Tesla CEO Elon Musk kicks off deliveries of the company’s heavy-duty truck, the Semi, at the Gigafactory in Sparks, Nevada.
Tesla Inc.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk kicked off deliveries of the company’s first few production Semi trucks on Thursday, speaking on stage at the company’s factory in Sparks, Nevada, with Dan Priestly, the company’s senior manager for Semi truck engineering.
As CNBC previously reported, Tesla set up lines and started production of the Semi outside of Reno this year at the site where it primarily makes the battery cells, drive units, and battery packs that power its cars. Musk and Tesla did not say on Thursday how many Semis it is delivering.
Tesla originally showed off the Semi design in Dec. 2017. Production got delayed by the Covid pandemic and battery cell supply issues, among other things.
During the deliveries kick-off event, Musk briefly alluded to the tumult of the past five years and quipped, “Sorry for the delay.”
He later thanked and the handed the mic to representatives from PepsiCo Frito Lay, which is Tesla’s first customer to receive and use production Semi trucks.
One major difference between Tesla’s Class 8 offering and other heavy-duty trucks is the location of the steering wheel and the driver’s seat. Rather than using the left side (or right side in Europe), Tesla designed the Semi with the steering wheel in the center of the cab with touchscreens positioned on both sides of the driver.
While the Tesla Semi was in development, other fully electric heavy-duty trucks launched into the market.
Volvo-owned Renault Trucks and Daimler haveproduced and delivered electric heavy-duty trucks to customers before TeslaEven beleaguered Nikola — whose founder was ousted and convicted of fraud in recent months — started production of a battery electric truck in March.
But Tesla boasts some high-tech features not available elsewhere, including a new, fast-charging system, and a battery with greater range than competitors. The DC fast-charging system delivers up to 1MW, and employs a water-based coolant to ensure it’s safe in delivering that power. Tesla says that the Semi can travel 500 miles on a single charge while fully loaded.
The new fast-charging tech will eventually be installed at Tesla SuperCharging stations and used to power up Cybertrucks, the consumer pickup truck Tesla is planning, Musk revealed. The company plans volume production of the sharp-edged heavy pickup at its new factory in Austin, Texas.
A return to form
The Tesla Semi event may provide relief to fans worried about his commitment to and focus on the electric vehicle business.
Musk has recently taken on new responsibilities as owner and CEO of Twitter, the social media giant, which he acquired in a leveraged buyout for $44 billion in October. He sold some of his considerable Tesla shares to finance that deal. Since taking over Twitter, he has been embroiled in multiple conflicts and controversies around that platorm.
Musk returned to form on Thursday, speaking to Tesla’s environmental mission and the company’s vehicle tech.
In the U.S., he said, there are something like 15 million passenger vehicles and around 200,000 heavy duty trucks. “It seems like a small percentage,” he said, but the semi trucks represent a large portion of harmful vehicle emissions because of their size, weight, and the fact they are driven around the clock.
Those emissions can have dastardly health effects on people who live near warehouses, ports, and other roadways with lots of trucking activity.
According to transportation and air quality research by the American Lung Association, medium- and heavy-duty vehicles (such as delivery vans, short- and long-haul trucks) represented about 6% of the on-road fleet in the U.S. as of 2020. These vehicles generate an outsized amount of pollution, including 59% of ozone and particle-forming nitrogen oxide emissions, and 26% of the greenhouse gas emissions from transportation.
Musk said that the Semi would not only help combat climate change, but “It’s also quiet, will improve the quality of your air, and will improve the health of people living near freeways.”
The same can be said of other electric, heavy-duty trucks that displace diesel trucks.
Musk and other execs did not discuss Tesla’s driver assistance systems, which are marketed as Autopilot and Full Self-Driving Capability, at the Semi deliveries event. In 2017, when Musk debuted the Semi, he touted a driverless trucking future.
Nor did they discuss how many trucks they plan to produce in the next year, nor how they will obtain the additional battery cells and raw materials to produce those.
Shares in Elon Musk’s auto business closed flat ahead of the event, at $194.70, and did not move appreciably in after-hours trading.
The logo of multinational tech company Foxconn (also known as Hon Hai), which is a major manufacturer for Apple products, in Taipei, Taiwan, on April 16, 2025.
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Foxconn, a key Nvidia partner in its artificial intelligence buildout, saw its revenue spike 26% year-on-year in November, as demand for servers continued to ramp up amid the AI boom.
The Taiwanese company, also known as Hon Hai, is the world’s largest contract electronics manufacturer and makes the servers that hold chips in data centers, as well as assembling Apple’s iPhone.
Foxconn on Friday reported “strong growth” year-on-year for its cloud and networking products, pointing to “momentum for AI server racks,” in its monthly revenue report. It reported revenue of NT$844.3 billion ($27 billion) for November.
A longstanding partner to many of the world’s largest tech companies including Nvidia and Apple, Foxconn has become a key player in the rollout of AI infrastructure in recent times.
It was announced in May that the company would provide infrastructure to a major AI factory in Taiwan, in collaboration with Nvidia and the Taiwanese government. Two months later Foxconn announced it was taking a stake in data center construction company TECO Electric & Machinery Co.
OpenAI said last month that it would collaborate with the Taiwanese company on design work and U.S. manufacturing readiness for next generation AI infrastructure hardware.
Foxconn’s month-on-month revenue was down around 6%, with the company pointing to its smart consumer electronics segment slightly declining.
“AI server rack shipments continue to ramp up, and ICT products are in peak season in the second half of the year,” the monthly report said in its business outlook for the fourth quarter.
The company said in November that growth in its AI server business had seen its third-quarter profits jump 17% year-on-year.
Foxconn’s share price has jumped 26% since the start of 2025, following a 76% uptick over the previous 12 months.
Yi He, co-founder of Binance, in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, on May 10, 2023.
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Binance Holdings, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, named a new co-CEO Wednesday in a major shake-up of its leadership structure.
Yi He, who co-founded Binance with former head Changpeng Zhao in 2017 and haschildren with the crypto mogul, will now split duties with acting CEO Richard Teng, who announced the news this week.
The move represents the firm’s most significant leadership change since Teng succeeded Zhao, who pleaded guilty to violating U.S. money-laundering laws in 2023.
Teng, who was appointed amid intense regulatory scrutiny of Binance and crypto more broadly, notably had a background in financial regulation and services, formerly holding a senior regulatory role at Singapore’s central bank.
“[Yi He] has been there from the start, and she has been driving a lot of changes and driving the growth of Binance,” Teng told CNBC’s Dan Murphy on Wednesday shortly after the announcement.
Yi He’s elevation to the co-CEO position represents the appointment of an insider with longstanding ties to Zhao, also known as CZ.
The Trump administration has taken a friendlier stance toward the crypto industry, with several high-profile cases dropped in recent months.
Queen behind the scenes
Yi He has maintained a relatively low public profile compared to CZ, with many details regarding her roles and activities at Binance unclear.
Her social profiles list her most recent position as Chief Customer Service Officer at the crypto exchange.
One of the last major public statements from the businesswoman was in defense of CZ during his 2024 trial, among 161 letters requesting leniency from the court.
In her letter written in Chinese, Yi He identified herself as CZ’s business partner and “the mother of his three children.”
She claimed that she met CZ at a public blockchain event in 2014, three years before Binance was founded. She was then working at cryptocurrency exchange OKCoin and recruited CZ to join her.
“As CZ’s life partner, I’ve known him for nearly ten years, so I understand a side of him that’s often overlooked,” she wrote in the 2024 letter defending him.
Binance said in a statement Wednesday that Yi He has “played a fundamental role in shaping Binance’s vision and culture, guiding a strategy focused on users’ needs and innovation.”
The company also included a public statement from Yi He, in which she emphasized her and Teng’s “complementary perspectives and shared vision.”
“Together, we bring diverse perspectives and are confident in leading the future of the industry during this pivotal time, as we responsibly expand our global presence and drive sustainable innovation with our users always at the center,” she said.
Federal probes into Binance have also referenced her role in the company. In 2020, U.S. prosecutors reportedly sought records of communications involving Yi He and other executives related to anti-money laundering compliance and the creation of Binance’s U.S. entity.
Media reports have previously painted Yi He as a “Crypto Queen” wielding massive sway behind the scenes at Binance.
According to a report from the Wall Street Journal in 2023, Yi He was a former Chinese talk-show host before joining OKCoin, and she entered a relationship with CZ while working together in Shanghai.
The report added that He would assume sweeping control over the crypto giant’s marketing and investment divisions.
Binance and Yi He did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
The Cloudflare logo appears on a smartphone screen and on the background on computer screen Internal server error in this photo illustration on November 18, 2025 in Lviv, Ukraine.
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U.S. internet infrastructure company Cloudflare said on Friday it had issued a fix for an issue with its dashboard and related apps.
Shares of the company fell as much as 4.5% in premarket trading after global websites went down and Cloudflare said it was investigating.
The company issued an update minutes later saying it had “implemented a fix” and was watching for results. Cloudflare shares pared some of its losses on the news and were last seen 2% lower.
Sites including professional networking platform LinkedIn, digital currency exchange Coinbase and online publishing platform Substack were among those that appeared to be impacted by the issue.
Outage monitoring site Downdetector, which itself appeared to be briefly impacted, said users reported a sharp uptick in problems on sites, including e-commerce platform Shopify, HSBC and food delivery group Deliveroo, among others, at around 9:16 a.m. London time.
These reports fell as Cloudflare implemented its fix shortly thereafter.
The outage comes less than three weeks after a similar Cloudflare crash caused error messages across the internet, an issue that the company said was “unacceptable” at the time, given the importance of its services.
Cloudflare’s software is used by many businesses worldwide, helping to manage and secure traffic for about 20% of the web. Among the services it provides are that it guards against distributed denial of service attacks, which are when malicious actors attempt to overload a website’s system with so many traffic requests that it can’t function.