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TOPSHOT – The photo taken on August 1, 2024 shows a general view of the driver’s seat and controls of a driverless robotaxi autonomous vehicle developed as part of tech giant Baidu’s Apollo Go self-driving project, in Wuhan, in central China’s Hubei province. Turning heads as they cruise past office buildings and malls, driverless taxis are slowly spreading through Chinese cities, prompting both wariness and wonder. (Photo by Pedro PARDO / AFP) / To go with: CHINA-TECHNOLOGY-AUTOMOTIVE, FOCUS by Jing Xuan TENG (Photo by PEDRO PARDO/AFP via Getty Images)

Pedro Pardo | Afp | Getty Images

China’s robotaxi push is sparking job security fears among drivers, but experts say the technology is already creating new jobs.

On Tuesday, China issued 16,000 test licenses for autonomous vehicles and opened 32,000 kilometers of public test roads. In June, the government also greenlit nine domestic automakers, including BYD and Nio, to begin testing conditionally automated driving technologies on certain public roads. Elon Musk is looking to get regulatory approval for Tesla’s Full-Self Driving technology by the end of this year.

But all that action has led to many Chinese social media users saying autonomous driving is “snatching rice bowls” of drivers, or putting them out of work.

In the long run, autonomous driving will definitely displace the driver jobs. But again, there is already a shortage of drivers. So definitely, for the taxi [companies], you can see it’s a benefit for them.

Mohit Sharma

analyst, Counterpoint Research

Baidu’s self-driving ride hailing platform Apollo Go has around 400 robotaxis operating in Wuhan — its largest operational region — and plans to increase that to 1,000 by the end of the year. Robin Li, CEO of Baidu, said the firm’s share of Wuhan’s ride-hailing market is only about 1%.

“Scaling will be a gradual process and it could take many years,” Li said during the firm’s quarterly earnings call on Aug. 22.

The Apollo Go service became so popular that taxi drivers petitioned Wuhan’s transport authority to limit the use of the service, according to media reports.

A check on the Apollo Go app showed a 16-minute robotaxi ride within the southern suburb of Beijing suburb would cost 10.36 yuan ($1.46), about half the 20 yuan fare listed by ride-hailing apps, which can call taxis.

New jobs created

Despite the flurry of headlines, experts say autonomous mobility will mature gradually.

“You will not lose all the jobs in one go. It will be a slow transition phase area by area, region by region,” said Mohit Sharma, research analyst at Counterpoint Research.

He added that governments could collaborate with robotaxi companies to switch drivers to other jobs, while education systems can train new generations for the jobs of the future.

An Apollo Go spokesperson said the firm is committed toward creating new job opportunities in the ecosystem. Roles include those in monitoring and testing systems, as well as data annotation, the firm said.

Wang Juan, who has been working as an on-road testing operator at Apollo Go for about two years, told CNBC that she decided to join the industry because she was interested in it. On-road testing operators trial autonomous vehicles and provide feedback on problems encountered during the tests for optimization.

She used to work at an automaker but felt her career stagnated there. She jumped at the opportunity to work for Apollo Go instead.

“Very challenging. It’s very different from my previous job,” she said in Mandarin about her current role, translated by CNBC. “In this role, I seek to find the problems and issues with the autonomous cars.”

Jeff Farrah, CEO for the Autonomous Vehicle Industry Association, said the industry “is creating a wide variety of new, well-paying jobs” in the U.S. These roles include service technicians, remote assistance operators, mapping specialists, dispatchers and terminal operators, he said.

“Even though AVs perform all aspects of the driving task, workers are essential to the technology. It’s also important to remember that AVs’ increased accessibility benefits will help the disability community obtain new employment opportunities,” Farrah said.

While there is always some job displacement when new technology enters the market, Sharma agreed innovation will also “create more jobs and new jobs because of the technology.” Sharma named cybersecurity, vehicle testing and validation and software development as some of the opportunities.

“In the long run, autonomous driving will definitely displace the driver jobs. But again, there is already a shortage of drivers. So definitely, for the taxi [companies], you can see it’s a benefit for them,” he said.

ComfortDelGro CEO: we are learning how to commercialize robotaxi

– CNBC’s Evelyn Cheng contributed to this report.

Clarification: This story was revised to reflect Apollo Go’s updated count of robotaxis in Wuhan.

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Trump to extend TikTok deadline for third time, pushing decision out another 90 days

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Trump to extend TikTok deadline for third time, pushing decision out another 90 days

Muhammed Selim Korkutata | Anadolu | Getty Images

For a third time since taking office in January, President Donald Trump plans to extend a deadline that would require China’s ByteDance to divest TikTok’s U.S. business.

“President Trump will sign an additional Executive Order this week to keep TikTok up and running,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement. “As he has said many times, President Trump does not want TikTok to go dark. This extension will last 90 days, which the Administration will spend working to ensure this deal is closed so that the American people can continue to use TikTok with the assurance that their data is safe and secure.”

ByteDance was nearing the deadline of June 19, to sell TikTok’s U.S. operations in order to satisfy a national security law that the Supreme Court upheld just a few days before Trump’s second presidential inauguration. Under the law, app store operators like Apple and Google and internet service providers would be penalized for supporting TikTok.

ByteDance originally faced a Jan. 19 deadline to comply with the national security law, but Trump signed an executive order when he first took office that pushed the deadline to April 5. Trump extended the deadline for the second time a day before that April mark.

Trump told NBC News in May that he would extend the TikTok deadline again if no deal was reached, and he reiterated his plans on Thursday.

Prior to Trump signing the first executive order, TikTok briefly went offline in the U.S. for a day, only to return after the president’s announcement. Apple and Google also removed TikTok from the Apple App Store and Google Play during TikTok’s initial U.S. shut down, but then reinstated the app to their respective app stores in February.

Multiple parties including Oracle, AppLovin, and Billionaire Frank McCourt’s Project Liberty consortium have expressed interest in buying TikTok’s U.S. operations. It’s unclear whether the Chinese government would approve a deal.

— CNBC’s Kevin Breuninger contributed to this report

WATCH: Project Liberty’s bid for TikTok is aligned with U.S. national security priorities.

Frank McCourt: Project Liberty's bid for TikTok is aligned with U.S. national security priorities

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AWS’ custom chip strategy is showing results, and cutting into Nvidia’s AI dominance

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AWS' custom chip strategy is showing results, and cutting into Nvidia's AI dominance

AWS announces new CPU chip: Here's what to know

Amazon Web Services is set to announce an update to its Graviton4 chip that includes 600 gigabytes per second of network bandwidth, what the company calls the highest offering in the public cloud.

Ali Saidi, a distinguished engineer at AWS, likened the speed to a machine reading 100 music CDs a second.

Graviton4, a central processing unit, or CPU, is one of many chip products that come from Amazon’s Annapurna Labs in Austin, Texas. The chip is a win for the company’s custom strategy and putting it up against traditional semiconductor players like Intel and AMD.

But the real battle is with Nvidia in the artificial intelligence infrastructure space.

At AWS’s re:Invent 2024 conference last December, the company announced Project Rainier – an AI supercomputer built for startup Anthropic. AWS has put $8 billion into backing Anthropic.

AWS Senior Director for Customer and Project Engineering Gadi Hutt said Amazon is looking to reduce AI training costs and provide an alternative to Nvidia’s expensive graphics processing units, or GPUs.

Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4 AI model is trained on Trainium2 GPUs, according to AWS, and Project Rainier is powered by over half a million of the chips – an order that would have traditionally gone to Nvidia.

Read more CNBC tech news

Hutt said that while Nvidia’s Blackwell is a higher-performing chip than Trainium2, the AWS chip offers better cost performance.

“Trainium3 is coming up this year, and it’s doubling the performance of Trainium2, and it’s going to save energy by an additional 50%,” he said.

The demand for these chips is already outpacing supply, according to Rami Sinno, director of engineering at AWS’ Annapurna Labs.

“Our supply is very, very large, but every single service that we build has a customer attached to it,” he said.

With Graviton4’s upgrade on the horizon and Project Rainier’s Trainium chips, Amazon is demonstrating its broader ambition to control the entire AI infrastructure stack, from networking to training to inference.

And as more major AI models like Claude 4 prove they can train successfully on non-Nvidia hardware, the question isn’t whether AWS can compete with the chip giant — it’s how much market share it can take.

The release schedule for the Graviton4 update will be provided by the end of June, according to an AWS spokesperson.

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JPMorgan moves further into crypto with stablecoin-like token JPMD

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JPMorgan moves further into crypto with stablecoin-like token JPMD

Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase & Co., speaks to the Economic Club of New York in Manhattan, New York City, on April 23, 2024.

Mike Segar | Reuters

JPMorgan Chase is taking a step further into the cryptocurrency space with its own stablecoin-like token, called JPMD.

The U.S. banking giant told CNBC on Tuesday that it’s planning to launch a so-called deposit token on Coinbase’s public blockchain Base, which is built on top of the Ethereum network. Each deposit token is meant to serve as a digital representation of a commercial bank deposit.

JPMD will offer clients round-the-clock settlement as well as the ability to pay interest to holders. It is a so-called “permissioned token,” meaning it is only available to JPMorgan’s institutional clients — unlike many stablecoins, which are publicly available.

“We see institutions using JPMD for onchain digital asset settlement solutions as well as for making cross-border business-to-business transactions,” Naveen Mallela, global co-head of Kinexys, J.P. Morgan’s blockchain unit, told CNBC Tuesday.

“Given the fact that deposit tokens would eventually be interest bearing as well, this would provide better fungibility with existing deposit products that institutions currently use,” he added.

Deposit token vs. stablecoin

JPMorgan said the benefit of launching a deposit token over a stablecoin is that it gives institutional clients a way to move money around faster and easier while still having a close connection with traditional banking systems.

A stablecoin is a type of digital token that’s designed to be pegged 1:1 to the value of a fiat currency at all times. The most popular stablecoins are Tether’s USDT and Circle’s USDC. The entire stablecoin market is worth approximately $262 billion, according to data from CoinGecko.

In the U.S., stablecoins remain broadly unregulated — although this is likely to change soon. The Senate is set to vote Tuesday on the GENIUS Act, legislation that would introduce formal regulation for such tokens.

Elsewhere, the European Union regulates stablecoins under its Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation, or MiCA, while the U.K. has also laid out plans to regulate the crypto industry. Britain’s Financial Conduct Authority is currently consulting on proposals to require stablecoin issuers to ensure their tokens maintain their value against a given asset.

Read more CNBC tech news

JPMorgan’s digital asset chief told CNBC that the bank chose Coinbase as its blockchain partner since the crypto exchange is already a long-standing client and a leader in the crypto space.

JPMD has had “preliminary interest from large institutional players who want more native onchain cash solutions from pre-eminent and reputed financial institutions,” Mallela added.

Speculation had been building around JPMorgan’s new crypto offering after a trademark application filed by the bank for “JPMD” was made public Monday.

The trademark outlined a broad range of crypto services under the JPMD name, including trading, exchange, transfer and payment services for digital assets.

Various crypto media outlets had speculated whether the bank was about to launch its own stablecoin. However, JPMorgan says that, while its token may share some similarities with a stablecoin, it’s ultimately a different kind of product.

Watch CNBC’s full interview with JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon

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