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A Waymo car drives along a street on March 01, 2023 in San Francisco, California. Waymo, Alphabet’s self-driving car division, announced that it has laid off over 135 employees in a second round of layoffs this year.

Justin Sullivan | Getty Images

Waymo on Tuesday began offering robotaxi rides in Austin, Texas, through the Uber app.

The launch sets up Waymo to showcase its driverless technology during Austin’s annual South by Southwest festival that kicks off Friday. Approximately 300,000 people descend on the Texas capital to attend SXSW on average each year, according to the Austin Convention & Visitors Bureau.

“We can’t wait for Austin locals and visitors alike to experience Waymo One via the Uber app starting this week,” said Nicole Gavel, Waymo’s head of business development and strategic partnerships, in a statement.

Waymo previously said it would be launching in Austin, among several other U.S. cities, in 2025. 

Austin is the first market where Uber will manage and dispatch a fleet of Waymo vehicles. Riders in Phoenix can book Waymo rides through the Uber app, but the ride-sharing company does not manage the Waymo fleet in that market. The two companies’ partnership will expand to Atlanta later this year, where Waymo employees have already begun taking fully autonomous trips across the city, the company said Tuesday.

Uber sold off its autonomous vehicle, or AV, unit in 2020 after a string of earlier safety incidents including one fatality. The two companies have not disclosed how they split revenue for Waymo rides booked through the Uber app.

“With Waymo’s technology and Uber’s proven platform, we’re excited to introduce our customers to a future of transportation that is increasingly electric and autonomous,” Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said in a statement. 

Alphabet-owned Waymo, which has pulled far ahead of self-driving car competitors in the U.S., is currently serving over 200,000 paid trips per week across San Francisco, Los Angeles and Phoenix, according to the company.

Waymo’s Austin expansion also sets up the company for a potential clash with Elon Musk-led Tesla later this year. 

Tesla has promised to launch a driverless rideshare service in Austin in June. The company already produces electric cars with partially automated driving systems. These require a human driver at the wheel ready to steer or brake at any time. Tesla has designed a robotaxi, called the CyberCab, but the company does not yet produce it.

Waymo riders will be able to travel across 37 square miles of Austin, covering neighborhoods including the city’s downtown, Hyde Park and Montopolis, the company said. Uber users who request an Uber X, Uber Comfort, Uber Green or Uber Comfort Electric will be shown the option to match with Waymo vehicles when available, the company added.

— CNBC’s Lora Kolodny contributed to this report.

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

Uber and Lyft drop on news Waymo is expanding to Miami

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Okta pops more than 20% on strong earnings and guidance beat

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Okta pops more than 20% on strong earnings and guidance beat

Todd McKinnon, CEO of Okta Inc., smiles during a Bloomberg Technology television interview in San Francisco on April 4, 2022.

David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Okta shares soared 22% on Tuesday after the cloud-based identity management company delivered strong fourth-quarter earnings and beat estimates on guidance.

The move put the stock on pace for its best day in more than a year.

Okta posted adjusted earnings late Monday of 78 cents per share, while revenue increased 13% from a year earlier to $682 million. That beat the average analyst estimates of 73 cents per share in earnings and $669.6 million in revenue, according to LSEG.

First-quarter revenue should come in between $678 million and $680 million, which also topped estimates.

On the company’s earnings call, CEO Todd McKinnon called it a “blowout quarter” as bookings topped $1 billion in a single period for the first time.

“We’re excited about the momentum we’ve built going into FY 2026 and are taking the right steps to advance our position as the leader in the identity market,” McKinnon said. “More and more customers are looking to consolidate their disparate and ineffective identity systems, and Okta is there to meet them with the most comprehensive identity security platform in the market today,” McKinnon added.

Okta allows companies to manage employee access or devices by providing tools such as single sign-on and multifactor authentication. Shares have rallied about 35% this year, including Tuesday’s pop, after slumping 13% in 2024. In late 2023, Okta suffered a high-profile data breach that gave access to client files through a support system.

Some Wall Street firms turned more positive on the stock after the latest results, with both D.A. Davidson and Mizuho upgrading their ratings. D.A. Davidson called the likelihood of double-digit growth “durable” as the company shows signs of stabilization.

Mizuho’s Gregg Moskowitz said the firm “underestimated” the upside to committed remaining performance obligations, or subscription backlog that the company expects to recognize as revenue over the next year.

“More broadly, OKTA continues to be a clear leader in the critically important identity management market,” Moskowitz wrote. “And we now have a higher confidence level that OKTA will increasingly benefit from its group of newer products that have already begun to drive a meaningful contribution.”

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‘Music to our ears’: Qualcomm CEO welcomes TSMC’s $100 billion investment to boost U.S. chipmaking

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'Music to our ears': Qualcomm CEO welcomes TSMC's 0 billion investment to boost U.S. chipmaking

We're at the beginning of a 'significant upgrade' for AI smartphones, Qualcomm CEO says

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.‘s $100 billion commitment to expand manufacturing in the U.S. is “great news,” Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon told CNBC on Tuesday, adding it helps with diversification of chipmaking locations.

Amon also addressed U.S President Donald Trump’s tariff policy, suggesting longer term technology trends would outweigh any short term uncertainty.

Trump announced on Monday that TSMC would invest $100 billion in the U.S. which would go toward building more chip fabrication plants in Arizona. TSMC is the world’s largest semiconductor manufacturer and supplies chips to the likes of Qualcomm, Apple and Nvidia.

The U.S., under leadership of both Trump and former President Joe Biden, has sought to bring more cutting-edge chip manufacturing to American soil on the grounds that it is a matter of national and economic security to have these advanced technologies made closer to home.

Many in the technology industry have backed these plans, including Qualcomm.

“Look, this is great news,” Amon said. “It shows that semiconductors are important. It’s going to be important for … the economy. Economic security means access to semiconductors. More manufacturing is music to our ears.”

Amon said that some of Qualcomm’s chips are already manufactured in TSMC’s existing plants in Arizona and in the future, the company will get more semiconductors made in the U.S.

“TSMC is a great supplier of manufacturing for Qualcomm. They have a facility in Arizona. We already have chips built in Arizona. The more capacity that they put we’re going to use it, same way we’ve been using in Taiwan, we’re going to use it in other locations,” Amon said.

Global companies are also digesting the imposition of tariffs by the U.S. on Mexico and Canada as well as additional duties on China.

Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon speaks at the Computex forum in Taipei, Taiwan, June 3, 2024.

Ann Wang | Reuters

Amon said it’s currently difficult to predict the impact on Qualcomm from the tariffs.

“It’s hard to tell because you don’t know exactly how this is going to go. The interesting thing is we’re big
exporters of chips. We’re not an importer of chips … Chips are going to devices. They’re made all over the world, and it’s hard to really know what is happening,” Amon said.

“We’re just is going to navigate based on whatever the outcome is.”

The Qualcomm CEO said there are a number of key technology trends that are likely to support the U.S. giant’s business in the long term, over the short term tariff uncertainty.

We are right at the “beginning of a significant upgrade for AI smartphones. We’re seeing PCs changing to AI PCs. Cars are becoming computers. That’s what’s driving our business, not necessarily what we’re going to see in the short term,” Amon said.

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Samsung to launch its Apple Vision Pro rival headset this year

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Samsung to launch its Apple Vision Pro rival headset this year

Samsung’s extended reality ‘Project Moohan’ headset on display at the Mobile World Congress 2025 in Barcelona.

Arjun Kharpal | CNBC

Samsung will launch its extended reality headset this year, a spokesperson for the company told CNBC on Tuesday.

The device, dubbed Project Moohan, is Samsung’s answer to Apple‘s $3,500 Vision Pro, which was launched last year.

Samsung teased the headset last year and put it on display at this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Samsung refers to the product as “extended reality” or XR device which aims to merge the digital and physical world. However, there are currently few details about the device. Four cameras are visible in the front lens of the physical headset and there appears to be touch controls on the side.

Samsung worked alongside both Qualcomm and Google to develop a new kind of operating system for these kind of devices, known as the Android XR platform.

In December, Samsung said Google Gemini would be installed in the headset allowing wearers to experience a “conversation user interface.”

This would presumably enable users to interact with Gemini, Google’s AI assistant, to help navigate through apps and tasks. The cameras also suggest there will be some sort of gesture control similar to Apple’s Vision Pro.

“To me, the breakthrough technology is a combination of advanced vision capability with intelligence that understands user intention. I think without the intelligence part, it’s a defective product,” Patrick Chomet, executive vice president at Samsung’s mobile division, told CNBC in an interview on Tuesday.

Chomet hinted at a world envisioned by many consumer electronics firms, where smarter AI digital assistants are able to more intuitively understand user requirements on a device.

Samsung was one of the early players in virtual reality headsets, a market that never really took off the way many companies had predicted. But with technology advancing in areas from displays to chips, mixed or extended reality has been touted by big players as a new frontier in computing.

Samsung teased a future product roadmap during a January presentation when it launched its flagship S25 series of smartphones. One slide of the presentation showed outlines of future devices including a trifold smartphone, similar to Huawei’s Mate XT, as well as the Project Moohan headset.

The final product was a pair of glasses, which could hint at a different type of future XR headset. Smart glasses offer similar experiences to a headset but without wearing a bulky device.

Companies including Meta, Snap and XReal have been developing so-called augmented reality glasses. AR is when digital images are overlaid on the real world in front of you.

CNBC reported last year that Samsung, Qualcomm and Google were collaborating on a mixed-reality set of glasses. Samsung appeared to confirm such a collaboration at the S25 event in January.

Chomet did not give a timeline for the launch of a glasses product. However, he said that it is likely people will use multiple devices.

“Probably for quite some time still the smartphone will be the most used device,” Chomet said. “I see a world where people have various things including in their home, in their car. And the device will help you accomplish what you need to accomplish.”

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