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After spending more than $10 billion on its robotaxi unit, General Motors is abandoning its Cruise driverless ride-hailing service.

The Detroit automaker on Tuesday said it will no longer fund its Cruise division’s robotaxi development and will instead fold the unit into its broader tech team. GM shares rose 2.3% in extended trading.

“Cruise was well on its way to a robotaxi business — but when you look at the fact you’re deploying a fleet, there’s a whole operations piece of doing that,” GM CEO Mary Barra said on a call Tuesday. Barra said GM would instead focus on the development of autonomous systems for use in personal vehicles.

GM cited the increasingly competitive robotaxi market, capital allocation priorities and the considerable time and resources necessary to grow the business as reasons for its decision.

The company will combine the majority-owned Cruise LLC with GM technical teams. Barra, who also serves as board chair of Cruise, said the companies have yet to determine how many employees will move to GM. Cruise has nearly 2,300 employees, a GM spokesperson told CNBC.

GM acquired Cruise in 2016. The automaker currently owns about 90% of Cruise and has agreements with other shareholders that will raise its ownership to more than 97%, GM said in a statement. GM anticipates it will complete the acquisition of remaining Cruise shares from outside shareholders by early 2025, CFO Paul Jacobson said Tuesday.

GM’s current annual expenditure on Cruise amounted to about $2 billion, and the restructuring would cut that by more than half, Jacobson said.

Honda, an outside investor in Cruise, told CNBC that it had planned to launch a driverless ride-hail service in Japan in early 2026, but will now re-assess those plans and make adjustments if needed.

“Honda remains committed to various research and development initiatives aimed at providing new mobility solutions to our customers in Japan,” a Honda spokesperson said on Tuesday. Honda said its total investment in Cruise was $852 million.

Cruise founder Kyle Vogt, who left the company in November 2023, posted on X after the announcement, “In case it was unclear before, it is clear now: GM are a bunch of dummies.”

An early entrant in the U.S. robotaxi market, Cruise grounded its driverless operations in October 2023, shortly before Vogt’s departure. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration fined Cruise $1.5 million after the company failed to disclose details of a serious crash that month involving a pedestrian.

A third-party probe into the incident ordered by GM and Cruise found that culture issues, ineptitude and poor leadership fueled regulatory oversights that led to the accident. The probe also investigated allegations of a cover-up by Cruise leadership but found no evidence to support those claims.

In July of this year, GM announced that it would indefinitely delay production of the Origin autonomous vehicle as its Cruise self-driving unit attempted to relaunch operations. At that point, Cruise began to focus on using the next-generation Chevrolet Bolt for development of its autonomous vehicles.

As Cruise’s operations were on hold, its robotaxi rivals gained ground.

Alphabet-owned Waymo has begun to operate commercial robotaxi services across several major U.S. metro areas, with the company last week announcing its plans to expand into Miami. Chinese autonomous vehicle makers including Pony.ai and WeRide have rolled out in overseas markets as well.

Tesla, meanwhile, showed off design concepts for a self-driving Cybercab at an event in October. Tesla still classifies the Autopilot and Full Self-Driving software in its vehicles as “partially automated driving systems,” which require a human to be ready to steer or brake at all times. In an October earnings call, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the company will launch a self-driving ride-hailing service in California and Texas as early as 2025.

SoftBank-funded Wayve is testing its autonomous vehicles in San Francisco, and Amazon-owned Zoox is also testing its autonomous vehicles, which do not feature steering wheels, in several U.S. cities including San Francisco.

SoftBank’s Vision Fund was also an investor in Cruise, with a nearly 20% stake, until GM repurchased the shares for $2.1 billion in 2022.

WATCH: Uber and Lyft drop on news Waymo is expanding to Miami

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OpenAI says ChatGPT suffers outage, company working on fix

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OpenAI says ChatGPT suffers outage, company working on fix

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman visits “Making Money With Charles Payne” at Fox Business Network Studios in New York on Dec. 4, 2024.

Mike Coppola | Getty Images

OpenAI said Wednesday it was working to fix an outage after its popular ChatGPT assistant and Sora video generator were left inaccessible.

“We have identified the issue and are working to roll out a fix,” OpenAI said in a post on X.

Earlier this month, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the company’s technology was reaching 300 million active users each week. Earlier on Wednesday, Apple released new versions of its software for the iPhone, iPad and Mac that bring integrations with ChatGPT.

ChatGPT has been down for over three hours. An outage in June lasted for over five hours.

OpenAI was valued at $157 billion in a funding round in October that included participation from existing backer Microsoft as well as chipmaker Nvidia. The company’s rapid ascent began with the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022 and has been the biggest story in the tech industry over the last couple years.

On Monday OpenAI said it was releasing Sora to people in the U.S. and most other countries, but on Tuesday, Altman wrote on X that “we significantly underestimated demand for sora; it is going to take awhile to get everyone access.”

WATCH: iPhone’s ChatGPT upgrade: Here’s what to know

iPhone's ChatGPT upgrade: Here's what to know

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ServiceTitan prices IPO at $71, above expected range, after slow stretch for tech offerings

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ServiceTitan prices IPO at , above expected range, after slow stretch for tech offerings

Vahe Kuzoyan, left, and Ara Mahdessian, the founders of ServiceTitan.

ServiceTitan

ServiceTitan, a provider of cloud software to contractors, priced its IPO at $71 a share on Wednesday, above the expected range.

The company is set to debut on the Nasdaq on Thursday under ticker symbol “TTAN.” ServiceTitan previously raised its price range to between $65 and $67.

ServiceTitan sold 8.8 million shares in the offering, which would amount to a raise of almost $625 million. At the IPO price, ServiceTitan is worth about $6.3 billion.

Technology IPOs have been sparse since late 2021, when inflation and rising interest rates pushed investors out of riskier assets. Cloud software stocks quickly went out of favor after remote work during the pandemic had accelerated their growth.

In March of this year, social network Reddit went public, followed by data management company Rubrik the following month. In September, less than two weeks after the Federal Reserve lowered its benchmark rate for the first time since 2020, chipmaker Cerebras filed for an IPO. However, the company has yet to debut on the market.

ServiceTitan, based in Glendale, California, filed to go public on Nov. 18. The company has said some proceeds would go toward redeeming all outstanding shares of its non-convertible preferred stock. It had issued that stock in 2022 to repay loans to finance the $577 million acquisition of pest control software provider FieldRoutes.

While raising money in 2022, ServiceTitan agreed to “compounding ratchet” terms that encourage the company to quickly go public and prevent unnecessary dilution, according to an analysis from venture firm Meritech Capital.

Bessemer Venture Partners, TPG and Iconiq are among the company’s top shareholders, alongside founders Vahe Kuzoyan and Ara Mahdessian.

Mahdessian’s father had a contracting business, and Kuzoyan’s father dealt in plumbing, according to the Los Angeles Times. The founders said in a pre-recorded IPO roadshow that they saw technology as a way to modernize their family businesses. Their software can help with marketing, sales, scheduling and customer service.

ServiceTitan’s preliminary results for the October quarter show a net loss of about $47 million on $198.5 million in revenue. That suggests approximately 24% year-over-year revenue growth, the highest rate since mid-2023. But the company’s net loss widened from around $40 million in the October quarter last year.

WATCH: Many tech companies have effectively completed IPOs as private businesses, says Mitchell Green

Many tech companies have effectively completed IPOs as private businesses, says Mitchell Green

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Alphabet and Tesla reach fresh records, joining Amazon and Meta and pushing Nasdaq past 20,000

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Alphabet and Tesla reach fresh records, joining Amazon and Meta and pushing Nasdaq past 20,000

Tech stocks on display at the Nasdaq.

Peter Kramer | CNBC

Alphabet and Tesla climbed to fresh records on Wednesday, closing at all-time highs alongside Amazon and Meta as the tech megacaps lifted the Nasdaq past 20,000 for the first time.

Tech’s seven trillion-dollar companies added roughly $416 billion in market cap for the day.

For Alphabet, the two-day 11% rally was driven by the company’s launch of its latest quantum computing chip, which it revealed on Monday and described as a “breakthrough” and “an important step in our journey to build a useful quantum computer with practical applications” in drug discovery, battery design and other areas.

Alphabet closed at $195.40 on Wednesday, topping its prior high of $191.18, which it reached on July 10.

Tesla had been below its previous record for much longer. Shares of the electric vehicle maker jumped almost 6% on Wednesday to $424.77, climbing above their prior closing high of $409.97 on Nov. 4, 2021. The stock has soared 69% since Donald Trump’s election victory last month, on Wall Street’s optimism that Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s cozy relationship with the incoming president will pay dividends.

Amazon, Apple and Meta have all been regularly reaching new highs, though Apple slipped 0.5% on Wednesday. Microsoft, meanwhile, is about 4% below its high reached in July, and chipmaker Nvidia is 6% off its record from last month.

The outsized weighting of tech’s megacaps has pushed the Nasdaq to a 33% gain for the year. The index rose 1.8% on Wednesday to close at an all-time high of 20,034.89.

The market has rallied since Trump’s victory on Nov. 4, partly on expectations that the new administration will dial down regulatory pressure on the tech industry and allow for more dealmaking.

On Tuesday, Trump named Andrew Ferguson as the next chair of the Federal Trade Commission, replacing Lina Khan, who is best known for blocking the top tech companies’ acquisition efforts. Ferguson, currently one of the FTC’s five commissioners, “will be the most America First, and pro-innovation FTC Chair in our Country’s History,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post.

Tom Lee, managing partner at Fundstrat Global Advisors, told CNBC’s “Closing Bell” that investors see more gains in tech with the expectation that a Federal Reserve rate cut is coming this month. The consumer price index showed a 12-month inflation rate of 2.7% in November, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on Wednesday, further solidifying the market outlook for a cut.

“We know that when interest rates fall, the megacaps actually are very sensitive to that, and I think today was a day where the odds of a December cut increased,” Lee said. “That’s actually bullish for tech.”

WATCH: What Fundstrat’s Tom Lee expects from the markets in 2025

What Fundstrat's Tom Lee expects from the markets in 2025

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