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A Waymo autonomous self-driving Jaguar taxi drives along a street on March 14, 2024 in Los Angeles, California. 

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Waymo has closed a $5.6 billion funding round to expand its robotaxi service in and beyond Los Angeles, San Francisco and Phoenix, where it operates today.

The autonomous vehicle venture is owned by Google parent Alphabet, which led the series C investment in Waymo, alongside earlier backers including Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Fidelity, Perry Creek, Silver Lake, Tiger Global and T. Rowe Price.

In a statement to CNBC, Waymo co-CEOs Tekedra Mawakana and Dmitri Dolgov said the funding would go toward expansion and advancing the Waymo Driver for business applications.

“With this latest investment, we will continue to welcome more riders into our Waymo One ride-hailing service in San Francisco, Phoenix, and Los Angeles, and in Austin and Atlanta through our expanded partnership with Uber,” they wrote.

The series C funding brings Waymo’s total capital raised to $11.1 billion after it raised $3.2 billion and $2.5 billion in two earlier rounds. Alphabet CFO Ruth Porat announced in July that the parent company would commit to a multiyear investment of up to $5 billion in Waymo.

While many companies are testing autonomous vehicles, or AVs, on public roads in the U.S., including well-funded upstarts such as Wayve, Waymo is the only one to operate a commercial robotaxi service in several major metro areas.

The service has been embraced by some women who have safety concerns about riding with unknown human drivers. And it has even been used by parents to send their teens to school when other transit options felt less safe or convenient.

Waymo now conducts more than 100,000 weekly trips for passengers in Los Angeles, Phoenix and San Francisco, who can hail their robotaxis via the Waymo One app. More recently, Waymo partnered with Uber to launch its robotaxi service in Austin, Texas — home of would-be rival Tesla’s headquarters.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has made promises about self-driving cars for more than a decade. This week, he said Tesla would offer a driverless ride-hailing service in Texas and California next year, once the company upgrades the partially automated systems in its existing vehicles, which still require a human driver today.

GM-owned Cruise had been Waymo’s closest competitor in the U.S. until it paused operations following an October 2023 incident in San Francisco in which a pedestrian was dragged 20 feet by a Cruise AV, after she was first struck by a human driver in another car. Cruise is working to reinstate its service and also plans to partner with Uber.

Self-driving vehicle makers in the U.S. must still prove their technology is safer to use than taxis and trucks with human drivers. As CNBC previously reported, nearly two-thirds of U.S. respondents to a Pew Research Center survey said they would not want to ride in a driverless passenger vehicle if they had the opportunity.

Waymo’s self-reported data suggests that their vehicles crash “far less often than human drivers on public roads,” according to analysis by Understanding AI author Timothy B. Lee.

Still, Waymo has initiated software recalls to improve the safety of its self-driving systems, and its AVs have sometimes blocked traffic, traveled the wrong way down the street, or been involved in collisions, though none resulted in a known fatality or severe injury.

The next-generation robotaxi from Waymo is a Geely Zeekr that’s equipped with its custom sensors and AI “Driver.” Waymo also recently agreed to a multiyear strategic partnership with Hyundai that will add the South Korean automaker’s Ioniq 5 electric vehicle to its robotaxi fleet.

In August, Waymo said it would also test its driverless vehicles in harsher, winter weather including in northern California, upstate New York and Michigan, with the hope of offering robotaxi services beyond the sunbelt, and eventually internationally.

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Southeast Asia needn’t take sides in US-China tech rivalry. It can learn from both, experts say

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July 8, 2025

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Southeast Asia needn't take sides in US-China tech rivalry. It can learn from both, experts say

A woman holds a cell phone featuring the DeepSeek logo, with the Nvidia logo displayed in the background.

Nurphoto | Nurphoto | Getty Images

As China and the U.S. compete in artificial intelligence, Southeast Asia should draw from the best of both countries while building its own technologies, panelists said at CNBC’s East Tech West 2025 conference on June 27 in Bangkok, Thailand.

Julian Gorman, head of Asia-Pacific at mobile network trade organization GSMA, said it would be a negative development if Southeast Asia was forced to choose between either superpower. 

“Southeast Asia is very dependent on both economies, both China and America. I think it’s pretty hard to consider that they would go one way or the other,” Gorman said. 

“It’s very important that we continue to focus on not fragmenting the technology, standardizing it, and working so that technology transcends geopolitics and ultimately is used for good,” he added. 

The spread of U.S. and Chinese AI companies into new global markets has been a big trend this year as both Beijing and Washington seek more global influence in advanced technologies. 

U.S. and China offerings

According to George Chen, managing director and co-chair of digital practice for The Asia Group, Southeast Asia had initially been leaning towards AI models from the U.S., such as those from Google and Microsoft. 

However, the emergence of China’s DeepSeek has propelled the popularity of the company’s models in Southeast Asia due to its low cost and open-source licensing, which can be used to build on and adapt models to regional priorities. 

Open-source generally refers to software in which the source code is made freely available, allowing anyone to view, modify and redistribute it. Large language model players in China have been leaning into this business model since DeepSeek’s debut. 

Previous panels at East Tech West have flagged open-source models as an important tool for regions outside of China and the U.S. to build their own sovereign AI capabilities.

Meanwhile, on the hardware side, the U.S. remains a leader in AI processors through chip giant Nvidia. While the U.S. has restricted China’s access to these chips, they remain on the market for Southeast Asia – which Chen suggested the region continue to take advantage of. 

However, Chen noted that there is a possibility that the AI landscape could change dramatically in a decade, with China being able to provide more affordable alternatives to Nvidia. 

“Don’t take a side easily and too quickly. Think about how to maximize your economic potential,” he suggested. 

GSMA’s Gorman pointed out that facing this “balancing act” between the superpowers is not new for Southeast Asia. For example, the region’s mobility industry heavily relies on Chinese tech manufacturing and hardware, as well as the U.S. in other areas such as telecommunications.

Southeast Asia’s edge

Though the U.S. and China are clearly ahead in building advanced AI models, Southeast Asia has its own edge in the global AI space, panelists said. 

“If you think about AI as a technology, eventually you need to apply it to a real product or service. That’s how people can use it,” said The Asia Group’s Chen.

The region has a strong app environment which offers “great potential,” he added. “The demographic is young, which means the potential for talent is always there, and R&D cost is relatively cheaper than other places.”

Cost considerations have already contributed to Malaysia’s growth as a global powerhouse in AI data centers and computing, particularly in the southern Johor region.

Still, Southeast Asia should aim to bring in companies with advanced capabilities that domestic industries can learn from and benefit from – a strategy that China employed to catch up to the West in advanced technologies, said Chen.

Leader in AI regulation? 

According to GSMA’s Gorman, Southeast Asia can serve as a neutral ground between China and the U.S., where the two sides can come together and engage in high-level dialogues on how to apply AI responsibly.  

Southeast Asia can also play a proactive role in AI regulation itself, he said, citing recent examples of regulatory leadership from the region, such as Singapore’s Shared Responsibility Framework for tackling international scams and fraud. 

So far, there have been few global regulations on AI. While the EU has adopted a policy, the U.S. and ASEAN countries have yet to follow suit. 

Chen added that the region will need to band together and adopt common frameworks to gain a more prominent seat at the table of global AI development and regulation. 

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Tech founders call on Sequoia Capital to denounce VC Shaun Maguire’s Mamdani comments

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14 hours ago

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July 7, 2025

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Tech founders call on Sequoia Capital to denounce VC Shaun Maguire's Mamdani comments

Almost 600 people have signed an open letter to leaders at venture firm Sequoia Capital after one of its partners, Shaun Maguire, posted what the group described as a “deliberate, inflammatory attack” against the Muslim Democratic mayoral candidate in New York City.

Maguire, a vocal supporter of President Donald Trump, posted on X over the weekend that Zohran Mamdani, who won the Democratic primary last month, “comes from a culture that lies about everything” and is out to advance “his Islamist agenda.”

The post had 5.3 million views as of Monday afternoon. Maguire, whose investments include Elon Musk’s SpaceX and X as well as artificial intelligence startup Safe Superintelligence, also published a video on X explaining the remark.

Those signing the letter are asking Sequoia to condemn Maguire’s comments and apologize to Mamdani and Muslim founders. They also want the firm to authorize an independent investigation of Maguire’s behavior in the past two years and post “a zero-tolerance policy on hate speech and religious bigotry.”

They are asking the firm for a public response by July 14, or “we will proceed with broader public disclosure, media outreach and mobilizing our networks to ensure accountability,” the letter says.

Sequoia declined to comment. Maguire didn’t respond to a request for comment, but wrote in a post about the letter on Wednesday that, “You can try everything you want to silence me, but it will just embolden me.”

Among the signees are Mudassir Sheikha, CEO of ride-hailing service Careem, and Amr Awadallah, CEO of AI startup Vectara. Also on the list is Abubakar Abid, who works in machine learning Hugging Face, which is backed by Sequoia, and Ahmed Sabbah, CEO of Telda, a financial technology startup that Sequoia first invested in four years ago.

At least three founders of startups that have gone through startup accelerator program Y Combinator added their names to the letter.

Sequoia as a firm is no stranger to politics. Doug Leone, who led the firm until 2022 and remains a partner, is a longtime Republican donor, who supported Trump in the 2024 election. Following Trump’s victory in November, Leone posted on X, “To all Trump voters:  you no longer have to hide in the shadows…..you’re the majority!!”

By contrast, Leone’s predecessor, Mike Moritz, is a Democratic megadonor, who criticized Trump and, in August, slammed his colleagues in the tech industry for lining up behind the Republican nominee. In a Financial Times opinion piece, Moritz wrote Trump’s tech supporters were “making a big mistake.”

“I doubt whether any of them would want him as part of an investment syndicate that they organised,” wrote Moritz, who stepped down from Sequoia in 2023, over a decade after giving up a management role at the firm. “Why then do they dismiss his recent criminal conviction as nothing more than a politically inspired witch-hunt over a simple book-keeping error?”

Neither Leone nor Moritz returned messages seeking comment.

Roelof Botha, Sequoia’s current lead partner, has taken a more neutral stance. Botha said at an event last July that Sequoia as a partnership doesn’t “take a political point of view,” adding that he’s “not a registered member of either party.” Boelof said he’s “proud of the fact that we’ve enabled many of our partners to express their respected individual views along the way, and given them that freedom.”

Maguire has long been open with his political views. He said on X last year that he had “just donated $300k to President Trump.”

Mamdani, a self-described democratic socialist, has gained the ire of many people in tech and in the business community more broadly since defeating former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the June primary.

— CNBC’s Ari Levy contributed to this report.

WATCH: SpaceX valuation is maybe even conservative, says Sequoia’s Shaun Maguire

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Samsung expects second-quarter profits to more than halve as it struggles to capture AI demand

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14 hours ago

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July 7, 2025

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Samsung expects second-quarter profits to more than halve as it struggles to capture AI demand

Samsung signage during the Nvidia GPU Technology Conference (GTC) in San Jose, California, US, on Thursday, March 20, 2025.

David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

South Korea’s Samsung Electronics on Tuesday forecast a 56% fall in profits for the second as the company struggles to capture demand from artificial intelligence chip leader Nvidia. 

The memory chip and smartphone maker said in its guidance that operating profit for the quarter ending June was projected to be around 4.6 trillion won, down from 10.44 trillion Korean won year over year.

The figure is a deeper plunge compared to smart estimates from LSEG, which are weighted toward forecasts from analysts who are more consistently accurate.

According to the smart estimates, Samsung was expected to post an operating profit of 6.26 trillion won ($4.57 billion) for the quarter. Meanwhile, Samsung projected its revenue to hit 74 trillion won, falling short of LSEG smart estimates of 75.55 trillion won.

Samsung is a leading player in the global smartphone market and is also one of the world’s largest makers of memory chips, which are utilized in devices such as laptops and servers.

However, the company has been falling behind competitors like SK Hynix and Micron in high-bandwidth memory chips — an advanced type of memory that is being deployed in AI chips.

“The disappointing earnings are due to ongoing operating losses in the foundry business, while the upside in high-margin HBM business remains muted this quarter,” MS Hwang, Research Director at Counterpoint Research, said about the earnings guidance.

SK Hynix, the leader in HBM, has secured a position as Nvidia’s key supplier. While Samsung has reportedly been working to get the latest version of its HBM chips certified by Nvidia, a report from a local outlet suggests these plans have been pushed back to at least September.

The company did not respond to a request for comment on the status of its deals with Nvidia.

Ray Wang, Research Director of Semiconductors, Supply Chain and Emerging Technology at Futurum Group told CNBC that it is clear that Samsung has yet to pass Nvidia’s qualification for its most advanced HBM.

“Given that Nvidia accounts for roughly 70% of global HBM demand, the delay meaningfully caps near-term upside,” Wang said. He noted that while Samsung has secured some HBM supply for AI processors from AMD, this win is unlikely to contribute to second-quarter results due to the timing of production ramps.

Meanwhile, Samsung’s chip foundry business continues to face weak orders and serious competition from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, Wang added.

Reuters reported in September that Samsung had instructed its subsidiaries worldwide to cut 30% of staff in some divisions, citing sources familiar with the matter.

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