Amazon is bringing its automated checkout technology to a pair of Whole Foods stores, the company announced Wednesday, marking the latest test of the grab-and-go system in a full-size supermarket.
In a blog post, Amazon said the technology, called “Just Walk Out,” is coming to two Whole Foods locations scheduled to open in 2022. One store will be located in the Glover Park neighborhood of Washington, D.C., and the other in Sherman Oaks, California.
Amazon’s “Just Walk Out” technology allows shoppers to enter a store by scanning an app and exit without needing to stand in a checkout line. Cameras and sensors track what items shoppers select and charge them when they leave.
Customers carry their purchases as they leave the UK’s first branch of Amazon Fresh, on March 04, 2021, in the Ealing area of London, England.
Leon Neal | Getty Images
At the upcoming Whole Foods locations, shoppers who want to skip the checkout line enter the store by either scanning an app, inserting a credit or debit card linked to their Amazon account or placing their palm over the company’s palm-scanning payment system, called Amazon One.
Shoppers who opt out of using Amazon’s cashierless technology will only be able to ring up their items using self-checkout or at a customer service booth.
Amazon has deployed its cashierless technology across a growing number of store formats, including at several Fresh grocery stores and in its Go convenience stores. It also sells the technology to third-party retailers. Amazon launching the technology in Fresh and Whole Foods locations puts it ahead of start-ups that have developed similar systems but have largely struggled to roll them out to bigger stores due to the technical challenges.
The expansion of Amazon’s “Just Walk Out” system is likely to raise the ire of labor unions who have previously warned the technology will lead to the elimination of cashiers. Amazon argued in the blog post that the technology will allow Whole Foods employees to do other work in the stores.
“These locations will employ a comparable number of Team Members as existing Whole Foods Markets stores of similar sizes,” the company said. “With Just Walk Out-enabled Whole Foods Market stores, how Team Members in the store spend their time is simply shifting, allowing them to spend even more time interacting with customers and delivering a great shopping experience.”
Amazon has brought other high-tech changes to Whole Foods since it acquired the grocery chain in 2017 for more than $13 billion. In April, Amazon launched its palm-scanning payment system at a Seattle Whole Foods store and has since added the technology to other locations.
Michael Intrator, co-founder and chief executive officer of CoreWeave Inc., during an interview on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York, US, on Monday, Sept. 22, 2025.
Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images
CoreWeave on Thursday announced a $6.5 billion deal with OpenAI, expanding its current agreement with the artificial intelligence startup behind ChatGPT.
The new agreement brings the AI cloud infrastructure provider’s total contracts with OpenAI to $22.5 billion.
“This milestone affirms the trust that world-leading innovators have in CoreWeave’s ability to power the most demanding inference and training workloads at an unmatched pace,” CoreWeave CEO Michael Intrator said in a statement.
In March, CoreWeave announced an $11.9-billion agreement with OpenAI to provide AI datacenters and technology over five years. Intrator told CNBC in May that the companies expanded the agreement by $4 billion.
CoreWeave, which went public in March, makes money by renting out data centers packed with numerous Nvidia graphics processing units. The company is backed by Nvidia and makes a significant chunk of its revenue from Microsoft, which is a key investor in OpenAI.
At the time of its prospectus, CoreWeave said it operated 32 datacenters powered over 250,000 Nvidia GPUs.
Earlier this month, CoreWeave’s share price popped after the company disclosed a $6.3 billion order from Nvidia.
OpenAI and Databricks are two of the most highly valued tech startups on the planet. Now they’re working together.
Databricks, a data analytics software vendor, said Thursday that it has committed to spending $100 million over multiple years with OpenAI. Databricks is making it easier for customers to connect their data stored in its cloud service with GPT-5, announced in August, and other OpenAI models.
OpenAI, which was recently valued by private investors at $500 billion, has become a household name in the years since the launch of its ChatGPT in late 2022. In partnering with Databricks, valued at more than $100 billion in its latest funding round, OpenAI has landed its first formal integration with a business-focused product vendor, said Brad Lightcap, OpenAI’s operating chief, in a news conference Wednesday.
Lightcap said the company’s “aspiration is a multiple” of the $100 million spending commitment in terms of revenue the agreement will generate.
Databricks has formed similar partnerships with Google and with Anthropic. But OpenAI is leading the way with more than 700 million people using its ChatGPT assistant, powered by GPT-5, every week.
The company was making enterprise more of a focus even before the Databricks deal. Microsoft has been bringing OpenAI models into businesses, governments and schools. And OpenAI has been building up its own sales function.
Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi said the partnership will simplify the process for its customers when it comes to accessing OpenAI’s models, which they’ve already been using in large numbers.
Until now, if a Databricks customer wanted to tap a proprietary OpenAI model to help analyze internal data, it would have required extensive configuration, as well as legal and security sign-off.
“The key difference here is that any database customer automatically now, just by clicking in the UI, can start using this product,” Ghodsi said, referring to the user interface. Ghodsi said the price is similar to what it would cost if the user went directly to OpenAI.
Greg Ulrich, Mastercard‘s chief AI and data officer, said he’s optimistic about the integration.
“It enables opportunity for research and targeted experimentation, using AI to solve new problems, bringing value to customers, enhancing employee productivity, in an environment that we trust, that we know,” Ulrich said.
It’s an increasingly competitive space.
Databricks rival Snowflake, which has a market cap of $75 billion, announced an expansion of its Microsoft partnership in February, enabling the use of OpenAI models. Oracle, which has a $300 billion cloud contract from OpenAI, said two weeks ago that in October it will launch a service for running Google, OpenAI and xAI models on data stored in its database software.
Databricks said earlier this month that it now generates more than $4 billion in annualized revenue, growing over 50% year over year, with $1 billion coming from AI products. The company’s $100 billion valuation was announced alongside a $1 billion funding round.
OpenAI and Databricks ranked No. 2 and No. 3, respectively, on CNBC’s 2025 Disruptor 50 list.
The European Commission launched an antitrust probe into German software behemoth SAP on Thursday, citing concerns about the company’s practices in software support services.
According to the Commission, the investigation will assess “whether SAP may have distorted competition in the aftermarket for maintenance and support services related to an on-premises type of software, licensed by SAP, used for the management of companies’ business operations.”
SAP, in a statement on Thursday, said it believed its policies and actions were fully compliant with EU competition rules.
“However, we take the issues raised seriously and we are working closely with the EU Commission to resolve them,” a spokesperson said. “We do not anticipate the engagement with the European Commission to result in material impacts on our financial performance.”
SAP is one of Europe’s most valuable companies, with a market cap of almost 282 billion euros ($331 billion). Shares of the firm moved lower on Thursday, losing 2% by 12:45 p.m. in London (7:45 a.m. ET).
The EU probe relates to a piece of SAP software called Enterprise Resource Planning, or ERP.
ERP is widely used by large corporations to manage their everyday finance and accounting needs. SAP is a major player in the space — but it isn’t alone. The company competes with the likes of Microsoft and Oracle, which offer their own ERP products.
Specifically, the European Commission said it was addressing the so-called “on-prem” version of SAP ERP. On-prem refers to software that is hosted on a company’s own servers, as opposed the cloud where it can be remotely accessed via SAP data centers.
Read more CNBC tech news
Much of SAP’s business still comes from its on-prem IT services. However, the company has for years been attempting to shift more of its focus to the cloud — particularly as it faces competition from technology giants like Microsoft and Amazon, which dominate the market for public cloud services.
The latest EU antitrust probe is noteworthy as it doesn’t involve Big Tech.
Much of the bloc’s work on competition policy has focused on the market power of U.S. technology giants. This has led to criticisms from both the tech sector and politicians in the U.S., who say American tech firms are being unfairly targeted. On Wednesday, Apple urged a repeal of the Digital Markets Act, the EU’s landmark digital competition law, saying it was “leading to a worse experience for Apple users in the EU.”