Waymo self-driving cars with roof-mounted sensor arrays traveling near palm trees and modern buildings along the Embarcadero, San Francisco, California, February 21, 2025.
Smith Collection/gado | Archive Photos | Getty Images
Waymo’s officially on its way to the nation’s capital.
The Alphabet-owned autonomous driving robotaxi service will be available in Washington, D.C., in 2026, the company announced Tuesday.
“I’ve experienced firsthand how safely the Waymo Driver operates around pedestrians, cyclists, and other vulnerable road users,” said Governors Highway Safety Association CEO Jonathan Adkins. “Waymo has worked with GHSA and our first responder network as they’ve expanded their service, always putting safety first. As someone who walks to work almost every day, I’m excited to share the road with Waymo in Washington, D.C.”
So far, Waymo One currently operates in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Silicon Valley and Phoenix, and is also driving in Austin and Atlanta through its partnership with Uber.
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The expansion follows a dominating 2024 for Waymo, which completed more than 5 million rides last year as other robotaxi competitors still lagged in the churning market. Service in Miami will be also launched in 2026 through a partnership with startup Moove.io, a spokesperson told CNBC.
General Motors began shuttering its Cruise robotaxi service in December. Elon Musk’s Tesla still doesn’t manufacture a robotaxi or run a hailing service despite promising “robotaxi cars” for roughly a decade. Amazon’s Zoox is continuing road testing in multiple U.S. cities, with plans to start service in Las Vegas, then San Francisco.
Waymo declined to provide additional comment on the D.C. expansion.
The rollout will get underway through a series of road trips with the Waymo Driver. At first, test rides are operated manually by human drivers who give the company feedback and context about driving nuances in the city.
“We’ll continue introducing ourselves to D.C.’s communities and emergency responders over the coming months,” the company said in the release. “We’ll also continue to work closely with policymakers to formalize the regulations needed to operate without a human behind the wheel in the District.”
On Jan. 9, Ubisoft said it was postponing the launch of “Assassin’s Creed Shadows” and had appointed advisors to review strategic options.
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Ubisoft on Thursday announced that it’s creating a new gaming subsidiary with Chinese technology giant Tencent investing 1.16 billion euros ($1.25 billion) into the unit.
The subsidiary will focus on Ubisoft’s best-known games brands, including Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry and Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six, according to the company.
It will “focus on building game ecosystems designed to become truly evergreen and multi-platform,” Ubisoft said in a press release Thursday.
“Backed by greater investment and boosted creative capacities, it will drive further increases in quality of narrative solo experiences, expand multiplayer offerings with increased frequency of content release, introduce free-to-play touchpoints, and integrate more social features,” the company added.
The investment from Tencent values the new subsidiary at 4 billion euros, Ubisoft said, implying a 4x multiple based on its average sales from full-year 2023 to 2025.
“It highlights the strong value of Ubisoft’s IPs, significantly reinforces its balance sheet, and enables the company to continue its efforts to become a more agile organization, unleash the full creative potential of its teams and better align its resources with the constantly evolving expectations of players,” Ubisoft said.
Earlier this month, Bloomberg reported that the games publisher was looking to bring in external investment in a new entity including some of its core intellectual property.
That followed reporting from Bloomberg last year that Tencent was discussing a possible take-private deal with Ubisoft’s founding Guillemot family.
News of the transaction also arrives a week after Ubisoft released Assassin’s Creed Shadows, the latest title in its best-selling franchise. The game was met with generally positive reviews from critics, garnering an average score of 82 on review aggregation site Metacritic.
CoreWeave CEO Michael Intrator appears on CNBC on July 17, 2024.
CNBC
Nvidia is aiming to anchor CoreWeave’s initial public offering at $40 a share with a $250 million order, according to a person familiar with the matter.
The company initially filed the offering at $47 to $55 per share. The source told CNBC’s Leslie Picker that CoreWeave is not planning on downsizing or refiling at this time.
CoreWeave did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
Nvidia is already a significant customer of CoreWeave, which rents out remote access to computers based on Nvidia’s AI chips. The tech giant, which also owns about 6% of the company, declined to comment on the order.
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CoreWeave’s anticipated offering has come as a welcome sign for an IPO market crippled by a drought in activity. The market for IPOs practically shuttered more than three years ago as investors ditched riskier bets against a backdrop of high inflation and interest rates.
Wall Street was optimistic that President Donald’s Trump term would usher in a more favorable setup for technology stocks, but the sector has gotten off to a rough start as tariffs sparked a global trade war and recession fears.
CoreWeave got its start in 2017 as Atlantic Crypto, offering infrastructure for mining the ethereum cryptocurrency. When digital currency prices dropped, the company snatched up additional graphics processing units (GPUs), and changed its name to CoreWeave as it turned its focus toward AI.
In its IPO prospectus filed earlier this month, the company said 2024 revenues jumped more than 700% to $1.92 billion and recorded a net loss of $863.4 million. The company also said that 77% of its revenue came from two customers. Microsoft is the most significant client, accounting for 62% of revenue last year.
— CNBC’s Hayden Field, Jordan Novet and Kristina Partsineveloscontributed reporting
The Alibaba office building in Nanjing, Jiangsu province, China, on Aug 28, 2024.
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Alibaba Cloud launched Thursday its latest AI model in its “Qwen series,” as large language model competition in China continues to heat up following the “DeepSeek moment.”
The new “Qwen2.5-Omni-7B” is a multimodal model, which means it can process inputs, including text, images, audio and videos, while generating real-time text and natural speech responses, according to an announcement on Alibaba Cloud’s website.
The company says that the model can be deployed on edge devices like mobile phones, offering high efficiency without compromising performance.
“This unique combination makes it the perfect foundation for developing agile, cost-effective AI agents that deliver tangible value, especially intelligent voice applications,” Alibaba said.
For example, it could be used to help a visually impaired person navigate their environment through real-time audio description, the company added.
The new model is open-sourced on the platforms Hugging Face and Github, following a growing trend in China after DeepSeek made its breakthrough R1 model open-source.
Open-source generally refers to software in which the source code is made freely available on the web for possible modification and redistribution. Over the past years, Alibaba Cloud says it has open-sourced over 200 generative AI models.
Amid China’s AI fervor accelerated by DeepSeek, Alibaba and other generative AI competitors have been releasing new, cost-effective models and products at an unprecedented pace.
Last week, Chinese tech giant Baidureleased a new multimodal foundational model and its first reasoning-focused model.
Alibaba, meanwhile, debuted its updated Qwen 2.5 artificial intelligence model in late January and released a new version of its AI assistant tool Quark earlier this month.
The company has strongly committed to its AI strategy, announcing last month a plan to invest $53 billion in its cloud computing and AI infrastructure over the next three years, exceeding what it spent in the space over the past decade.
Kai Wang, Asia senior equity analyst at Morningstar, told CNBC that large Chinese tech players such as Alibaba, which build data centers to meet the computing needs of AI in addition to building their own LLMs, are well positioned to benefit from China’s post-DeepSeek AI boom.
Alibaba secured a major win for its AI business last month when it confirmed that the company was partnering with Apple to roll out AI integration for iPhones sold in China.
On Wednesday, the group also reported an expanded strategic partnership with BMW to accelerate the integration of its AI into the carmaker’s next-generation intelligent vehicles.
