Connect with us

Published

on

In this article

GUANGZHOU, China — Xpeng unveiled a new electric sports utility vehicle Friday as competition in China’s new energy vehicle market continues to intensify.

The G9 is Xpeng’s fourth production model. The company plans to launch the car in China in the third quarter of 2022, a person familiar with the matter told CNBC. The person asked not be identified because the matter is confidential.

But the company also said the car is designed for international markets. Xpeng began shipping its flagship P7 sedan to Norway this year, its first overseas market.

“G9 is our first model to be conceived and developed from the ground up for both the international and Chinese markets, bringing our most sophisticated designs to our customers worldwide,” Xpeng Co-Founder Henry Xia said in a press release.

Xpeng unveiled the G9 sports utility at the Guangzhou auto show on Friday, November 19, 2021. It is Xpeng’s fourth production model and second SUV.
Xpeng

The G9 launch adds a fourth car to Xpeng’s lineup, after the G3 SUV and the P7 and P5 sedans. It’s the second SUV in Xpeng’s portfolio and adds another electric vehicle to that competitive segment of the market.

Xpeng’s G9 will face off against the likes of Tesla’s Model Y, Nio’s ES6 and Li Auto’s Li One.

The company has not released pricing or range details yet.

Xpeng G9 features

The G9 will be Xpeng’s first model equipped with Xpilot 4.0, the company’s advanced driver-assistance system, or ADAS, which is slated for rollout in first half of 2023.

Poised as a rival to Tesla’s Autopilot, Xpilot allows the car to carry out semi-autonomous features such as lane switching.

The car will also feature Nvidia’s Orin-X autonomous driving chips.

Xpeng says the G9 will be compatible with its X-Power superchargers, which allow cars to charge up to a 200-kilometer driving range in 5 minutes.

The G9 will also feature Light Detection and Ranging technology, or Lidar. These systems send out lasers that bounce back to measure distance. Those returning beams are processed by an algorithm to create a three dimensional representation of surrounding objects — a key technology for autonomous vehicles to understand their environment.

Continue Reading

Technology

As Tesla layoffs continue, here are 600 jobs the company cut in California

Published

on

By

As Tesla layoffs continue, here are 600 jobs the company cut in California

As part of Tesla’s massive restructuring, the electric-vehicle maker notified the California Employment Development Department this week that it’s cutting approximately 600 more employees at its manufacturing facilities and engineering offices between Fremont and Palo Alto.

The latest round of layoffs eliminated roles across the board — from entry-level positions to directors — and hit an array of departments, impacting factory workers, software developers and robotics engineers.

The cuts were reported in a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification, or WARN, Act filing that CNBC obtained through a public records request.

Facing both weakening demand for Tesla electric vehicles and increased competition, the company has been slashing its headcount since at least January. CEO Elon Musk told employees in a memo in April that the company would cut more than 10% of its global workforce, which totaled 140,473 employees at the end of 2023.

Previous filings revealed that Tesla would cut more than 6,300 jobs across California; Austin, Texas; and Buffalo, New York.

Musk said on Tesla’s quarterly earnings call on April 23 that the company had built up a 25% to 30% “inefficiency” over the past several years, implying the layoffs underway could impact tens of thousands more employees than the 10% number would suggest.

According to the WARN filing, the 378 job cuts in Fremont, home to Tesla’s first U.S. manufacturing plant, included people involved in staffing and running vehicle assembly. There were 65 cuts at the company’s Kato Rd. battery development center.

Tesla didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Among the highest-level roles eliminated in Fremont were an environmental health and safety director and a user experience design director.

In Palo Alto, home to the company’s engineering headquarters, 233 more employees, including two directors of technical programs, lost their jobs.

Tesla has also terminated a majority of employees involved in designing and improving apps made for customers and employees, according to two former employees directly familiar with the matter. The WARN filing shows that to be the case, with many cut from the team at Tesla’s Hanover Street location in Palo Alto.

Tesla faces reduced demand for cars it makes in Fremont, including its older Model S and X vehicles and Model 3 sedan. Total deliveries dropped in the first quarter from a year earlier, and Tesla reported its steepest year-over-year revenue decline since 2012.

An onslaught of competition, especially in China, has continued to pressure Tesla’s sales in the second quarter. Xiaomi and Nio have each launched new EV models, which undercut the price of Tesla’s most popular vehicles.

Tesla’s stock price has tumbled about 30% so far this year, while the S&P 500 is up 11%.

Musk has been trying to convince investors not to focus on vehicle sales and instead to back Tesla’s potential to finally deliver self-driving software, a robotaxi, and a “sentient” humanoid robot. Musk and Tesla have long promised customers self-driving software that would turn their existing EVs into robotaxis, but the company’s systems still require constant human supervision.

Other recent job cuts at Tesla included the team responsible for building out the Supercharger, or electric-vehicle fast-charging network, in the U.S.

Tesla disclosed plans in its annual filing for 2023 to grow and optimize its charging infrastructure “to ensure cost effectiveness and customer satisfaction.” Tesla said in the filing that it needed to expand its “network in order to ensure adequate availability to meet customer demands,” after other auto companies announced plans to adopt the North American Charging Standard.

Since cutting most of its Supercharger team, Tesla has reportedly started to rehire at least some members, a move reminiscent of the job cuts Musk made at Twitter after he bought the company and later rebranded it as X. Musk told CNBC’s David Faber last year that he wanted to rehire some of those he let go.

Read the latest WARN filing in California here:

Continue Reading

Technology

AI infrastructure startup CoreWeave raises $7.5 billion in debt deal led by Blackstone

Published

on

By

AI infrastructure startup CoreWeave raises .5 billion in debt deal led by Blackstone

Michael Intrator, CEO of CoreWeave, participates in a CNBC interview on May 9, 2024.

CNBC

Fresh off a $1.1 billion equity funding round, artificial intelligence infrastructure startup CoreWeave has raised $7.5 billion in debt so that it can more heavily invest in its cloud data centers.

Blackstone’s funds led the lending round, with participation from Coatue, Carlyle, BlackRock and others. In its equity financing two weeks ago, CoreWeave was valued at $19 billion.

Investors are flocking to CoreWeave, because the 550-person company is one of the main providers of Nvidia’s chips for running AI models. Demand for the technology is soaring as businesses across virtually all sectors are racing to integrate AI chatbots into their products following the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022.

With Nvidia’s AI-focused graphics processing units (GPUs) in limited supply, CoreWeave’s access to the processors has made it a hot commodity. That means the company, which is backed by Nvidia, is going up against the world’s top cloud infrastructure operators, including Amazon and Google.

On its website, CoreWeave claims to have lower on-demand prices than any major cloud company. Even Microsoft, the world’s second-largest provider of cloud infrastructure, has started relying on CoreWeave to help supply OpenAI with the computing power it needs.

Collette Kress, Nvidia’s finance chief, said at a Citigroup event in September that CoreWeave has “quite some skills in terms of just their speed of adoption, their speed in terms of setting things up.”

A CoreWeave spokesperson declined to comment on whether the company is using Nvidia GPUs as collateral for the fresh debt financing. Such GPUs were used as collateral in a $2.3 billion debt round last year, Reuters reported.

The new debt will help CoreWeave pay for servers loaded with GPUs, as well as networking equipment and cabinets, the spokesperson said.

WATCH: CoreWeave CEO Michael Intrator discusses the competitive landscape

CoreWeave CEO Michael Intrator discusses the competitive AI landscape

Continue Reading

Technology

Microsoft’s Mistral partnership avoids merger probe by British regulators

Published

on

By

Microsoft's Mistral partnership avoids merger probe by British regulators

The Microsoft logo is displayed on a smartphone.

Mateusz Slodkowski | Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images

The U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority cleared Microsoft’s AI partnership with Mistral of regulatory concerns after previously inviting views on whether the arrangement qualified as a merger.

The CMA said in a brief statement Friday that the deal “does not qualify for investigation under the merger provisions of the Enterprise Act 2002.”

CNBC has reached out to Microsoft and Mistral.

Mistral, a French AI firm founded in 2023, won a 15 million euro ($16 million) investment from Microsoft earlier this year.

Under the terms of the deal, the U.S. tech giant receives a minority stake in Mistral, while the French company adds its large language models to the U.S. tech giant’s Azure cloud computing platform.

In April, the CMA began seeking views from interested parties on partnerships agreed by U.S. tech giants with smaller AI firms to determine whether arrangements between the companies qualify as mergers.

As part of that effort, the CMA looked into the minority investment deals agreed by Microsoft and Mistral, as well as into whether Microsoft’s hiring of certain former employees from AI startup Inflection constitutes a merger. The watchdog separately invited comment on the arrangements between Amazon and Anthropic.

Now, the regulator says it’s no longer looking into Microsoft’s investment in Mistral. It has given no update on its inquiries into the Amazon-Inflection deal and into Microsoft’s hiring of employees from Inflection.

Microsoft previously denied its deals with OpenAI and Mistral and hiring of employees from Inflection constituted mergers. Amazon has also said that its partnership with Anthropic represents a limited corporate investment, not a merger.

Continue Reading

Trending