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.
China’s artificial intelligencedevice market is already booming, and in the advanced technology race against the U.S., the country’s expertise in hardware could give it an edge.
“The advantage comes from the fundamental root that China is a nation of manufacturing,” Dr. Kai-Fu Lee, CEO of 01.AI and chairman of Sinovation Ventures, told CNBC. “Today, the competition is on the software, the models, the agents, the applications. But soon it will move to devices.”
Meta has sold millions of its smart glasses since introducing the specs in 2023, and the Chinese have caught on, with more than 70 Chinese companies creating competing products in the space.
Eyewear from companies such as Inmo and Rokid are sold worldwide. Xiaomi and Alibaba‘s are found only in China and are embedded with the tech giants’ own AI.
Alibaba’s DingTalk, a messaging platform for the workplace, this year released a credit card-sized AI gizmo meant for note-taking on the job.
The DingTalk A1 can record, transcribe, summarize and analyze speech from as far as 8 meters (26 feet) away, about the length of a large boardroom.
The device is similar to the Plaud Note, which is available in the U.S.
The device experimentation in China spans from the practical to the unconventional.
Chinese startup Le Le Gaoshang Education Technology released a “Native Language Star” brand translating gadget aimed at Chinese parents with limited English to teach English to their own children.
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The contraption, which is looped around the back of a user’s neck like a travel neck pillow and comes down toward the chest, has a sort of muzzle unit that goes over the mouth and mutes the user’s own voice.
The unit is embedded with Tencent and iFlyTek AI and is billed as a way to turn an English-speaking Chinese parent into a “laowai,” or foreigner. It retails for $420.
Having so many hardware touchpoints helps with adoption and with getting people used to the technology. It’s also a boost for companies to gather a war chest of data compared to other countries, analysts say.
“When you still hear people outside of China talking about what the future of the AI device might be, the market is full of AI devices here already,” tech consultant Tom van Dillen of Greenkern said at his office in Beijing. “This creates this feedback loop again to make the AI even better.”
Yet an edge in hardware is far from a guarantee to win the AI race, especially if China’s AI lacks appeal with global customers due to privacy or other issues, or if it falls well behind its counterparts in the U.S. or elsewhere.
“You really have to be that Apple iPhone to reap the most of the reward,” Lee cautioned, referencing late entrepreneur Steve Jobs’ invention that is often seen as one of the most transformative consumer products ever. “I think the China advantage for building the Apple iPhone for the AI age is that the capabilities are there — engineers and entrepreneurs, and so on. But it will still be a race.”
President Donald Trump on Monday said Nvidia will be allowed to ship its H200 artificial intelligence chips to “approved customers” in China and elsewhere, on the condition that the U.S. gets a 25% cut.
The policy “will support American Jobs, strengthen U.S. Manufacturing, and benefit American Taxpayers,” Trump wrote.
“The Department of Commerce is finalizing the details, and the same approach will apply to AMD, Intel, and other GREAT American Companies,” he added in the post.
The H200 is a higher-grade chip than the H20, but not the company’s top-of-the-line product.
Nvidia shares climbed earlier Monday on news that the Commerce Department was set to approve the China sales, but later pared those gains. The stock rose about 2% after hours.
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Nvidia (NVDA) and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) stock prices
“We applaud President Trump’s decision to allow America’s chip industry to compete to support high paying jobs and manufacturing in America,” a spokesman from Nvidia told CNBC in a statement.
“Offering H200 to approved commercial customers, vetted by the Department of Commerce, strikes a thoughtful balance that is great for America,” the spokesman said.
Semiconductors, which are key components in nearly every category of electronics, are at the center of the AI race between the U.S. and China.
They have also played a role in the tumultuous trade relationship between the two economic superpowers.
Read more CNBC tech news
When Beijing imposed export controls on rare-earth minerals, which are used in the production of some high-end chips, the Trump administration threatened to massively increase tariffs on U.S. imports from China.
After meeting in South Korea in late October, Trump and Xi struck a tentative trade truce in which China committed to end “retaliation” against U.S. chipmakers, according to the White House.
Trump said after that meeting that he discussed the export of Nvidia chips with Xi.
Broadcom shares hit an all-time high during Monday’s trading session after the emergence of another encouraging sign that the company’s custom chips are all the rage on the AI scene. The newest development comes from the tech website, The Information, which said Microsoft could be looking to move its custom chip business from Marvell Technology to Broadcom. The report is the latest in a string of recent good news for Broadcom, which delivers quarterly earnings after Thursday’s close. Shares of Marvell were understandably falling more than 7%. Also weighing on Marvell stock was a note from Benchmark, in which the analysts call out with a “high degree of conviction” that Amazon may also be looking to move the development of future generations of its Trainium chips away from Marvell to AIchip, a Taiwanese designer. Taken together, Broadcom shareholders should feel good about the company’s standing in the custom AI market, as specialized silicon emerges as a competitor to Nvidia’s all-purpose AI chips, which have been the gold standard in running artificial intelligence workloads. At the same time, the weakening position of Marvell amplifies Broadcom as the go-to company for custom chips. The Information report, as it relates to Microsoft, comes after the success of Google’s tensor processing units, which were co-developed by Broadcom. The TPUs have been praised in recent weeks following the release of Gemini 3, the latest large language model from Alphabet ‘s Google. Gemini 3, which has leapt to the top of the app leaderboards, was trained and runs entirely on Google’s custom TPUs. A couple of weeks ago, The Information reported that Meta Platforms was thinking about using Google’s TPUs for its data centers in 2027. AVGO YTD mountain Broadcom YTD While it’s great to watch Broadcom’s share price climb, we don’t love it when a stock runs into an earnings release, as it indicates high expectations. We do understand the move, though, because all this news has made it clear that Broadcom’s custom silicon business is primed for further gains. We don’t expect to hear much about these latest two developments on the post-earnings call. We do, however, suspect that talk about custom chip demand will center around the interest Broadcom has been seeing following the launch of Gemini 3. Outside of custom chips, there will be high interest in Broadcom’s networking business, which has seen incredible growth over the past year, given the increased need for high-bandwidth networking solutions resulting from the explosion of AI adoption — especially with the introduction of reasoning models and agentic solutions. On the legacy front, we expect to see some gradual improvement, thanks in part to seasonality as the company’s wireless revenues are tightly linked with the iPhone sales cycle, given that Apple is the company’s primary wireless customer. As for software, we continue to expect strong growth and margin performance driven by VMware, and we will be interested to hear about any additional synergy and cross-selling opportunities the team has been working on. (Jim Cramer’s Charitable Trust is long AVGO, MSFT, AMZN, META. See here for a full list of the stocks.) As a subscriber to the CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer, you will receive a trade alert before Jim makes a trade. Jim waits 45 minutes after sending a trade alert before buying or selling a stock in his charitable trust’s portfolio. If Jim has talked about a stock on CNBC TV, he waits 72 hours after issuing the trade alert before executing the trade. THE ABOVE INVESTING CLUB INFORMATION IS SUBJECT TO OUR TERMS AND CONDITIONS AND PRIVACY POLICY , TOGETHER WITH OUR DISCLAIMER . NO FIDUCIARY OBLIGATION OR DUTY EXISTS, OR IS CREATED, BY VIRTUE OF YOUR RECEIPT OF ANY INFORMATION PROVIDED IN CONNECTION WITH THE INVESTING CLUB. NO SPECIFIC OUTCOME OR PROFIT IS GUARANTEED.