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CNBC Disruptor 50 Gecko Robotics disrupts the infrastructure industry

The collapse of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge earlier this year and an I-95 overpass in Philadelphia last June weren’t triggered by structural flaws — a runaway, powerless ocean ship and tanker fire were the culprits. But the disasters were the latest examples of an issue seen across the U.S.: trillions of dollars worth of critical — and vulnerable — bridges, roads, dams, factories, plants and machinery that are rapidly aging and in need of repair.

Significant sums of money are being spent to fix the issues, some coming from President Biden’s Infrastructure Act and other legislation, but the way infrastructure is maintained has largely not changed, mostly done slowly by humans or after a significant issue arises like a leak or collapse.

Gecko Robotics, which ranked No. 42 on the 2024 CNBC Disruptor 50 list, is taking on the nationwide challenge with AI and robots, specifically, its wall-climbing bots that perform inspections on infrastructure and not only identify existing issues but also to try to predict what can be done to avoid future problems.

More coverage of the 2024 CNBC Disruptor 50

“When you think about the built world, a lot of concrete, a lot of metal that is, especially in the U.S., 60 to 70 years old; we as a country have a D rating for infrastructure and getting that up to a B is a $4 trillion to $6 trillion problem,” Gecko Robotics CEO Jake Loosararian told CNBC’s Julia Boorstin. “A lot of that is understanding what to fix and then targeting those repairs, and then also ensuring that they don’t continue to make the same mistakes.”

Gecko Robotics’ technology is already being used to monitor “500,000 of the world’s most critical assets,” Loosararian said, which range from oil and gas facilities and pipelines to boilers and tanks at manufacturing facilities.

A focus on military hardware, from subs to aircraft carriers

Gecko robots are increasingly being utilized by the U.S. military. In 2022, the U.S. Air Force awarded Gecko Robotics a contract to help it with the conversion of missile silos. Last year, the U.S. Navy tapped the company to help modernize the manufacturing process of its Columbia-class nuclear submarine program, using Gecko’s robots to conduct inspections of welds.

Gecko Robotics is also working with the Navy to inspect aircraft carriers, which Loosararian demonstrated on CNBC via a demo on the USS Intrepid, a decommissioned aircraft carrier that now serves as a museum in New York City.

He compared the analysis that Gecko Robotics is doing on infrastructure to a CAT scan of a human body, while also creating a digital twin of the scanned object.

Those inspections historically are done by workers, collecting thousands of readings across an aircraft carrier. Gecko Robotics technology can collect upwards of 20 million data points in a tenth of the time, Loosararian said.

“There’s human error, and if you’re hanging off the side of a ship, it’s pretty dangerous too,” he said.

There are also issues related to the timeliness of military hardware construction and readiness of defense assets in an unpredictable world of global threats. For example, Loosararian said China is building ships 232 times faster than the U.S. is, a function of the sheer amount of shipbuilding capacity that China now has in comparison.

“A third of our naval vessels are in drydock right now, and you want them out of drydock or not even in a maintenance cycle,” Loosararian said. “What we’re doing with Lidar and ultrasonic sensors is a health scan, seeing what the damages are and how to fix them, because what we’re trying to do is get these ships from drydock out to the seas patrolling as fast as possible.”

The digital twins being created by Gecko robots also help with the building of future projects, saving not only time but resources and capital.

“It’s not just about how things work day-to-day but also how do you build smarter things,” Loosararian said.” If we can understand what fails in the real world, then we can figure out how to build smarter things in the future.”

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CNBC Disruptor 50 Gecko Robotics disrupts the infrastructure industry

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Amazon workers reject union in vote at North Carolina warehouse

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Amazon workers reject union in vote at North Carolina warehouse

File: The Amazon distribution center in Garner, N.C. opened in August 2020. Across four floors, the warehouse covers 2 million square feet.

Scott Sharpe | Tribune News Service | Getty Images

Amazon workers at a facility near Raleigh, North Carolina, overwhelmingly voted against unionizing on Saturday.

Of the 3,276 ballots cast, there were 2,447 votes opposing the union and 829 in favor, according to the National Labor Relations Board. There were 77 challenged ballots, a gap that’s too narrow to change the outcome of the election. The results still need to be certified by the NLRB.

The election at the facility, named RDU1 and located in the suburb of Garner, came after organizers with the upstart Carolina Amazonians United for Solidarity and Empowerment (CAUSE) campaigned at the warehouse for the past three years. The facility employs roughly 4,700 workers.

CAUSE said in a statement that the election results were a “result of Amazon’s willingness to break the law.”

“Amazon’s relentless and illegal efforts to intimidate us prove that this company is afraid of workers coming together to claim our power,” the group said. “Amazon may think it is above the law, but we will not accept a system that allows billionaires and corporations to play by a different set of rules.”

Amazon spokeswoman Eileen Hards denied that the company broke the law or interfered with the election.

“We’re glad that our team in Garner was able to have their voices heard, and that they chose to keep a direct relationship with Amazon,” Hards said in a statement. “We look forward to continuing to make this a great place to work together, and to supporting our teammates as they build their futures with us.”

Amazon, the nation’s second-largest private employer, has long sought to keep unions out of its ranks. The strategy succeeded in the U.S. until 2022, when workers at a Staten Island warehouse voted to join the Amazon Labor Union. Last month, workers at a Whole Foods store in Philadelphia voted to join the United Food and Commercial Workers union.

Amazon responded to the Garner union drive with a barrage of anti-union messages in the warehouse, on a website, and sent through its AtoZ app to employees. A leader of the warehouse urged employees to “vote no,” saying a union “can get in the way of how we work together.” The company described CAUSE as an “outside party” that’s “claiming to be a union.”

Amazon has previously said its employees can choose whether or not to join a union, and that it speaks “openly, candidly and respectfully about these topics” so that they can “make an informed decision.”

CAUSE was founded in 2022 by RDU1 employees Mary Hill and Rev. Ryan Brown to voice concerns about the company’s response to the Covid pandemic, which they viewed as inadequate. The group sought to organize RDU1 to boost wages and secure longer breaks.

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Starting pay at RDU1 is $18.50 an hour. CAUSE has pushed to negotiate for wages of $30 an hour.

In its statement on Saturday, CAUSE said it intended to continue organizing at RDU1 “because over half of Amazon employees are still struggling with food and housing insecurity.”

Labor groups have looked beyond NLRB elections in an attempt to gain a union foothold at Amazon. They’ve assisted employees with filing unfair labor practice charges with the NLRB against Amazon, accusing the company of violating labor laws.

The International Brotherhood of Teamsters helped coordinate a picket effort at nine Amazon facilities in December. Amazon said the walkout had no impact on its operations.

The Teamsters union has said it represents 9,000 Amazon workers around the country, although the company has refused to recognize the union and bargain with leadership.

Unions have enjoyed increasing support across the country, with 67% of Americans saying they approve of labor unions, according to Gallup. But that hasn’t translated into higher membership rates. Union membership in the private sector declined slightly to 5.9% in 2024, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

North Carolina had the lowest union membership rate in the country last year, with only 2.4% of workers in the state represented, according to the BLS.

WATCH: Amazon’s first U.S. union faces an uphill battle after historic win

How two friends formed Amazon's first U.S. union and what's next

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Trump Media reports $400 million in 2024 losses

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Trump Media reports 0 million in 2024 losses

U.S. President Donald Trump signs an executive order establishing the Energy Dominance Council led by Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum in the Oval Office at the White House on February 14, 2025 in Washington, DC. President Trump signed a second executive order withholding federal funding from schools and universities that impose a COVID-19 vaccine mandate.

Andrew Harnik | Getty Images News | Getty Images

Trump Media & Technology Group shares were down about 1% in extended trading on Friday after the operator of Truth Social released its 2024 results.

Here’s how the company performed:

  • Earnings: Loss of $2.36 per share
  • Revenue: $3.6 million

The company’s revenue declined 12% year over year, according to its annual report. The company saw its net loss widen to $400.9 million from $58.2 million in 2023.

Trump Media debuted on Nasdaq under the ticker “DJT” last March, completing its merger with Digital World Acquisition Corp. The stock nearly doubled in value in 2024, with its namesake, Donald Trump, winning the U.S. presidential election in November. As of Friday’s close, the stock was down about 11% year to date giving it a market capitalization of $6.59 billion.

In 2024, Trump Media incurred merger-related legal fees because of obstruction from former President Biden’s Securities and Exchange Commission, according to a statement. A change to a revenue-sharing agreement with an advertising partner resulted in lower sales. “Additionally, revenue has varied as we selectively test a nascent advertising initiative on our Truth Social platform,” the company said in the annual report.

Unlike Meta and other social media companies, Trump Media management said in the filing they do not believe in using traditional metrics such as the number of active users or average revenue per user. Doing so “could potentially divert its focus from strategic evaluation with respect to the progress and growth of its business,” according to the filing.

In the fourth quarter, Trump Media announced the availability of its Truth+ video streaming service on Android, iOS and the web.

The company has not held an earnings call since the merger.

As of Friday, a trust where President Trump is the sole beneficiary owns 52% of the voting power of the company’s stock, the filing states.

Trump publishes posts on Truth Social, where he has 8.9 million followers. On X, owned by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who has been helping with the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency, Trump has 100.9 million followers.

Trump Media now has $776.8 million in cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments, with $9.6 million in debt.

“We will continue to explore opportunities to partner, merge with, and acquire other entities that are able to function effectively if TMTG evolves into a holding company with subsidiaries spanning several industries,” Chairman and CEO Devin Nunes, a former Republican Congressman was quoted as saying in the statement.

WATCH: Trump Media expands into financial services, including allocation to crypto: CNBC Crypto World

Trump Media expands into financial services, including allocation to crypto: CNBC Crypto World

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Dell shares pop on report of $5 billion deal for AI servers for Elon Musk’s xAI

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Dell shares pop on report of  billion deal for AI servers for Elon Musk's xAI

Chief Executive Officer of SpaceX and Tesla and owner of Twitter, Elon Musk attends the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at the Porte de Versailles exhibition centre on June 16, 2023 in Paris, France.

Chesnot | Getty Images

Dell shares rose 4% on Friday following a report from Bloomberg that Elon Musk’s startup xAI was preparing an agreement to buy $5 billion in artificial intelligence servers from the hardware maker.

The equipment containing Nvidia‘s GB200 graphics processing units (GPUs) would be delivered this year, according to Bloomberg, which cited unnamed sources.

Many data center gear manufacturers have been seeing growth from selling boxes for training and running AI models. Dell said in November that it had $3.6 billion in quarterly AI server order demand. Dell’s total revenue for the latest quarter totaled $24.37 billion, up 10% year over year.

In December, xAI announced a $6 billion funding round. CNBC reported that the Musk startup, which competes with OpenAI, was raising the money to purchase GPUs. The Grok assistant from xAI is available for people to use on X, which is also owned by Musk.

Musk has been building out xAI’s facility in Memphis, Tennessee.

Dell declined to comment. xAI didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Read the full Bloomberg report here.

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