Passengers ride in an electric Waymo full self-driving technology in Santa Monica
Allen J. Schaben | Los Angeles Times | Getty Images
Waymo, Alphabet‘s self-driving car unit, is having a relatively good couple of months – at least, compared to one of its key rivals: GM‘s Cruise.
Formerly known as the Google self-driving car project and now an independent subsidiary of Google parent-company Alphabet, Waymo has been operating in some capacity since 2009. Five years ago, the company launched what it billed as the “world’s first commercial autonomous ride-hailing service” in the metro Phoenix area, then last year expanded to San Francisco. The company soon plans to launch commercially in Austin, its fourth city, and also recently began test-driving vehicles in the winter weather of Buffalo, New York.
For much of this time, Cruise has seemed to be competing neck-and-neck: When Waymo raised funding at a $30 billion valuation in 2020, Cruise followed in 2021 with the same valuation. When Cruise began offering fully autonomous rides in San Francisco in the winter of 2022, Waymo followed in the fall. In August, California regulators voted to approve round-the-clock robotaxi service in San Francisco from both companies, making it the first major U.S. city to allow two robotaxi companies to compete for service “at all hours of day or night.”
Amid the news, Waymo’s chief product officer, Saswat Panigrahi, told CNBC that the self-driving car unit hasn’t seen a change in tone from regulators or a shift in the company’s public perception.
Obviously, Waymo seems to be performing better than some competitors. What, exactly, do you think you’ve been doing differently?
There are no shortcuts. I mean, this is not a question you’re asking an app or a web page, which is giving you an answer. This is a multi-thousand pound vehicle that’s moving through the physical world – yes, it’s an application of AI but a very different kind of application of AI. And there’s something to be said about time and experience and just rigor that no matter how hard you work, it takes time to do this.
So I would say that the amount of data you’ve tested yourself against – you could always test more, but the staggering scale of testing that has been brought to bear – I sometimes say that building the Waymo Driver is a hard thing, but it’s almost as hard to evaluate the Driver. The amount of simulation we have had to do… has taken a decade. It took Google’s level of infrastructure because even to simulate at that scale, as you and I are speaking right now, 25,000 vehicles in our simulator are learning to drive better. To bring that, you need incredible infrastructure capability because even if you had the AI capability, without the infrastructure, it’d be very hard to bring that skill to bear – a decade of investment into AI before AI was cool.
Compute infrastructure, to power those simulations?
Yeah, some of it is just raw scale of compute, how many computers can you bring to bear, that kind of thing. But some of it is also – think of the old-school video game versus how realistic video games have become now, that’s a metaphor for how things are. Let’s say we saw a person in Phoenix speeding at 60 miles an hour on a 45 mile-per-hour [street], and then imagine that we saw a very tight intersection in SF – can you realistically mix these two to challenge your driver to a harsher situation that may occur many millions of miles later in the real world?
[On top of that], being able to add rain, for example – all right, you’re safe enough when you’re driving through good weather, through this tight intersection with a speeding agent. Can you do that as well in rain? Can you do that at night? You can’t wait for the rain in real life to occur exactly when you want to push your system in that way, but being able to simulate rain requires that infrastructure but also enough algorithms and realism on top to be able to push this.
Can you get specific about how much compute that requires?
I have worked with pretty high-scale systems before Waymo, at Google and Ericsson, and this is a pretty staggering scale. But the only number I can tell you is 25,000-plus virtual vehicles driving continuously, 24/7, learning from each other, and [tens of] billions of miles in simulations. Think of how much you or I drive in a year – we drive, what, 10,000 miles in any given year…? Now think of billions of miles of experience – close to seven orders of magnitude difference.
Let’s talk about the shift in ridership over the past month. Have you seen an increase? Decrease?
Things are growing – to give you an idea, this year we have more than 10x’d [trips with public riders]… The ridership is increasing in both Phoenix and SF. We are well ahead of 10,000 trips [in each city] every single week… So it’s going well. We’re taking the time to respond to feedback and thoughtfully expand.
[Note: Waymo recently shared that Waymo riders took more than 700,000 trips in autonomous vehicles in 2023.]
Amid all the controversies, in recent months, what’s been the impact on public perception of your programs?
For riders, it’s just been an incredibly positive response. We look at their ratings, we look at their usage patterns, we look at what they qualitatively tell us, we speak to them in focus groups and all of them have been overwhelmingly positive…
On people we share the city with – communities, groups, like first responders, firefighters and so on – we’re continuously engaged with them. We’re listening to their feedback. We have trained more than 5,000 first responders in SF alone, multiple training sessions, and based on that have [brought] new features. For example, now we can signal intensities to firefighters that, “Hey, we’re about to make a U-turn and get out of this scene.”
Over the same period, have regulators’ demands of the Waymo team changed at all?
With regulators, we have a very open dialogue and submitted more data than they ever asked for… So it has been a very positive engagement with them, but no change in tone.
We were the first company that openly released our safety framework, the mechanism by which we test the performance of our system and how we determine when we’re ready to deploy, three years ago. We were also the first to release all of our collision data from the fully autonomous service… Those were all before any regulator asked us for something. And then yes, we do submit ongoing reports to them as well.
As far as your AI processes and how exactly things work – are you running deep learning on neural networks? Feeding in training data from simulations? Give me a rundown.
There’s a ton of AI that’s helping us detect a pedestrian, a child, a cyclist, a pedestrian on a scooter, a pedestrian on a scooter that’s motorized which is why it’s going much faster, an older person with a stroller they’re pushing. Being able to predict which direction the car that’s making an unusual curvature is going to jump in… being able to predict where different objects are going to be in the next few seconds.
All that is an insane amount of AI with a lot of specialization on the difference between how kids behave, versus how adults behave, versus how people on bicycles behave… Everything you can think of from deep learning, reinforcement learning, all of these areas, we are utilizing it in multiple parts of the system.
Most autonomous vehicles have remote operations teams. How does Waymo’s work?
I want to clarify that the driving is done by the Waymo Driver on the car – there is no remote person driving the car. You can think of it like air traffic control, in a way. Air traffic control doesn’t fly the plane, but the pilot may ask a question to air traffic control, “Hey, I’m observing a very anomalous situation here, what is the intent?” And there are very basic binary questions that can be asked that a person can respond to provide clarification when that’s not immediately clear from the scene.
For example, you could have a set of cones blocking a street, but there could be a large enough gap where you could go in, so it’s a bit ambiguous on whether or not you should go in or stop – that kind of a question can be asked and there’s an answer… And it’s designed to do the right thing even when support isn’t available.
What’s been Waymo’s biggest internal obstacle over the past year?
One thing I’ll say is definitely what has been interesting this year is bringing the cost down.
During past expansions, my impression has been that Waymo was looking for “Goldilocks cities,” and what I mean by that is cities that didn’t make it too difficult to roll out a driverless car service but were also challenging to some extent, such as a growing population or interesting road maneuvers but no snow or ice. When you’re on the lookout for your next city, what are you looking for – and what those cities might be beyond Phoenix?
You touched upon a key thing there. Phoenix has been amazing for us… If it’s really tight, you don’t need to see that far ahead, but when you are going at 45 and sometimes people are driving 50 to 60 miles per hour, you do need to see a lot further, anticipate objects, make unpredicted turns and so on. And what we found is when we went from Phoenix to San Francisco – the ultra high density of pedestrian narrow streets, double-parked cars, and so on – one thing we’re realizing is that every other good weather city in the United States, at least, and some internationally as well, is just a linear combination of the two. So if you take LA, for example, West Hollywood is a bit like the dense parts of San Francisco, but its paths to the suburbs are very much like Phoenix.
On the axis of weather, we’re now doing rain and fog… and then the next, eventually, will be snow… What we’re trying to make sure of is that we don’t go to a city just to rubber-stamp it, just to be able to say that we’re autonomous there.
Travis Hutchison, a soybean farmer, unloads his cargo from his family’s truck at a local grain dealer in Queen Anne, Maryland, on Oct. 10, 2025.
Roberto Schmidt | AFP | Getty Images
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Here are five key things investors need to know to start the trading day:
1. Transpacific turmoil
The volatile U.S.-China relationship hit another bump yesterday when President Donald Trump said he is considering placing a cooking oil embargo on Beijing in retaliation for it’s refusal to buy U.S. soybeans. The ongoing feud has led to choppy stock market trading over recent days.
Here’s the latest:
In a Truth Social post published shortly before yesterday’s closing bell, Trump wrote that China’s refusal to buy American soybeans is “an Economically Hostile Act.” Trump threatened blocking all business with China “having to do with Cooking Oil.”
China was the top buyer of the U.S. crop last year but has not purchased any soybeans since May, as the countries have sparred over trade policy.
The White House has criticized China in recent days and threatened a new 100% tariff, following China’s tightening of export restrictions for rare earth materials.
U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer told CNBC yesterday that China’s future actions will determine if the higher levies are actually implemented. Meanwhile, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said China’s latest moves are an attempt “to pull everybody else down with them.”
Stocks have whipsawed in recent sessions as investors monitored the latest developments. The S&P 500 ended yesterday’s session in the red after Trump’s post stymied the index’s attempted comeback.
A customer uses an ATM at a Bank of America branch in Boston, Massachusetts.
Brian Snyder | Reuters
3. Day 15
Travelers wait to go through security at O’Hare International Airport (ORD) in Chicago, Illinois, US, on Friday Oct. 10, 2025.
Christopher Dilts | Bloomberg | Getty Images
While Trump has repeatedly said that his administration’s mass layoffs are targeting “Democrat Agencies” amid the shutdown, the cuts also appear to be affecting bipartisan efforts. At the Treasury Department — where nearly 1,450 federal employees have received reduction-in-force notices — the entire 83-person staff of the bipartisan-supported Community Development Financial Institutions Fund was cut.
As the shutdown enters its third week, air traffic controllers have handed out leaflets at some airports urging the public to pressure Congress to reopen the government. Some airports meanwhile are refusing to play a video from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem blaming Democrats for the shutdown.
4. Taking off
The Boeing Company at Paris Air Show 2025 in Le Bourget airport.
Nicolas Economou | Nurphoto | Getty Images
With September’s figures now in the books, Boeing is on track for its highest annual plane delivery count since 2018. The company said yesterday that it delivered 55 aircraft last month, bringing its total to 440 airplanes in the first nine months of 2025.
As CNBC’s Leslie Josephs notes, Boeing has been able to stabilize its production following several safety and production crises. Executives are aiming to increase production of Boeing’s pricey 737 Max planes.
Boeing on Tuesday also received approval from European Union antitrust regulators for its $4.7 billion acquisition of Spirit AeroSystems. The plane maker agreed to sell some of Spirit’s businesses to remedy competition concerns.
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5. Cash grab
Cheng Xin | Getty Images
The Justice Department seized around $15 billion worth of bitcoin from the cryptocurrency wallets of Chen Zhi, who prosecutors allege ran a large-scale “pig butchering” fraud operation in Cambodia. Zhi, who remains at large, is charged with wire fraud conspiracy and money laundering conspiracy.
It is the largest-ever forfeiture action sought by the DOJ.
The Daily Dividend
Survey results from JPMorgan highlight just how differently Americans in different income brackets view the economy.
— CNBC’s Leslie Josephs, Dan Mangan, Lillian Rizzo, Kevin Breuninger, Spencer Kimball, Jeff Cox and Liz Napolitano contributed to this report. Josephine Rozzelle edited this edition.
Walmart is deploying millions of ambient Internet of Things battery-free sensors throughout its massive supply chain in the U.S.
The retail giant is using technology from Wiliot in what the IoT vendor is calling the first large-scale deployment of ambient IoT in the retail sector and one of the largest such implementations to date.
Ambient IoT is a class of IoT devices mainly powered by harvesting ambient energy from radio waves, light, motion, heat, or other viable ambient energy sources. It’s an evolution of legacy IoT and radio frequency identification technologies that promise lower costs and high scalability.
Walmart will be using the IoT sensors to track pallets nationwide by the end of 2026. “Expansion to other global markets is under consideration, but the immediate focus is the U.S. rollout,” Cathey said.
The company will now have real-time insights into inventory management, knowing exactly where merchandise is located and whether it’s owned by the retailer, at any moment, and covering an estimated 90 million pallets of inventory when at full scale.
The ambient IoT sensors Walmart uses capture signals about temperature, location, humidity, and dwell time. These signals are linked with the company’s advanced artificial intelligence systems, enabling the company to dramatically improve supply chain efficiency, inventory accuracy, and cold chain compliance.
“We expect to be active in about 500 Walmart locations by the end of the year, with plans for national expansion in 2026,” said Greg Cathey, senior vice president of transformation and innovation at Walmart. The rollout will cover 4,600 Walmart Supercenters, Neighborhood Markets, and more than 40 distribution centers, generating high-resolution supply chain data that feeds into Walmart’s AI systems, he said.
“This data provides proof of delivery, improves replenishment decisions, and lets us know where our items are in real time,” Cathey said. “By combining continuous sensing with AI, we’re moving from probabilistic predictions to precision decision-making.”
Greater visibility into supply chain
What makes the addition of ambient IoT sensors significant is it provides a new stream of data into AI systems, enabling them to be even more effective in giving Walmart greater visibility into supply chain operations.
The technology initiative is already making a significant impact by eliminating some manual tasks and providing automated alerts, Cathey said. “Associates no longer need to perform time-consuming checks to locate items,” he said. “Automated alerts now flag this information in real time, allowing associates to act faster and dedicate more time to serving customers.”
The enhanced visibility into the supply chain is also helping to resolve inventory discrepancies, allowing improved customer experiences.
While Cathey did not disclose specific figures such as cost savings, Walmart is anticipating gains from higher supply chain efficiency, improved inventory accuracy, reduced manual tasks for associates, and the ability to get items on shelves more quickly. “Customers [will] benefit from better product availability and consistency,” he said.
“AI system performance is predicated on its training data. The better the data, the better the AI performance,” said Julien Bellanger, president of Wiliot. “Supply chain AI has long been fueled by inherently out-of-date data — or forecasted data that represents projections rather than reality.”
Ambient IoT is changing this model, Bellanger said, by fueling AI with data that reflects what’s actually happening throughout the supply chain.
“We have been here before; Walmart was an early adopter of RFID back in 2004 when it was supposed to provide much the same functionality,” said Bill Ray, distinguished vice president, analyst and chief of research at research firm Gartner. “However, this time the cost of the tags is much lower, and that will be a tipping point.”
Ray says it’s important to note that the value of such IoT systems is already known. “The business models have been well studied and evaluated, when RFID was first touted as the solution to supply chain problems,” he said. “RFID has had an enormous impact, but the cost of the tags prevented the transformation it had promised. The industry has been able to integrate the new, lower-cost tags into the same value models, and come up with positive answers.”
Gartner has been tracking Wiliot for a long time. “The question was never if the technology could deliver on its promise. The question was if Wiliot could reliably scale production without compromising tag performance or price, and if it could integrate with existing supply chain systems. This announcement tells us that Walmart is convinced it can, now Wiliot will have to prove it,” Ray said.
“Ambient IoT just works,” Cathey said. “It doesn’t require wanding or scanning. It lets our associates do what they do, and they can focus on doing their jobs safely and efficiently while providing continuous, real-time visibility into our supply chain.”
Ambient IoT got a boost earlier this year when a new business alliance was created to develop and promote an open, multi-standard ecosystem for ambient IoT manufacturers, suppliers, integrators, operators, users, and customers, based on next-generation, battery-free ambient IoT standards.
By focusing on advanced communication technologies, the alliance is seeking to overcome the limitations of traditional battery-powered IoT devices, promoting more sustainable and efficient products.
An Aligned data center in Northlake, Illinois, US, on Thursday, Oct. 9, 2025.
Christopher Dilts | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Nvidia, Microsoft, BlackRock and Elon Musk’s xAI are part of a consortium of investors that has agreed to purchase Aligned Data Centers for $40 billion, the companies announced Wednesday.
Aligned designs and operates data centers and data campuses across North and South America, and is owned by Macquarie Asset Management.
MGX of Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, BlackRock’s Global Infrastructure Partners and members of Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure Partnership, or AIP, will acquire 100% of the company’s equity, in what will be the largest global data center deal to date, according to a release.
AIP was created by BlackRock, MGX, Microsoft and Nvidia in September 2024 to accelerate investment in AI infrastructure. The Kuwait Investment Authority, xAI and Temasek have joined as additional participants.
The Aligned deal marks AIP’s first investment and is a step toward the group’s goal of deploying $30 billion of equity capital.
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“With this investment in Aligned Data Centers, we further our goal of delivering the infrastructure necessary to power the future of AI, while offering our clients attractive opportunities to participate in its growth,” Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock and Chairman of AIP, said in a statement.
AI companies have been racing to build out the infrastructure they believe they will need to meet growing demand for the technology.
Companies including OpenAI, Nvidia, CoreWeave and Oracle are striking ambitious data center and computing deals that will require unprecedented amounts of funding and power.
Data centers are the large facilities that house the hardware and equipment needed to run big AI workloads and train models. Aligned currently operates 50 campuses and has more than 5 gigawatts of operational and planned capacity.
The Aligned transaction is expected to close late next year, and it is still subject to regulatory approvals and other standard closing conditions.