Chinese tech giant Baidu has announced plans to bring robotaxis to London starting next year through its partnerships with Lyft and Uber, as the UK emerges as a growing autonomous vehicle battleground.

The announced collaborations will bring Baidu’s Apollo Go autonomous vehicles to the British capital through the Uber and Lyft platforms, the companies said on their respective social media accounts. 

Lyft’s testing of Baidu’s initial fleet of dozens of vehicles will begin in 2026, pending regulatory approval, “with plans to scale to hundreds from there,” Lyft CEO David Risher said in a post on social media platform X on Monday.

Meanwhile, Uber said that its first pilot is expected to start in the first half of 2026. “We’re excited to accelerate Britain’s leadership in the future of mobility, bringing another safe and reliable travel option to Londoners next year,” the company added.

The moves add to Baidu’s growing global footprint, which it says includes 22 cities and more than 250,000 weekly trips, as it races against other Chinese players like WeRide and Western giants like Alphabet‘s Waymo. 

The UK, in particular, has seen a wave of interest from driverless taxi companies, following the government’s announcement in June that it would accelerate its plans to allow autonomous vehicle tech on public roads. 

The government now aims to begin permitting robotaxis to operate in small-scale pilots starting in spring 2026, with Baidu likely aiming to be amongst the first. 

The city of London has also established a “Vision Zero” goal to eliminate all serious injuries and deaths in its transportation systems by 2041, with autonomous driving technology expected to play a large role. 

News of Baidu pilots comes as its competitor Waymo also looks to begin testing in London, with plans for a full service launch in 2026. Waymo currently operates or plans to launch a service or test its fleet in 26 markets, including major cities like Tokyo and New York City.

Baidu, for its part, has been aggressively expanding globally, with testing rolling out in international markets like the United Arab Emirates and Switzerland. 

Alphabet-owned Waymo has resumed its driverless ride-hail service in the San Francisco Bay Area after a temporary pause during blackouts that plagued the city beginning on Saturday afternoon.

“Yesterday’s power outage was a widespread event that caused gridlock across San Francisco, with non-functioning traffic signals and transit disruptions,” a Waymo spokesperson, Suzanne Philion, told CNBC in an e-mailed statement Sunday afternoon.

“While the failure of the utility infrastructure was significant, we are committed to ensuring our technology adjusts to traffic flow during such events,” she added.

As power outages spread yesterday, videos shared on social media appeared to show multiple Waymo vehicles stalled in traffic in different parts of the city.

San Francisco resident Matt Schoolfield said he saw at least three Waymo autonomous vehicles stopped in traffic Saturday around 9:45 p.m. local time, including one he photographed on Turk Boulevard near Parker Avenue.

“They were just stopping in the middle of the street,” Schoolfield said.

The power outages began around 1:09 p.m. Saturday and peaked roughly two hours later, affecting about 130,000 customers, according to Pacific Gas and Electric. As of Sunday morning, about 21,000 customers remained without power, mainly in the Presidio, the Richmond District, Golden Gate Park and parts of downtown San Francisco.

PG&E said the outage was caused by a fire at a substation that resulted in “significant and extensive” damage, and said it could not yet provide a precise timeline for full restoration.

San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie said in a 9 p.m. update on X that police officers, fire crews, parking control officers and city ambassadors were deployed across affected neighborhoods.

Waymo’s Philion also told CNBC that “While the Waymo Driver is designed to treat non-functional signals as four-way stops, the sheer scale of the outage led to instances where vehicles remained stationary longer than usual to confirm the state of the affected intersections. This contributed to traffic friction during the height of the congestion.”

Waymo “closely coordinated with San Francisco city officials,” she said, and proactively paused its service as of Saturday evening and in the first half of the day on Sunday.

“The majority of active trips were successfully completed before vehicles were safely returned to depots or pulled over,” she noted.

Amid the disruption, Tesla CEO Elon Musk posted on X: “Tesla Robotaxis were unaffected by the SF power outage.”

Unlike Waymo, Tesla does not operate a driverless robotaxi service in San Francisco.

Tesla’s local ride-hailing service uses vehicles equipped with “FSD (Supervised),” a premium driver assistance system. The service requires a human driver behind the wheel at all times.

According to state regulators — including the California Department of Motor Vehicles and California Public Utilities Commission — Tesla has not obtained permits to conduct driverless testing or services in the state without human safety supervisors behind the wheel, ready to steer or brake at any time.

Tesla is vying to become a robotaxi titan, but does not yet operate commercial, driverless services. Tesla’s Robotaxi app allows users to hail a ride; however, its vehicles currently have human safety supervisors or drivers on board, even in states where the company has obtained permits for driverless operations.

Waymo, which leads the nascent industry in the West, is Tesla’s chief competitor in AVs, along with Chinese players like Baidu-owned Apollo Go.

The outage-related disruptions in San Francisco come as robotaxi services are becoming more common in other major U.S. cities. Waymo is among a small number of companies operating fully driverless ride-hailing services for the public, even as unease about autonomous vehicles remains high.

A survey by the American Automobile Association earlier this year found that about two-thirds of U.S. drivers said they were fearful of autonomous vehicles.

The Waymo pause in San Francisco indicates cities are not yet ready for highly automated vehicles to inundate their streets, said Bryan Reimer, a research scientist at the MIT Center for Transportation and co-author of “How to Make AI Useful.”

“Something in the design and development of this technology was missed that clearly illustrates it was not the robust solution many would like to believe it is,” he said.

Reimer noted that power outages are entirely predictable. “Not for eternity, but in the foreseeable future, we will need to mix human and machine intelligence, and have human backup systems in place around highly automated systems, including robotaxis,” he said.

State and city regulators will need to consider what the maximum penetration of highly automated vehicles should be in their region, Reimer added, and AV developers should be held responsible for “chaos gridlock,” just as human drivers would be held responsible for how they drive during a blackout.

— CNBC’s Riya Bhattacharjee contributed reporting.

Microsoft’s Xbox has had a tumultuous year.

A slew of layoffs, price hikes and studio closures have led many to declare — not for the first time — that the Xbox is dead.

Laura Fryer, former executive producer at Microsoft Game Studios, said in June that the company seems to have “no desire or literally can’t ship hardware anymore.”

Former Microsoft executive and ex-Blizzard Entertainment president Mike Ybarra slammed Xbox’s “confusing” strategy in a now-deleted X post in October, saying the company is potentially heading for a “death by a thousand needles.”

The company’s overall gaming revenue decreased 2% year-over-year, with a 29% dip in Xbox hardware sales, according to Microsoft’s first-quarter earnings for fiscal 2026.

The broader console industry has been in a major slump, with hardware spending down 27% year-over-year in November, which is typically a busy shopping month, according to a recent report from research firm Circana.

It was the worst November in two decades, IGN reported, citing Circana data.

Combined Switch and Switch 2 unit sales were down more than 10% during the month and PS5 sales were down more than 40%, IGN said. But the Xbox Series hardware took the biggest beating, with a dramatic 70% drop in sales.

In console sales, Xbox can barely see the leaders this year.

Nintendo‘s Switch 2 has sold 10.36 million units since its debut in June, the company said in its latest earnings report. Sony‘s PlayStation 5 had 9.2 million units sold in 2025, according to its most recent financial results.

Microsoft’s Xbox Series S and Series X, at 1.7 million units, couldn’t outsell the original Nintendo Switch, which launched in 2017 and has sold 3.4 million units so far this year, data from game sales tracking site VGChartz estimated.

Microsoft declined to comment on Xbox sales or numbers.

The company stopped reporting console unit shipments in 2015 as the gap between Xbox and PlayStation widened.

The Series S, Series X and PS5 all originally released in 2020, with some updates being released since then.

In November, Valve made a splash with its next-generation Steam Machine, which is set to launch next year.

The reveal of its console-PC hybrid generated buzz across the gaming landscape, with The Verge declaring that “Valve just built the Xbox that Microsoft is dreaming of.”

The mini cube will be able to run Windows PC games through Valve’s own Linux-based SteamOS as a television console or as a gaming computer. Gamers will have access to Steam’s extensive library of thousands of games.

But Microsoft doesn’t seem too worried about falling behind.

“We’re not in the business of out-consoling Sony or out-consoling Nintendo. There isn’t really a great solution or win for us,” Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer said in a 2023 podcast.

In congratulating Valve on the release, the Xbox boss gave a nod to the movement to expand gaming access “across PC, console and handheld devices.”

As Sony and Nintendo have firmly established themselves as hardware companies, Microsoft is pushing toward Bill Gates’ original vision of an all-encompassing entertainment hub in the living room.

“Ultimately, the addressable market is anybody who wants to play games, and Microsoft wants to serve that market,” Wedbush analyst Michael Pachter told CNBC.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in a recent interview with the TBPN podcast that the company’s gaming business model will look to be “everywhere in every platform,” from consoles to TV to mobile.

His comments also hinted that the next Xbox may function more like a PC.

“It’s kind of funny people think about the console and PC as two different things,” Nadella said. “We built a console because we wanted to build a better PC, which could then perform for gaming. So I kind of want to revisit some of that conventional wisdom.”

Xbox President Sarah Bond echoed the idea, saying in a recent interview with Mashable that the company’s next-generation console will have “some of the thinking” seen in the Xbox’s new handhelds, which were built by hardware manufacturer Asus in partnership with Microsoft.

Launched in October, those devices support cross-platform gaming and can run PC games bought from Epic Games, CD Projekt and Valve stores.

Xbox has already incorporated that approach into the latest Backbone Pro, which rolled out in November. 

Designed in partnership with Backbone Labs, the portable gaming controller offers access to cloud gaming on mobile, PC, smart TV and other streaming devices.

So what will Microsoft’s new-gen console look like?

Little is known about where the company is at in its development. 

A source familiar with Xbox strategy told CNBC that the company is looking at creating an open system that enables players to jump between console, PC and cloud gaming — and any form of entertainment beyond gaming.

In a 2019 interview with The Verge, Spencer said that he was not concerned with focusing on console sales as much as making games accessible.

“I do think as we look at the next decade of gaming, as we think about reaching the over 2 billion people on the planet who play games, many of those people won’t be buying consoles and gaming PCs,” Spencer said.

Xbox Game Pass subscription service, which gives subscribers access to games from a variety of publishers, is a clear example of this strategy.

Microsoft has been steadily expanding its title offerings on the service.

The platform’s most basic tier, Game Pass Essential (previously Game Pass Core), which costs $9.99 and launched in 2023 with 36 games, now offers over 50 titles.

Ultimate tier members have access to over 500 titles.

The growth in cloud gaming has been blistering.

Xbox reported a record 34 million Game Pass subscribers in 2024 and a total Game Pass revenue of almost $5 billion over the last fiscal year. 

Xbox said in a November blog post that the number of cloud gaming hours from Game Pass subscribers was up 45% compared to the same time last year. The Microsoft subsidiary also said console players are “spending 45% more time cloud streaming on console and 24% more on other devices.”

In announcing the benchmark, the platform added that Xbox Cloud Gaming is now in 30 countries with the expansion into India, which it called “the fastest-growing gaming market in the world,” home to more than 500 million gamers this year.

Although Microsoft faced heavy criticism from subscribers after increasing the cost of its Ultimate tier by 50% from $19.99 to $29.99 in October, the company is reportedly testing an ad-supported version of Xbox Cloud Gaming.

Omdia senior principal analyst George Jijiashvili told CNBC that a free Game Pass tier would likely act as a user-acquisition tool, especially for gamers who have not invested in consoles yet.

However, due to the high costs associated with cloud gaming, an ad-supported tier would likely not be able to actually drive a meaningful amount of revenue, he said.

Cloud gaming is inherently difficult to scale since it needs to balance computing power and operating costs with user affordability.

“With console-grade cloud gaming, you need to essentially run every single instance of the game in a server,” Jijiashvili said. “You need a dedicated hardware for every single person that’s streaming the game, meaning it just doesn’t scale.”

Despite gaming’s scaling limitations, Microsoft seems committed to doing what it has done with the rest of its products — moving it to the cloud. 

“They’ve evolved into a primarily cloud services company,” Pachter said. “So everything they’ve done since they started acquiring studios at Xbox has been toward the connected experience in the home to view entertainment.”

Bond recently said in an interview with Mashable that the idea of exclusive games is “antiquated” as the company has leaned into cross-platform gaming.

Microsoft announced in October that the upcoming “Halo” game will be available on Sony’s PlayStation 5, marking the first time the major franchise has become accessible on a competing console.

In 2024, Xbox opened four formerly exclusive games to other consoles.

Spencer said at the time that the move did not indicate a change in Xbox’s exclusive strategy, but the company has since continued to bring several former exclusives to rival platforms.

In a January interview, Spencer said that the company won’t “put walls up” where users can engage with Xbox games.

“What we’ve learned is put the games first, make sure the games can be as great as they can,” he said. “We love the experience on our own hardware, on our own platform, but our games will show up in more and more places.”

Microsoft laid off 1,900 workers, around 9% of its gaming division, in January and slashed another 650 jobs from Xbox in September.

In May, the company also shut down several studios under game publisher Bethesda, including “Redfall” maker Arkane Austin and “Mighty Doom” developer Alpha Dog Games.

The gaming unit was hit again when company-wide layoffs in July led to Microsoft shelving “Perfect Dark” and “Everwild,” games that have reportedly been in development for at least seven years, as well as multiple unannounced projects.

Some have attributed the cost-cutting measures to mounting pressure to hit lofty profit goals.

The company reportedly asked its gaming division in 2023 to target profit margins of 30%, according to Bloomberg, which cited people familiar with the matter.

The goal was a significant jump from the 12% profit margin Xbox reached in 2022, as revealed in court documents, and well above the average video-game industry standard of 17% to 22%, analysts told Bloomberg.

Microsoft told CNBC that while the company does set ambitious goals, the reported 30% profit margin target was incorrect.

Microsoft has raised prices on its aging lineup of flagship consoles twice over the past year. Nintendo and Sony also announced price hikes for their respective consoles in August. 

The PS5 currently starts at $549.99, and the original Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2 cost $399.99 and $499.99, respectively.

Xbox’s new ROG Xbox Ally and ROG Xbox Ally X were priced at $599.99 and a staggering $999.99, respectively.

With a growing number of consoles and handhelds in the market, competition is fierce for a dedicated group of customers that will always be interested in owning hardware.

But Xbox is betting that cloud and cross-platform gaming are the future.

For a decade, claims have been made about the death of the Xbox, and what comes next could fully spell the end, or bring a metamorphosis.