Connect with us

Published

on

Kyle Vogt, chief executive office and chief technology officer of Cruise Automation Inc., during the South by Southwest (SXSW) festival in Austin, Texas, US, on Tuesday, March 14, 2023. 

Jordan Vonderhaar | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Cruise, General Motors‘ embattled driverless car unit, said Tuesday it will pause all public road operations — both supervised and manual — in an expansion of last month’s pause of driverless operations.

“This orderly pause is a further step to rebuild public trust while we undergo a full safety review,” Cruise wrote in a blog post. “We will continue to operate our vehicles in closed course training environments and maintain an active simulation program in order to stay focused on advancing AV technology.”

The self-driving car unit has faced a barrage of safety concerns and incidents since it received approval in August for round-the-clock robotaxi service in San Francisco. Last week, Cruise announced it would recall 950 robotaxis after a pedestrian collision. In October, the California Department of Motor Vehicles suspended Cruise’s deployment and testing permits for its autonomous vehicles, effective immediately.

“When there is an unreasonable risk to public safety, the DMV can immediately suspend or revoke permits,” the California DMV said in a statement at the time.

Federal auto safety regulators are also investigating Cruise following multiple reports about pedestrian injuries.

The decision to suspend all trips on public roads comes after a board meeting Monday at Cruise’s headquarters in San Francisco. The company also announced a reorganization and more oversight from GM: Craig Glidden, GM’s EVP of legal and policy, will become Cruise’s chief administrative officer, with Cruise’s legal and policy, communications and finance teams as direct reports. Glidden will also work closely with CEO Kyle Vogt and senior leadership to “oversee the workstreams around Transparency and Community Engagement,” according to Cruise.

The company also announced that it will hire an independent “safety expert” in coming weeks to assess Cruise’s safety operations and culture, building upon its decision to hire a chief safety officer, announced last week. In addition, Exponent — the engineering consulting firm Cruise hired to analyze an Oct. 2 crash that led to a pedestrian’s critical injuries — will now be expanding its probe into a full review of Cruise’s tech and safety systems, according to the blog post.

Cruise did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The suspension is rippling through the company. Last Thursday, Cruise announced a round of contractor layoffs.

“Cruise has made the difficult decision to reduce a portion of the contingent workforce that supported driverless ridehail operations,” a company spokesperson told CNBC Thursday in a statement. “These contingent workers were responsible for work such as cleaning, charging and maintaining the fleet, and we’re grateful for their contributions.” 

One Cruise contractor, who worked for the company through Unifi and requested anonymity, told CNBC that on paper, that may have been the job description, but in actuality, they were also often in charge of reprogramming cars, physically updating cars after a software update, offloading data and more. The contractor also said that some of their coworkers found out via a sign posted about shifts being canceled, along with an email.

Cruise told CNBC on Thursday that the layoffs reflected its temporary suspension of driverless activities, and that the company planned to “continue supervised operations without passengers.” However, as of now it has suspended those operations as well.

In GM’s third-quarter earnings update, the company said it had lost roughly $1.9 billion on Cruise through September of this year.

Continue Reading

Technology

Asian tech stocks fall as Trump doubles down on tariffs, keeping investors on edge

Published

on

By

Asian tech stocks fall as Trump doubles down on tariffs, keeping investors on edge

Employees move semiconductor testers on the assembly line of the Advantest Corp. plant in Ora, Japan on Aug. 10, 2012.

Tomohiro Ohsumi | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Asian tech and chip-related stocks fell Tuesday after U.S. President Donald Trump made it clear that tariffs on Mexico and Canada would go into effect as planned.

Trump said the U.S. would impose 25% tariffs on goods imported from Canada and Mexico, adding that there was “no room left for Mexico or for Canada” to negotiate an alternative to the tariffs.

Trump also said he would impose an additional 10% tariff on imports from China, having already levied 10% duties that came into effect in February.

Asian tech stocks were also pressured by the near 9% fall in artificial intelligence darling Nvidia‘s shares overnight.

Japanese semiconductor equipment maker Advantest plunged as much as 9%, to its lowest level since last October, while Chipmaker Renesas Electronics lost 6.35%.

Tech investor SoftBank Group dropped 6.25%. The company’s CEO Masayoshi Son plans to borrow $16 billion to invest in artificial intelligence, according to a news report that came out over the weekend.

Over in South Korea, shares in SK Hynix lost as much as 3.26%, while Samsung Electronics bucked the trend to rise nearly 1% following the launch of its Galaxy A series smartphones with AI-powered features.

Chinese AI-linked stocks also fell with Alibaba and Kingsoft Cloud down as much as 2.23% and 8.46% respectively.

Meanwhile, shopping platform Meituan lost 0.62%, electronic vehicle maker BYD plunged 6.60%, Xpeng traded 1.97% lower and Li Auto lost 2.68%.

Chinese tech major Tencent‘s shares were trading 0.91% higher in Hong Kong.

In Taiwan, shares in Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company lost more than 2% Tuesday, after Trump said the company would invest $100 billion in the U.S. to bolster chip manufacturing. The investment was a “tremendous move by the most powerful company in the world,” Trump said.

Continue Reading

Technology

Malaysia will take ‘necessary action’ if its companies are involved in Nvidia fraud case: Trade minister

Published

on

By

Malaysia will take 'necessary action' if its companies are involved in Nvidia fraud case: Trade minister

Nvidia’s headquarters on Feb. 26, 2025, in Santa Clara, California.

Justin Sullivan | Getty Images

Malaysia said it will take “necessary action” against Malaysian companies if they are found to be involved in a fraud case linked to the alleged movement of Nvidia chips from Singapore to China.

That comes after Singapore Law and Home Affairs Minister K Shanmugam reportedly said on Monday that the servers in the fraud case may have contained Nvidia’s artificial intelligence chips which were then sent to Malaysia.

On Feb. 27, Singapore charged three men with fraud, with local broadcaster CNA saying it understood the cases are linked to the alleged movement of Nvidia chips.

“The question is whether Malaysia was a final destination or from Malaysia, it went to somewhere else, which we do not know for certain at this point,” Shanmugam told reporters.

Malaysia checking with data center companies if chips have 'gone to the right parties': Minister

Speaking to CNBC’s “Squawk Box Asia” on Tuesday, Tengku Zafrul Aziz, Malaysia’s minister for investment, trade and industry said the country has no information that data center companies operating in Malaysia are “not using the chips that they are supposed to be using.”

He said such servers are imported by data center companies such as Microsoft, AWS and Google.

Singapore’s Shanmugam had said Nvidia’s chips were embedded in servers supplied by Dell and Supermicro to Singapore-based companies, before they went to Malaysia. He added that “there may have been false representation on the final destination of the servers.”

When asked if Malaysia knew where the servers were now, Zafrul replied, “we don’t know,” adding that Malaysian authorities are discussing with the data center companies and checking if they have gone to the right parties.

“Right now, there’s no such cases in Malaysia to date, and we are investigating if they are. We’ll definitely discuss this with Singapore and well, the companies would then have to be held accountable by the relevant authorities,” he added.

CNA also reported two Singaporeans were charged with criminal conspiracy to commit fraud on a supplier of servers.

Citing charge sheets, CNA said they allegedly made false representations in 2024 that the items would not be transferred to a person other than the “authorized ultimate consignee of end users.”

The charges also come after Reuters reported in late January that the U.S. Commerce Department is looking into whether Chinese AI startup DeepSeek has been using U.S. chips that are not allowed to be shipped to China.

Citing a person familiar with the matter, Reuters said “organized AI chip smuggling to China has been tracked out of countries including Malaysia, Singapore and the United Arab Emirates.”

Zafrul told CNBC that Malaysia will be checking the chips’ destination, but added, “what I can say today [is] the chips are not meant to be in Malaysia in the first place. So the question is, why is it going out of Singapore?”

Continue Reading

Technology

23andMe special committee again rejects CEO Wojcicki’s take-private offer

Published

on

By

23andMe special committee again rejects CEO Wojcicki's take-private offer

Anne Wojcicki, co-founder and chief executive officer of 23andme Inc., during the South by Southwest (SXSW) festival in Austin, Texas, US, on Friday, March 10, 2023. 

Jordan Vonderhaar | Bloomberg | Getty Images

23andMe‘s special committee of independent directors on Monday rejected CEO Anne Wojcicki’s proposal to take the distressed genetic testing company private.

Wojcicki submitted a proposal to the committee on Sunday, offering to acquire all of the company’s outstanding shares for 41 cents each, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

The stock plunged 33% on Monday to close at $1.47, down more than 99% from its peak in 2021.

Wojcicki and New Mountain Capital submitted a prior bid in February to take the company private for $2.53 per share. Days later, New Mountain told Wojcicki it was no longer interested in participating in a potential acquisition and would discontinue discussions, the filing said.

23andMe’s special committee said that Wojcicki’s proposal represented an 84% decrease from the prior offer and determined not to go forward, according to a release on Monday.

“The Special Committee has reviewed Ms. Wojcicki’s acquisition proposal in consultation with its financial and legal advisors, and has unanimously determined to reject the proposal,” the directors said.

23andMe didn’t immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.

Following a turbulent 2024, 23andMe announced plans in January to explore strategic alternatives, which could include a sale of the company or its assets, a restructuring or a business combination. 

Wojcicki previously submitted a proposal to take the company private for 40 cents per share in July, but it was rejected by the special committee, in part because the members said it lacked committed financing and did not provide a premium to the closing price at the time.

WATCH: The rise and fall of 23andMe

The rise and fall of 23andMe

Continue Reading

Trending