to NerdWallet's mutual fund fee calculator. Had that same investor paid 0.68% a year in expenses, they'd have about $1.25 million, with $260,000 in fees. Want to lead with confidence and bring out the best in your team? Take CNBC's new online course, How To Be A Standout Leader. Expert instructors share practical strategies to help you build trust, communicate clearly and motivate other people to do their best work. Sign up now and use coupon code EARLYBIRD for an introductory discount of 25% off the regular course price of $127 (plus tax). Offer valid March 16 through March 30, 2026. Terms apply. Take control of your money with CNBC Select CNBC Select is editorially independent and may earn a commission from affiliate partners on links.Six ways to file your taxes for free4 financial resources to tap when you think layoffs may be comingWhat is a good monthly retirement income in 2026?Here are 5 grocery rewards cards to beat inflation VIDEO7:2707:2726-year-old works at a bookstore and lives on $53,000 a year in New York CityMillennial Money

Iran is holding the world economy hostage by blockading the Strait of Hormuz, said Sheikh Nawaf al-Sabah, the CEO of Kuwait Petroleum Corp. View More

Sheikh Nawaf al-Sabah, CEO of Kuwait Petroleum Corp., speaks during the CERAWeek by S&P Global conference in Houston, Texas, March 11, 2025.F. Carter Smith | Bloomberg | Getty Images HOUSTON — Kuwait on Tuesday said Iran's closure of the Strait of Hormuz amounts to an economic blockade of Gulf Arab oil producers, warning that the impact is beyond catastrophic and will trigger a domino effect across the world. "We are outraged by this attack against us," Sheikh Nawaf al-Sabah, the CEO of the Kuwait Petroleum Corp., told the oil industry at S&P Global's CERAWeek energy conference here."This is an attack not only against the Gulf, but it is an attack that is holding the world's economy hostage," said al-Sabah, who delivered his remarks via video conference from Kuwait after canceling his appearance in Houston due to the war. Kuwait has declared a force majeure on its delivery contracts and ramped down oil production because it cannot export to the global market. KPC is only producing oil for domestic consumption right now, al-Sabah said. Saudi Aramco CEO Amin Nasser warned earlier this month that the Iran war would have "catastrophic consequences" for the world economy. Nasser understated the impact of the strait's closure, al-Sabah said. "It's a domino effect," al-Sabah said. "The costs of this war don't stay within geographical lines in this region. They extend all the way through the supply chain." It will take months for oil production in the Gulf to reach full capacity because Kuwait and its neighbors have shut oil wells, al-Sabah said. Kuwait was producing about 2.6 million barrels per day prior to the war, making it the fifth-largest producer in OPEC. "We have resilient reservoirs that bring out quite a bit of production immediately — within a few days," al-Sabah said. "The bulk of it will come within a few weeks, and then the full production will come within three or four months."The emergency oil release by more than 30 nations in the International Energy Agency, including the U.S., will do little to address the supply shortfall, the CEO said. The 3 million barrels per day of emergency stocks do not compensate for the curtailments in Iraq, let alone those of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, he said. "There is no substitute for the strait," al-Sabah said. But the impact of the war extends far beyond oil and gas, the CEO said. The petrochemicals that produce plastics for food packaging will be in shortfall, which will make it difficult to transport food around the world, he said. Fertilizer from the gulf also cannot reach global markets just as planting season is set to begin in many parts of the world, al-Sabah said. Some countries in the developing world could see a 50% reduction in their harvest compared with prior years, he said. Tanker and cargo traffic through the strait, which connects the Persian Gulf to the world, has plummeted due to Iran's attacks on commercial vessels. About 20% of the world's oil supply passed through the waterway before the war. Iran has launched a barrage of missile and drone attacks against Gulf Arab countries. Those strikes came after the U.S. and Israel launched a massive wave of airstrikes against Iran starting on Feb. 28. Air raid sirens sounded multiple times early morning Tuesday in Kuwait as Iran launched ballistic missile attacks against civilian infrastructure, al-Sabah said.Iran has attacked refineries in Kuwait even though they are wholly owned by the country, al-Sabah said. Kuwait's social security administration was hit earlier this month in an attack, he said. "This all puts to a lie what Iran has been claiming — that they are limiting their attacks only to American infrastructure in the region," al-Sabah said. Choose CNBC as your preferred source on Google and never miss a moment from the most trusted name in business news.

Google's DeepMind division has been partnering with more robotics companies in recent months. View More

In this articleGOOGLFollow your favorite stocksCREATE FREE ACCOUNT Intrinsic’s flagship product, Flowstate, is a web-based platform that allows users to build robotic applications without having to write thousands of lines of code.Intrinsic Google is adding another robotics partnership to its belt as it leans into robotics as a key bet for artificial intelligence.Agile Robots develops intelligent, sensor-based robotic arms and humanoid robots. The company announced a partnership with Google DeepMind to integrate its Gemini Robotics foundation models with Agile Robots’ hardware."The partnership is built on a belief that applying AI in the physical world will be transformative," the Tuesday blog post states. "By bringing together Agile Robots' hardware and other AI robotic solutions developed in Germany, with Google DeepMind's Gemini Robotics foundation models, the two teams will improve performance via robot deployment, data collection, model training and iteration."The new partnership means Google will get real-world deployment data as it sees robotics as one of the large use cases for AI, competing against companies like Amazon and Tesla. It also shows the company is making several robotics partnerships as it leans into manufacturing as key use case.Munich-based Agile Robots already has more than 20,000 deployed robotic systems globally and it will integrate Google's tech in existing industrial robots at scale, the blog post says. The partnership will first focus on "high-value industrial" use cases such as manufacturing tasks."This research partnership is an important step in bringing the impact of AI to the real world," said Carolina Parada, Senior Director and Head of Robotics, Google DeepMind, in Tuesday's blog post. She added that Agile Robots will help Google develop "more advanced AI models for the next generation of robots." Read more CNBC tech newsAmazon's Zoox to debut robotaxis in Austin, Miami later this year as it awaits paid ride approvalOpenAI calls out Microsoft reliance as risk in investor document ahead of expected IPOAmazon faces further AWS disruption in the Middle East from Iran conflictOpenAI's data center pivot underscores Wall Street spending concerns ahead of IPO In mid-2025, Google debuted two new AI models, Gemini Robotics and Gemini Robotics-ER (extended reasoning), bringing generative AI into physical action commands to control robots. Google said in a blog post at the time that it would partner with Apptronik, a Texas-based robotics developer, to "build the next generation of humanoid robots with Gemini 2.0."In January, Google's DeepMind said it would work with Hyundai's Boston Dynamics, formerly a division of Google, to develop new AI models for its Atlas robot.Last month, Google DeepMind announced that Intrinsic, a robotics software company, will be moved from the "Other Bets" category into the main company with hopes of being "The Android of robotics." The company said it will focus on the manufacturing industry and work with Google's Gemini and infrastructure teams, including potentially helping it with building out Google's own data centers.   An early sign that the company was getting serious about robotics was in its hiring of key talent last year. In November, Google's DeepMind unit hired the former CTO of Boston Dynamics Aaron Saunders.However, Google's increased attention to robotics has also brought along internal skepticism. Boston Dynamics, for example, has long-standing contracts with the Defense Department, and some DeepMind employees reportedly brought up concern at an all-hands meeting earlier this year, according to Business Insider.It's not just a trend at Google. Robotics is surfacing as a key use case for AI across the tech industry.In February, Bedrock Robotics, an autonomous vehicle technology startup for construction machinery founded by veterans of Waymo and Segment, raised $270 million in a new fundraising round, valuing the two-year-old start-up at $1.75 billion. The round was led by Alphabet's investment arm CapitalG, Valor Atreides A.I. Fund; Nvidia's venture arm and previous backer 8VC. watch nowVIDEO6:4306:43Schaeffler CEO: Humanoid robots and defence are key growth driversSquawk Box Europe Choose CNBC as your preferred source on Google and never miss a moment from the most trusted name in business news.

Arm is making its first CPU, pivoting from only licensing its architecture to giants like Apple, Nvidia, Amazon and Google. CNBC got an exclusive first look. View More

In this articleO9T-FFHXSCLMETAFollow your favorite stocksCREATE FREE ACCOUNT watch nowVIDEO15:2415:24Inside Arm’s $71 million chip lab where its making its first ever CPUTech For more than 35 years, Arm Holdings has licensed its instruction sets to the world's biggest chipmakers and collected royalties on every processor made with its designs. Now the U.K.-based company is making physical silicon of its own for the first time.Arm CEO Rene Haas unveiled his company's first in-house chip on Tuesday at an event in San Francisco. Arm is calling the new data center central processing unit the AGI CPU. It's a long-anticipated move that marks a major change for the so-called Switzerland of chip firms as it enters into fresh competition with its customers.Meta is the first to sign on, as the social media company builds out multiple gigawatts of AI data centers and plans to shell out up to $135 billion on capital expenditures this year. In February, Meta secured a huge amount of chips from both Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices. "In today's world, you really only have a couple of players," said Meta software engineer Paul Saab, who helped with the Arm chip project since its start in 2023, in an interview with CNBC. "This adds yet another player to the ecosystem for us." Saab added that the Arm deal "allows a lot more flexibility in our software stack and in our supply chain."Terms of the agreement weren't disclosed. For Arm, the deal marks a major win and a stamp of approval from one of the most valuable companies in the world. "Let's say they get 5% of Meta's $115 to $135 billion capex going into the future," said chip analyst Patrick Moorhead of Moor Insights. "That is a game changer on the top line for them." It's also the latest sign that CPUs are seeing a resurgence in demand. Nvidia, which has established itself as the leader in AI graphics processing units, recently told CNBC that CPUs are "becoming the bottleneck" as agentic AI changes compute needs. Futurum Group calls it a "quiet supply crisis," predicting the CPU market growth rate could exceed GPU growth by 2028.While GPUs are ideal for training and running AI models because their thousands of cores can perform many operations simultaneously, CPUs have a smaller number of powerful cores running sequential general-purpose tasks. Agentic AI requires a lot of general compute power, with large amounts of data moving around across multiple agents.At Nvidia's annual GTC conference last week, CEO Jensen Huang unveiled an entire rack filled only with Vera CPUs. At the Arm event on Tuesday, Huang appeared in a recorded statement congratulating Arm on its new CPU. Top leaders from Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle, Broadcom, Micron, Samsung, SK Hynix and Marvell also appeared in the video. Arm told CNBC about 50 partners signaled support ahead of the launch."It's a $1 trillion market, and what we're seeing over and over again is actually our partners coming out and understanding and realizing this is actually great for the industry," Mohamed Awad, Arm's cloud AI head, told CNBC in an interview.CNBC got an exclusive first look at Arm's new chip lab where it's preparing the new CPU for full production later this year. Arm's head of cloud AI Mohamed Away gave CNBC's Katie Tarasov a tour of the chip lab where it created its first in-house chip, the AGI CPU, in Austin, Texas, on Friday March 6, 2026.Erin Black | CNBC 'Create the chip that you want'Arm spent $71 million and about 18 months building three new lab rooms at its campus in Austin, Texas, where a once-tiny team has grown to over 1,000 people. Inside, engineers "bring up" the chips by putting them through multiple rounds of testing once they come off the factory line.Like nearly all fabless AI chipmakers, Arm currently manufactures its CPU at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company's fabrication plants. Made on TSMC's 3-nanometer node, Arm's CPU is entirely manufactured in Taiwan for now. TSMC has a 3nm fab coming to Arizona soon, and Awad said Arm would "love to manufacture here. It really comes down to what our customers are ultimately looking for."Arm is best known as the leading architecture for mobile chips in almost every smartphone. It got into data center chips in 2018 with the launch of its Neoverse platform. Amazon took Neoverse mainstream in its first custom processor, Graviton, and Google and Microsoft now also base their AI chips on Arm."If Arm didn't exist, then all of those companies who have their own processors wouldn't be able to create their own," Moorhead said. Read more CNBC tech newsAmazon's Zoox to debut robotaxis in Austin, Miami later this year as it awaits paid ride approvalOpenAI calls out Microsoft reliance as risk in investor document ahead of expected IPOAmazon faces further AWS disruption in the Middle East from Iran conflictOpenAI's data center pivot underscores Wall Street spending concerns ahead of IPO Still, most server chips are built on traditional x86 architecture used by Intel and AMD. Moorhead calls x86 "tried and true" and said it can "run pretty much anything." The benefit of Arm architecture is it's "super efficient" because the designs are more customizable, Moorhead said. "You can just create the chip that you want with nothing else."Awad told CNBC the Arm team "ruthlessly optimized" its new AGI CPU for artificial general intelligence — hence the name. Up to 64 of the new CPUs, a total of about 8,700 cores, can fit in a single air-cooled rack. It's a dense configuration Arm is betting will appeal to power-constrained data center customers around the world. "You can get two times the performance-per-watt than you can from an x86 rack," Awad said. "That means twice as much performance in the same footprint, in the same power." Meta's Saab said wattage is "a very scarce resource.""If you have a best in class CPU that's giving you the best performance-per-watt that you possibly can, that opens up more wattage for other parts of your infrastructure," he said. Meta's 5-gigawatt Hyperion data center under construction in Richland Parish, Louisiana, Jan. 9, 2026.Courtesy of Meta 'Available to the whole world'Meta has a big need for efficiency as it builds out massive AI data centers across Louisiana, Ohio and Indiana. The company is also reportedly looking to lease space at the giant Stargate site in Texas, where OpenAI and Oracle scrapped plans to expand up to 10GW of capacity.Meta's AI spending spree comes after its Llama 4 model was not well received by developers last year."They got behind," Moorhead said. "They also recognized we don't have enough compute power to do what we need to do."In addition to securing processors from Nvidia and AMD, Meta unveiled four new chips in March within its own line of Meta Training and Inference Accelerators that it's been making since 2023. Now, it's adding CPUs from Arm to the mix."It was meant to basically be a full replacement, drop-in replacement, for our current compute CPUs and be transparent to our developers," Saab said.Saab was at Facebook in 2011, when the company launched the Open Compute Project, a consortium that now has hundreds of member companies, including Arm and Nvidia, committed to open hardware designs that help reduce data center energy consumption and costs."The first conversations we had with Arm were, 'Hey, if we build this, we don't want to keep this only within the company,'" Saab said. "We're not like a chip company that's trying to build sales channels to sell chips. We wanted it to be available to the whole world."Arm wouldn't disclose pricing for the CPU, but Moorhead predicts it will be in the thousands of dollars.Awad told CNBC it would be "competitively priced," with an aim to serve as an option for companies that can't afford to make their own in-house processor. "You have to have 1,000 engineers, a $500 million dollar budget to go and create it," Moorhead said. "So there's definitely a market need."Watch: Inside Arm's $71 million chip lab where its making its first ever CPU Choose CNBC as your preferred source on Google and never miss a moment from the most trusted name in business news.

Gap's partnership with Gemini and its customer-facing AI tools give it a competitive edge at a time when winning in specialty retail is harder than ever. View More

In this articleGAPGOOGLFollow your favorite stocksCREATE FREE ACCOUNT watch nowVIDEO3:2403:24What Gap's Gemini AI partnership says about the future of retailCNBC Digital Original Video Gap is partnering with Google's Gemini to allow shoppers to check out directly within the AI platform, making it the first major fashion company to work directly with the tech company to fuel agentic commerce, CNBC has learned exclusively. The partnership comes as more and more shoppers move away from traditional search and toward artificial intelligence platforms for product discovery, forcing retailers to rethink their approach to marketing to ensure they're staying competitive and not missing out on customer demand. "It's not just keyword search anymore, right? It's conversations, and so we need to be relevant to that," Gap's chief technology officer, Sven Gerjets, told CNBC in an interview. "Is it, you know, 'I'm trying to figure out what to do for a wedding, what are the things I should be looking at?' Or, 'I've got a job interview, are there some styles I should wear?' All of those things we need to become relevant to." When shoppers are hunting for a new pair of jeans or the perfect oversized hoodie on Gemini, and the platform thinks some of Gap's products could be a fit, customers will be able to buy products from Gap's house of brands directly within the platform without having to be redirected to the brand's website. The information about the product that is surfaced to shoppers won't be crawled from Gap's website but will be details the retailer provided to Gemini in advance so it can control for accuracy, continue to collect customer data and have better control over the customer experience. If the shopper decides to buy the product, they'll check out via Google Pay, and Gap will handle the shipping and any other logistics. Gerjets said Gap is still testing the service's capabilities but expects to deploy it to customers "imminently." Shoppers walk past a GAP fashion retail store on Oxford Street on October 30, 2025 in London, United Kingdom. John Keeble | Getty Images News | Getty Images In addition, a new AI-powered sizing tool dubbed Bold Metrics that Gap plans to integrate will help customers find the right size when shopping online and will also launch soon to shoppers.Gap's partnership with Gemini and its gains in customer-facing AI tools give it a competitive edge at a time when winning in specialty retail is harder than ever. The overall fashion market has been growing increasingly fragmented and more competitive. As long as a retailer's website has data that an AI platform can read, the company's products will likely surface in chat results if the platform considers them a fit for a shopper's inquiry, but there's a lot of work that retailers need to do to ensure they're showing up properly. If a shopper is looking for a sundress on an AI platform, for example, and a company offers a relevant product, but the data isn't readable by an LLM, the brand could miss out on the sale. Most major companies are using and implementing AI in a variety of ways, but so far, none of Gap's primary competitors have announced similar partnerships with Gemini.Gap's approach to agentic commerce is a first iteration that's expected to evolve over time, Gerjets said. For now, customers won't be able to link loyalty accounts or spend points on the transaction, he said. That could create some friction for regular customers, but Gerjets said the option could be added down the line. "We'll continue to evolve the experience and bring the things forward that the customers want, so that is definitely the roadmap and the future," said Gerjets. "It's a very first experience in, I think, a journey that we're all on to really nail what agentic commerce is for the customers."  Retail's AI wars Gap's partnership with Gemini comes after OpenAI made similar deals with companies such as Walmart and Etsy only to walk back plans to offer checkout directly within the app. While the number of people using AI platforms for product discovery is growing, it's still a small portion of overall shoppers, and the number of customers who will feel comfortable checking out directly within LLMs remains unclear. Some shoppers may feel wary about putting their credit card information into the platform, while others may prefer to shop directly within a retailer's app where their store credit card and loyalty points are stored. Given how long shoppers have been interacting with Google and the fact that it already has customer payment information stored within its system, some shoppers could feel more comfortable using Gemini for checkout versus newer AI platforms such as OpenAI's ChatGPT. In some ways, Gemini's platform is also more advanced. Google recently released new updates so real-time product data is available to users, preventing challenges such as out-of-stocks and pricing errors. Shoppers will also be able to add multiple items to their carts and connect loyalty memberships in some cases — two features OpenAI has yet to fully crack. Gerjets said OpenAI and Gemini also have two different protocols for agentic commerce. The "Universal Commerce Protocol," which Gap is using on Gemini, was designed for merchants to have better control over the overall shopping experience, whereas OpenAI's "Agentic Commerce Protocol" was designed more for discovery, Gerjets said. "This space is moving so quickly ... We're all evolving and learning together, and who knows what the space will look like in five years, who will be crowned the victor, or how fragmented the space will be?" Gerjets said. "For us, it's important that we work with all of them, because we really want to meet our customers where they want to be." Correction: This story has been updated to correct that Gap plans to integrate an AI-powered sizing tool called Bold Metrics. A previous version misstated the relationship between Gap and the tool. Choose CNBC as your preferred source on Google and never miss a moment from the most trusted name in business news.