CUPERTINO, Calif. — Nasdaq brought its market open festivities to Apple’s sprawling Silicon Valley headquarters on Tuesday, the eve of the company’s 50th birthday.

From a desk inside Apple Park, the ring-shaped campus that Steve Jobs spent his last years helping design, Tim Cook rang the opening bell and, in the process, ushered in the iPhone maker’s second half-century.

It was a celebratory occasion, but one arriving at a pivotal point for an iconic American company that faces major challenges today and in the years ahead as the technology industry gets swept up by artificial intelligence.

Prior to the AI boom, which started with the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022, Apple was able to win by dominating the consumer device market and adding its Siri voice assistant across its product portfolio.

The pitch has always been simple: Pay a premium for a device, and trust that what happens on it stays yours, whether it’s messages, photos or notes. Personal data isn’t fuel for an advertising engine.

Two of Apple’s megacap tech peers took the opposite approach. Google and Meta are the giants of digital advertising, giving away their key services for free and making tens of billions of dollars a year in profit by targeting users with promotions.

Apple’s principle came from Jobs, its co-founder and longtime CEO. Cook, his successor, has been preaching it since becoming CEO in 2011, shortly before Jobs’ death. For much of Apple’s 50-year history, it’s been gospel in Cupertino.

That’s why Apple’s latest move feels so out of character.

In January, Apple struck a multiyear deal to use Google’s Gemini AI as part of a rebooted Siri. Google has already been paying in the range of $20 billion a year to be the default search engine on the iPhone. In AI, that relationship flips: Apple becomes the one paying for the underlying intelligence by licensing Google’s technology.

Money isn’t the main issue — Apple recorded net cash of $54 billion in the latest quarter and returned $32 billion to shareholders, mostly through buybacks. Rather, the concern, according to Asymco analyst Horace Dediu, is what the arrangement with Google means for user data and whether the search company uses it to bolster its algorithms.

“That’s where the wall has to be,” Dediu said. “That they don’t give that information to Google, and Google doesn’t get smarter and improve its core business because Apple is sharing information with them.” He added that, “To the extent that the intelligence improves, that should stay within Apple.”

Apple declined to make anyone available for this story, but CNBC spoke with former employees and people who spent decades studying the business. The general sentiment is that Apple is at a crossroads, caught between the ethos that shaped the company and a technological shift that’s forcing it to compete on unfamiliar ground.

Apple is in this quandary in part because, compared to its tech peers, the company has been slow to AI. The long-awaited AI update to Siri has faced delays, though Apple says it’s still coming by year-end. In 2024, the company launched Apple Intelligence, which includes image generators, text rewriters, the ability to summarize push notifications and an integration with ChatGPT. Consumer response has been mixed.

Where Apple has really bucked the trend is in keeping capital expenditures in check, rather than following the path of Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet and Meta, which are collectively committing hundreds of billions of dollars a year to new AI infrastructure so they can support cutting-edge models and workloads.

As rivals were building giant model businesses, involving training through scraping of information and data, Apple steered clear, a decision that many in the industry say left the company at a disadvantage in generative AI.

Bank executives were sent scrambling over the weekend after President Donald Trump declared late Friday that American credit card companies would be subject to a 10% cap on the interest rate they can charge customers.

The move sent shares of large banks including Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo and Bank of America down between 1% and 4% in early trading Monday. Companies more tightly tethered to the card industry, like Visa, Mastercard and American Express, also fell. Capital One, whose loan book is mostly from credit cards, sank nearly 7%.

Trump proposed a one-year cap on interest rates starting Jan. 20. While it’s unclear exactly how that would be enforced, the industry’s message is clear: the plan would bring unintended consequences for consumers and the American economy.

The move would make large swaths of the credit card industry unprofitable, especially tied to customers with less-than-ideal credit profiles, according to banks and analysts. The average credit card rate nationally is 19.7% as of this month, according to a weekly survey from Bankrate.com, while rates for subprime borrowers and store-specific cards are even higher.

Rather than offer loss-making products to consumers, the industry would simply stop offering access to customers with subprime credit, along with a slew of other changes around card programs including scaling back rewards, insiders say. Consumers would either spend less or rely on other forms of unsecured debt, many of which carry even higher interest rates than credit cards, they say.

“We cannot offer products at a loss; there’s no scenario where we would take our entire portfolio to 10%,” said a person with knowledge of the operations of a large bank, who asked to remain anonymous to speak candidly. “It’s not a stretch to suggest this will very quickly tank the economy.”

The drag on the economy from less spending could be more acute for airlines, retailers and restaurants, which would have to make up for lost card revenues by “potentially raising pricing” on their services, KBW analysts led by Sanjay Sakhrani and Chris McGratty said in a Jan. 11 research note.

The industry’s trade groups issued a joint statement late Friday making their case.

“Evidence shows that a 10% interest rate cap would reduce credit availability and be devastating for millions of American families and small business owners who rely on and value their credit cards, the very consumers this proposal intends to help,” the trade groups said.

The most straightforward approach, through legislation in Congress, isn’t possible by the proposed Jan. 20 start date, said Tobin Marcus, head of U.S. policy at Wolfe Research.

Other enforcement means, through banking regulators including the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, are also possible. But the Trump administration has repeatedly tried to shutter that agency, and the industry has had a successful run at defeating CFPB rules in federal courts.

“I’m not aware of an authority that they can use to do this unilaterally in any kind of a sweeping way,” Marcus said. “As far as I can tell, telling them they have until Jan. 20 is an attempt to create pressure and have them do it voluntarily.”

While the exact mechanism that Trump can use to enforce an interest rate cap is unclear, card issuers now face the risk that rates could be headed lower in some form of negotiated compromise with the government, KBW’s McGratty said in an interview.

“Is 10% an opening bid?” he said. “There’s a long distance between 10% and what companies charge today.”

Americans had a collective $1.23 trillion in credit card debt as of the third quarter last year, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Balances have been climbing as many Americans spent down the savings they’d built up during the global coronavirus pandemic.

Correction: This story has been updated to correct the spelling of Capital One.

Insiders at artificial intelligence chipmaker Nvidia have dumped more than $1 billion in stock over the last year, according to a report from the Financial Times.

About $500 million worth of sales occurred over the last month as the market notched new highs and shook off geopolitical tensions that had rattled investors, according to the report. The stock is up more than 17% this year despite concerns over curbs limiting AI chip sales overseas and 44% over the last three months.

Securities filings revealed that the tech titan recently unloaded about $15 million worth of shares as part of his more than $900 million plan announced in March to sell up to 6 million shares through the end of the year. Huang’s net worth totals about $138 billion, placing him as 11th on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Last week, the chipmaking giant hit a fresh record and rallied for five straight days following the stock sales and an annual shareholder meeting, where the CEO called robotics the biggest opportunity for the company after AI. That helped the chipmaker regain its seat as the most valuable company ahead Microsoft and Apple.

The FT article cited a report from VerityData, which noted that the jump in shares above $150 prompted the stock dump.

Last year, Huang unloaded more than $700 million in Nvidia shares as part of a prearranged plan.

A spokesperson for Nvidia declined to comment on the report.

Read the complete Financial Times report here.

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump will have to wait another three months before he can start selling his meme coin.

The $TRUMP token, which debuted in January just ahead of the president’s inauguration, was scheduled to begin unlocking a major tranche of insider-held tokens this month. But Trump token’s official X account said this week that all major unlocks, including the initial cliff and the next three months of daily vesting, would be delayed by an additional 90 days.

Only 20% of the supply of $TRUMP is available to trade. The remaining 80%, held by insiders, is locked under a three-year schedule, with tokens getting released in increments.

Lockups are meant to prevent a rug pull, the industry term for a scheme that allows insiders to quickly get rich while other investors lose from a slumping price. Vesting schedules are designed to reassure retail investors that early backers won’t dump their coins and immediately flood the market.

The $TRUMP token offered an early indication of the president’s willingness to leverage his power and political brand for financial gain. The market cap quickly surged to $15 billion, buoyed by Trump’s posts on Truth Social and X that declared, “It’s time to celebrate everything we stand for: WINNING!”

On Wednesday, the $TRUMP token soared more than 50% after the project’s website offered the top 220 holders of the token dinner with the president on May 22 at his golf club near Washington, D.C.

As CNBC reported on Friday, Democratic Senators Adam Schiff of California and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts are calling on the U.S. Office of Government Ethics to investigate whether the promotion constitutes “pay to play” corruption.

Like most meme coins, $TRUMP has no underlying product or service. Following its launch in January, First Lady Melania Trump swiftly introduced her own token — $MELANIA — which briefly surpassed $2 billion in market value before tumbling along with $TRUMP.

Shortly after the release of the $TRUMP and $MELANIA coins, the SEC issued guidance stating that meme tokens don’t qualify as securities, effectively shielding the projects from immediate regulatory scrutiny.

The token’s creators have already made a fortune despite the trading restrctions. According to Chainalysis, the main wallet behind $TRUMP earned more than $350 million in USDC, a dollar-pegged stablecoin, by acting as a market maker, collecting a fee on each trade.

The Trump family has another crypto project in the works.

World Liberty Financial, a decentralized finance venture backed by the first family, has raised $550 million across two token sales since October. Buyers are barred from reselling their tokens and receive no share of profits — but a Trump-affiliated entity is entitled to 75% of net revenue, including token sale proceeds, according to offering documents reviewed by CNBC.

WATCH: Trump meme coin ‘plainly a bad thing’

BEIJING — China’s latest export controls has rattled insiders of the critical minerals industry, and some are concerned that Beijing will leverage its global supply chain dominance in unprecedented ways.

China’s Ministry of Commerce announced Thursday that export controls on antimony would take effect Sept. 15. Antimony is used in bullets, nuclear weapons production and lead-acid batteries. It can also strengthen other metals.

“Three months ago, there’s no way [any] one would have thought they would have done this. It’s quite confrontational in that regard,” Lewis Black, CEO of Canada-based Almonty Industries, said in a phone interview. The company has said it’s spending at least $125 million to reopen a tungsten mine in South Korea later this year.

Tungsten is nearly as hard as a diamond, and used in weapons, semiconductors and industrial cutting machines. Both tungsten and antimony are on the U.S. critical minerals list, and less than 10 elements away from each other on the periodic table.

“My sector is now thinking this is getting much closer to home than graphite,” Black said, referring to China’s previous export controls. Last year, Beijing, the world’s largest graphite producer, said it would enforce export permits for the crucial battery material amid scrutiny from foreign countries worried about its dominance.

“I can’t explain this move and I think that’s what rattled a lot of people in this sector, my customers, and they don’t have a plan B, which China is very aware of. There hasn’t been one for 30 years,” he said.

“There’s always been an equilibrium … they were never weaponized because they could create this snowball of escalation,” he said.

China accounted for 48% of global antimony mine production in 2023, while the U.S. did not mine any marketable antimony, according to the U.S. Geological Survey’s latest annual report. The U.S. has not commercially mined tungsten since 2015, and China dominates global tungsten supply, the report said.

“I think it’s the start of some export restrictions in a number of rare earths, minerals,” Tony Adock, executive chair of Tungsten Metals Group, said in a phone interview. He said he found it hard to believe that China would just restrict antimony.

“The way that the [Chinese Commerce Ministry] statement was written, we’ve extrapolated that to tungsten and other rare earths. It may not happen,” Adock said, noting that “tungsten is probably the highest economic importance.”

China’s Ministry of Commerce did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Starting in 2026, the U.S. REEShore Act prohibits the use of Chinese tungsten in military equipment. That refers to the Restoring Essential Energy and Security Holdings Onshore for Rare Earths Act of 2022.

The House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party in June announced a new working group on the U.S. critical minerals policy.

Ecclestone said that last week, the niche market of antimony trading noticed that the U.S. price for buying the metal from Rotterdam was exponentially higher than the price for delivery out of Shanghai. That’s after antimony prices kept rising even after pandemic-related shipping disruptions ended, he said.

“There’s a suspicion that the Pentagon has been re-stuffing its reserves of certain metals, and most notably antimony because it needs antimony for munitions,” said Ecclestone, who founded the mining strategy firm in 2003.

The U.S. Department of Defense did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

China is acting more in retaliation “against what it views as an intrusion into its national interests,” Markus Herrmann Chen, co-founder and managing director of China Macro Group, said in an email.

He pointed out that China’s Third Plenum meeting of policymakers in July “put forward a completely new policy goal of better coordinating the entire minerals value chain, likely reflecting the further heightened supply importance of ‘strategic mineral resources’ for both business and geoeconomic interests.”

“We recognized that our 40-year expertise working in naturally radioactive materials give us a competitive advantage to duplicate China’s success separating multiple [rare earth elements] from low-cost and plentiful monazite,” Chalmers said, referring to a mineral from which the desired metals can be extracted.

It remains unclear whether China will follow through with a blanket implementation of the latest export controls.

“They don’t want to acknowledge that this could escalate,” Black said. “But I don’t think China wants this to escalate either. The last thing you want to create is another boogey man [at] the beginning of a U.S. election. Let’s see in a week whether this is really a policy or not.”