A Waymo self-driving car, seen with a driver, stops at a red light outside the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on Friday, March 31, 2025.
Bill Clark | CQ-Roll Call, Inc. | Getty Images
Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana told CNBC on Tuesday that the Alphabet-owned ride-hailing company has reached 10 million trips, doubling in the past five months.
“These are all paid trips, and they represent people who are really integrating Waymo Driver into their everyday lives,” said Mawakana, speaking at the Google I/O developer conference. The 10 million figure includes rides in Austin, Los Angeles, San Francisco and the Phoenix area.
Waymo is delivering more than 250,000 paid robotaxi rides a week, Alphabet said in its April earnings report. On Monday, Waymo said it had won approval to expand its autonomous ride-hailing service to more parts of the San Francisco Bay Area, including San Jose.
The robotaxi company is part of Alphabet’s “Other Bets” unit. Revenue in the overall category fell 9% in the first quarter from a year earlier to $450 million, and operating loss grew from to $1.23 billion from $1.02 billion a year ago.
While those figures include a number of businesses, Mawakana confirmed that Waymo is not yet profitable but that the company is “super focused on building a sustainable business.”
“We’re proving out that it can be a profitable business,” she said. “There’s a path to profitability.”
Waymo faces potential competition from Tesla, which has promised to launch its robotaxi service in Austin next month. Tesla CEO Elon Musktold CNBC on Tuesday that the plan was still on track, and that the company will start with about 10 vehicles and rapidly expand to thousands if the debut goes well with no incidents.
Musk said Tesla aims to bring its robotaxis to Los Angeles and San Francisco following the planned Austin launch. He has previously claimed Tesla’s “generalized” approach to robotaxis is more ambitious than Waymo’s. Tesla primarily relies on camera-based systems and computer vision instead of using sophisticated sensors including lidar and radar in its vehicles.
Mawakana said that Waymo has taken what it views as the “safest path.”
“There’s probably a lot of ways it can be done, but we’re the only ones that have done it,” she said. “We’ve been doing it 24 hours a day for almost five years. And so to us, it’s really important to focus on safety, not focus on safety and then cost — not cost and then safety.”
Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon, speaks during an unveiling event in New York on Feb. 26, 2025.
Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said Wednesday that the company hasn’t seen any signs of consumers tightening their wallets in the face of President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs.
Jassy’s comments came during Amazon’s annual shareholder meeting, which was held virtually on Wednesday.
“We have not seen any attenuation of demand at this point,” Jassy said during a question-and-answer portion of the meeting. “We also haven’t yet seen any meaningful average selling price increases.”
Amazon and other retailers continue to digest the impact of Trump’s tariffs. Rival retailer Walmartwarned last week that consumers could start seeing price hikes from tariffs later this month and in June. Within days, that sparked the ire of Trump, who urged the company to “EAT THE TARIFFS.”
Read more CNBC Amazon coverage
Targetsaid Wednesday it will likely need to hike prices on some items, while Home Depotsaid it expects to maintain its current pricing levels.
Jassy said last month the company made some “strategic forward inventory buys” to stock up on goods and is “pretty maniacally focused” on keeping prices low for shoppers.
Some third-party sellers, which account for roughly 60% of products sold, have increased prices on certain items, while others have opted to keep prices steady, Jassy said on Wednesday.
“I think that the diversity and the size of our marketplace really helps customers have the best selection of the best prices,” Jassy said.
OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman appears on screen during a talk with Microsoft Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella at the Microsoft Build 2025, conference in Seattle, Washington on May 19, 2025.
Jason Redmond | AFP | Getty Images
OpenAI said on Wednesday that it’s buying Jony Ive’s AI devices startup io for about $6.4 billion in an all-equity deal that includes its current stake in the company.
Ive is taking on “deep creative and design responsibilities across OpenAI and io,” OpenAI said in a statement. The company said that io is merging with OpenAI, while Ive and his “creative collective” called LoveFrom will stay independent.
In a blog post on Wednesday from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Ive, the pair said that io was founded a year ago by Ive, along with Apple alumni Scott Cannon, Tang Tan and Evans Hankey, who briefly took over Ive’s role at Apple after he departed.
“The io team, focused on developing products that inspire, empower and enable, will now merge with OpenAI to work more intimately with the research, engineering and product teams in San Francisco,” the post said.
OpenAI said it’s paying $5 billion given that it already owns 23% of the company.
The purchase is by far OpenAI’s largest and comes weeks after the company agreed to buy AI-assisted coding tool Windsurf for $3 billion. Prior to that, OpenAI acquired analytics database company Rockset for an undisclosed sum in 2024.
Ive announced in 2019 that he was leaving Apple, where he was the longtime chief design officer, to start LoveFrom. Airbnb said in 2020 that Ive was consulting with the company on hiring and future products. The New York Times reported last year that LoveFrom’s clients pay the firm up to $200 million a year and that its designers at the time were working on projects for Christie’s, Airbnb and Ferrarri.
LoveFrom says on its website that it was founded by Ive and designer Marc Newson, but the doesn’t say anything about what the company does or include any mention of io.
Apple chief design officer Jony Ive (L) and Apple CEO Tim Cook inspect the new iPhone XR during an Apple special event at the Steve Jobs Theatre on September 12, 2018 in Cupertino, California.
Ive is responsible for designing Apple‘s most iconic products, including the iPod, iPhone, iPad and MacBook Air. He also helped design Apple’s new Cupertino headquarters, called Apple Park, a project that began in 2004 with the campus officially opening in 2019.
News of the acquisition comes as OpenAI, which was recently valued at $300 billion in a funding round led by SoftBank, is rushing to stay ahead in the generative AI race, where competitors including Google, Anthropic and Elon Musk’s xAI are investing heavily and regularly rolling out new products. Part of staying ahead in that race includes shoring up its hardware operations.
To further its hardware ambitions, OpenAI hired the former head of Meta’s Orion augmented reality glasses initiative in November to lead its robotics and consumer hardware efforts. Caitlin “CK” Kalinowski wrote in an announcement at the time that the role would “initially focus on OpenAI’s robotics work and partnerships to help bring AI into the physical world and unlock its benefits for humanity.”
Also late last year, OpenAI invested in Physical Intelligence, a robot startup based in San Francisco, which raised $400 million at a $2.4 billion valuation. Other investors included Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. The startup focuses on “bringing general-purpose AI into the physical world,” according to its website, by developing large-scale AI models and algorithms to power robots.
Windows 11 operating system logo is displayed on a laptop screen for illustration photo.
Beata Zawrzel | Nurphoto | Getty Images
Microsoft said Wednesday that it broke down the Lumma Stealer malware project with the help of law enforcement officials across the globe.
The tech giant said in a blog post that its digital crimes unit discovered over 394,000 Windows computers were infected by the Lumma malware worldwide between March 16 through May 16.
The Lumma malware was a favorite hacking tool used by bad actors, Microsoft said in the post. Hackers used the malware to steal passwords, credit cards, bank accounts and cryptocurrency wallets.
Microsoft said its digital crimes unit was able to dismantle the web domains underpinning Lumma’s infrastructure with the help of a court order from the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia.
The U.S. Department of Justice then took control of Lumma’s “central command structure” and squashed the online marketplaces where bad actors purchased the malware.
Read more CNBC tech news
The cybercrime control center of Japan “facilitated the suspension of locally based Lumma infrastructure,” the blog post said.
“Working with law enforcement and industry partners, we have severed communications between the malicious tool and victims,” Microsoft said in the post. “Moreover, more than 1,300 domains seized by or transferred to Microsoft, including 300 domains actioned by law enforcement with the support of Europol, will be redirected to Microsoft sinkholes.”
Microsoft said that other tech companies like Cloudflare, Bitsight and Lumen also helped break down the Lumma malware ecosystem.
Hackers have been buying the Lumma malware via underground online forums since at least 2022, all while developers were “continually improving its capabilities,” the blog post said.
The malware has become the “go-to tool for cybercriminals and online threat actors” because it’s easy to spread and break through some security defenses with the right programming, the company said.
In one example of how criminals used Lumma, Microsoft pointed to a March 2025 phishing campaign in which bad actors misled people into believing they were part of the Booking.com online travel service.
These cyber criminals used the Lumma malware to carry out their financial crimes in this scheme, the company said.
Additionally, Microsoft said that hackers have used the Lumma to attack online gaming communities and education systems, while other cybersecurity companies have noted that the malware has been used in cyber attacks targeting manufacturing, logistics, healthcare and other related critical infrastructure.