Nintendo sold more than 3.5 million units of its flagship Switch 2 gaming system in the four days following its launch, a record-breaking start for the company’s first new console in eight years. 

The sales figures, reported by the Japanese multinational video-game company on Wednesday, put it on the path to realizing its aim of selling 15 million units of the Switch 2 console in the fiscal year ending March 2026. 

The Switch 2, which was released on June 5, has been met with much fanfare, with fans fans lined up for hours ahead of midnight releases at Nintendo stores.

“Fans around the world are showing their enthusiasm for Nintendo Switch 2 as an upgraded way to play at home and on the go,” Nintendo of America President and Chief Operating Officer Doug Bowser said in a statement, adding the company was thankful for the response. 

Tokyo-listed shares of Nintendo, which have gained nearly 30% so far this year, were down 3.5% on Wednesday, LSEG data showed. The company has seen its shares rise nearly fivefold since the original Switch debuted in early March 2017.

It remains to be seen if the Switch 2 can recapture the magic of its predecessor, which had set the bar with 15 million unit sales in its first year. It went on to sell more than 152 million units to become the second-highest selling Nintendo device ever, behind the Nintendo DS.

In April, Nintendo’s Bowser told CNBC that the company had been working with “retail partners to ensure there’s ample supply for not only the launch weekend, but well beyond.”

However, Nintendo President Shuntaro Furukawa stated the same month that 2.2 million people in Japan had entered the lottery to purchase the Switch 2 on launch day, exceeding expectations and what the company had initially planned to deliver to stores.

Serkan Toto, CEO of Tokyo-based games consultancy Kantan Games, previously told CNBC shortages in Japan were expected to persist.

President Donald Trump’s “reciprocal tariffs” on most countries around the world also present headwinds for the Switch 2. 

In April, the company announced that it would delay preorders of the Switch 2 in the U.S. while it considers the impact of tariffs.

The Switch 2 retails for $449 in the U.S., which makes it Nintendo’s priciest console to date.

Nintendo’s Bowser said in April the company was going to “monitor where tariffs are going” before making any further decisions on price hikes. 

The Switch 2 builds on the success of the original Switch, featuring a larger screen, improved performance, and a higher price tag. The system also introduces the new GameChat2 feature, which allows players to voice or video chat with friends online and share game screens.

— CNBC’s Arjun Kharpal contributed to this story.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk said on Tuesday that his company’s robotaxi service is “tentatively” set to launch in Austin, Texas, on June 22.

In a post on X, Musk indicated that he’s flying from Los Angeles to Austin for the kickoff, which he previously said would occur sometime in June. When a commenter asked when public rides will start, Musk said the current plan is for June 22, and that the first driverless trip from the Tesla factory to a customer’s house will take place on his birthday, June 28.

“We are being super paranoid about safety, so the date could shift,” Musk wrote.

Earlier on Tuesday, Musk shared a video on X showing that Tesla was testing driverless vehicles on the roads of Austin without a human safety supervisor behind the wheel. The eight-second clip showed the latest version of the Model Y SUV, painted black with a white “Robotaxi” graffiti-style logo painted on it, navigating an intersection and pausing to allow pedestrians to traverse a crosswalk.

Musk recently told CNBC’s David Faber that Tesla will start with a very small rollout, including about 10 to 20 of its robotaxis, with a new, “unsupervised” version of the company’s FSD or “Full Self-Driving” technology installed. The tests will involve the Model Y, not the futuristic looking CyberCab that Tesla plans to produce next year.

Musk said Tesla will “geofence” the service, limiting where the Model Y robotaxis can initially operate, and that employees will remotely monitor the fleet.

While running Tesla, Musk is also the CEO of defense contractor SpaceX and leads artificial intelligence company xAI, which has merged with his social network X (formerly Twitter.) He is also the richest person in the world, and spent nearly $300 million to propel President Donald Trump back to the White House.

Musk recently concluded a stint leading the Department of Government Efficiency, which made sweeping cuts to federal agencies, regulations and offices tasked with oversight of Tesla and his other companies.

While fans of Musk and Tesla have expressed enthusiasm for the company’s robotaxi service pilot in Austin, others with automotive safety concerns and who stand against Musk’s political ideology and activity are planning protests.

The Dawn Project, in partnership with anti-Musk activists including Tesla Takedown and Resist Austin, said in an e-mailed statement that they plan to host a demonstration on June 12 in downtown Austin to show off safety issues with Tesla’s electric vehicles and driver assistance features which are currently marketed as Autopilot and Full Self-Driving (Supervised).

Dan O’Dowd, who is CEO of both Green Hills Software and The Dawn Project, has described the latter as a tech-safety and security education business in prior interviews with CNBC. Green Hills Software makes products which are used by direct competitors of Tesla including Ford and Toyota.

Mark Zuckerberg is so frustrated with Meta’s standing in artificial intelligence that he’s willing to spend billions of dollars to convince Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang to join his company, people familiar with the matter told CNBC. 

Meta is finalizing a deal to invest $14 billion into Scale AI, according to a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be named because the terms are confidential. Bloomberg reported earlier this week that an investment could top $10 billion, and a story from The Information on Tuesday said Meta would pay close to $15 billion.

As a founder of one of the most prominent AI startups, Wang has built a reputation as an ambitious leader who both understands AI’s technical complexities and how to build a business that’s not merely focused on research, according to two former Meta AI employees who agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity. Zuckerberg will be counting on Wang to better execute Meta’s AI ambitions following the lukewarm launch of the company’s latest Llama AI models.

By not directly acquiring Scale AI, Meta appears to be taking a similar strategy as companies like Google and Microsoft, which have brought in prominent leaders in AI from the startups Character.AI and Inflection AI by taking large stakes in those companies rather than buying them outright. Meta is currently on trial against the Federal Trade Commission for antitrust claims, and the company doesn’t want to further upset regulators by acquiring Scale AI, multiple people familiar with the matter said.

As part of the deal, Meta will take a 49% stake in the data-labelling and annotation startup, The Information reported, while Wang will help lead a new AI research lab at the social networking company and will be joined by some of his colleagues. The New York Times was first to report about the new AI lab.

Scale AI, founded in 2016, has made a splash in the era of generative AI by helping major tech companies like OpenAI, Google and Microsoft prepare data they use to train cutting-edge AI models. Meta is one of Scale AI’s biggest customers, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The startup, valued in a funding round about a year ago at $14 billion, is number 28 on CNBC’s Disruptor 50 list. In mid-2024, the company signed one of the biggest recent commercial leases in San Francisco, gobbling up about 180,000 square feet of space in a downtown building that had been occupied by Airbnb.

Scale AI has increasingly made in-roads into the defense industry, and in March announced a multimillion dollar deal with the Department of Defense. In November, it collaborated with Meta on Defense Llama, a custom version of Meta’s open-source Llama foundation model designed specifically to “support American national security missions,” the company said in a blog post.

Meta and Scale AI declined to comment.

Heading into 2025, AI was one of Meta’s top priorities. But Zuckerberg has grown agitated that rivals like OpenAI appear to be ahead in both underlying AI models and consumer-facing apps, current and former Meta employees said.

Zuckerberg has been deprioritizing its Fundamental Artificial Intelligence Research unit, or FAIR, in favor of its more product-oriented GenAI team to help Meta make headway in AI and improve its Llama family of AI models, CNBC previously reported.

Meta’s release of its Llama 4 AI models in April was not well received by developers, further frustrating Zuckerberg, the people said. At the time, Meta only released two smaller versions of Llama 4 and said it would eventually release a bigger and more powerful “Behemoth” model. 

That model has yet to be made available due to Zuckerberg’s concerns about its capabilities relative to competing models, the people said. In particular, there is concern about how Behemoth stacks up against the latest from companies like OpenAI and China’s DeepSeek, whose models are preferred by the wider developer community.

Following Llama 4’s lackluster debut, Meta conducted a reorganization of its GenAI unit, splitting it into two. Connor Hayes, a longstanding Meta employee, was put in charge of AI Products, while AGI Foundations was given to Amir Frenkel, previously a vice president of engineering and product for Meta’s Reality Labs hardware unit, and Ahmad Al-Dahle, the previous head of GenAI. 

Al-Dahle’s new position as a co-leader was seen as a sign that Zuckerberg had lost confidence in him, the people said.

Zuckerberg admires Wang and considers him capable of a major role at Meta as an AI leader, the people said. A dropout from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Wang has built a sizable business and is familiar with AI’s technical intricacies. The people described Wang as a “wartime CEO” who is in line with Zuckerberg’s position that the U.S. faces increasing competition from China, thus requiring help from the tech industry.

Wang told CNBC in January that he believes there is an “AI war” between the U.S. and China, and that the U.S. will need more computing power in order to compete.

“The United States is going to need a huge amount of computational capacity, a huge amount of infrastructure,” Wang said at the time. “We need to unleash U.S. energy to enable this AI boom.”

It’s an unusual move for Zuckerberg, who has traditionally put loyalists in high-ranking positions. But it shows the magnitude of the moment and Zuckerberg’s belief that a prominent outsider like Wang may be better positioned than any current Meta employee to bolster the company’s position in AI, the people said.

Wang also brings a lot of outside knowledge of how competitors like OpenAI are building their consumer chatbots and AI models. Data labelling and training has become more complicated in recent years as the capabilities of AI models has increased, said Vahan Petrosyan, the CEO of SuperAnnotate, one of Scale AI’s competitors.

“I would say Scale have covered probably 70% of all the models that are built,” Petrosyan said. With Wang and others from Scale AI, Meta could gain “collective intelligence on how to build a better ChatGPT.”

“When Meta is buying them, they’re buying their intelligence,” Petrosyan said. 

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