Waymo on Wednesday said humans will begin test driving the Alphabet-owned company’s robotaxi vehicles in Baltimore, Pittsburgh and St. Louis.

The three cities represent the latest additions to Waymo’s quickly growing list of cities where the Google sister company is either operating its robotaxis, planning to launch service or starting to test its vehicles. That list now stands at 26 markets.

Waymo will begin manual drives in the trio of new cities this week with hopes to eventually begin serving fully-autonomous rides there, spokesperson Ethan Teicher told CNBC.

Over the past month, Waymo has been aggressively making announcements for new markets and developments at the Google sister company. This comes as tech rivals Amazon and Tesla made advancements in the robotaxi market in 2025. Amazon’s Zoox began offering free rides in Las Vegas and San Francisco, and Tesla this year launched ride-hailing service with human supervisors in the Austin and San Francisco markets.

In November, Waymo announced that it will soon begin manually driving in Minneapolis, Tampa and New Orleans. The company also added Houston, San Antonio and Orlando to its list of cities where it’ll launch service in 2026. Waymo also began offering rides on freeways in the San Francisco, Los Angeles and Phoenix markets, and it named a new finance chief.

With more than 250,000 weekly paid trips, Waymo’s robotaxi service currently operates in Austin, the San Francisco Bay Area, Phoenix, Atlanta and Los Angeles markets. The company in May said it had provided more than 10 million paid rides since launching in 2020.

The new cities further signal that Waymo is increasingly confident its service can work well in locations with colder weather conditions.

WATCH: Waymo launches paid robotaxi rides on freeways

Security technology startup Verkada has reached a $5.8 billion valuation after a new funding round led by CapitalG, Alphabet’s venture capital arm, announced Wednesday.

“I think Google saw the opportunity with us in the application of AI and everything we’re driving to apply AI to the physical security industry,” CEO Filip Kaliszan told CNBC’s Deirdre Bosa.

The company said in a release that the investment will be used to bolster its artificial intelligence capabilities and provide liquidity.

The financing totaled $100 million, a person familiar with the terms of the round told CNBC, raising the company’s valuation by $1.3 billion from its Series E funding in February. The person asked not to be named in order to discuss details of the funding.

CapitalG also recently contributed to a $435 million fundraise for cybersecurity startup Armis in November.

The new funding comes as Verkada surpasses $1 billion in annualized bookings across 30,000 customers globally.

The company develops physical security products, including cameras, alarms and sensors, that are connected under a single cloud-based software platform.

Kaliszan said his company serves a broad span of businesses, such as retailers, government properties, schools, and transportation.

For example, TeraWatt Infrastructure, which supplies charging sites to electric vehicles like Google’s Waymo, uses Verkada technology to protect EV facilities.

In September, the company rolled out over 60 new AI features and platform updates, including tools like “AI-Powered Unified Timeline.”

The tool can automatically synthesize videos and images from several cameras into a single visual timeline, rather than requiring security teams to dig through multiple videos during an investigation.

“The genius of Filip and the team of Verkada is that they’re leveraging AI as a Rosetta Stone to really help unlock insights from cameras to help companies become safer and more efficient,” CapitalG general partner Derek Zanutto told Bosa.

By capturing over 20 million images per hour, Verkada can provide notable data like foot traffic, occupancy rates, security violations and other trends, Zanutto said.

He added that the physical security is a sleeping $60 billion market that is led by legacy hardware like “cameras that just record, not cameras that think” — a gap that Verkada is hoping to fill.

However, AI-powered technology will not necessarily replace human security guards any time soon.

“I think humans will be providing security to other humans for as long as I can think,” Kaliszan said. “But AI can empower these first responders to be more aware, to have situational knowledge, to know what to do, and in some cases, actually prevent the problems from happening.”

He pointed to the Louvre heist in October, where multiple crown jewels were robbed from the museum, as an opportunity where AI-assisted devices that could actively monitor, then immediately alert security forces, would be more effective than only physical personnel.

“If you could intervene right then, if you could know in real time that that’s happening, the potential for savings and preventing damage is tremendous,” he said.

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Here are five key things investors need to know to start the trading day:

Macy’s beat Wall Street’s top- and bottom-line expectations for the third quarter this morning, posting its strongest growth in more than three years. The department store operator’s results are only one of several recent data points investors have received on the state of the U.S. consumer.

Here’s what to know:

• Despite the strong results, shares of Macy’s dropped more than 6% before the bell. The retailer displayed caution about the current quarter, citing consumer spending concerns and pressure from tariffs.
• Meanwhile, American Eagle Outfitters shares surged 12% after the apparel company posted better-than-expected earnings and provided upbeat guidance for fourth-quarter comparable sales.
• American Eagle said its ad campaigns with actress Sydney Sweeney and NFL star Travis Kelce are “attracting more customers,” though they’ve not yet been a major revenue driver.
• Sweeney is just one of several celebrities who has starred in a denim ad for a clothing brand. As CNBC’s Gabrielle Fonrouge and Natalie Rice report, companies are pulling out all the stops in hopes of winning the so-called “denim war.”
• Plus, the numbers are in: More than 202 million Americans shopped in the five-day period from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday, the highest number on record since the National Retail Federation began tracking in 2017.
• Follow live markets updates here.

President Donald Trump has said his tariffs will bring production jobs back to the U.S. But as CNBC’s Jeff Cox reports, corporate executives and economic forecasters are concerned the opposite could happen.

Respondents to an Institute for Supply Management survey said the duties are pushing them to start reducing headcount and offering severance packages. “Conditions are more trying than during the coronavirus pandemic in terms of supply chain uncertainty,” one respondent said. A Federal Reserve report from last week also showed employment “declined slightly” over the past several weeks.

We’ll be keeping a close eye on the ADP private payrolls report due out this morning. Economists polled by Dow Jones are expecting growth of 40,000 jobs in November.

OpenAI is feeling the heat as rivals Alphabet and Anthropic gain ground in the artificial intelligence race. Earlier this week, CEO Sam Altman reportedly sent a staff memo laying out a “code red” effort to improve its ChatGPT bot.

It comes amid growing fanfare for Alphabet’s Gemini 3 model, which beat industry benchmarks. Anthropic, meanwhile, is reportedly readying for one of the largest IPOs ever.

As CNBC’s Pia Singh reports, Wall Street now sees Alphabet’s Google as the AI leader. Shares of Alphabet and its chip partner Broadcom have surged in recent weeks, while Nvidia and Microsoft — both business partners of OpenAI — pulled back.

Broadcast station owners are running toward industry consolidation, but they’re hitting roadblocks.

Nexstar is attempting to buy Tegna, while Sinclair made a hostile bid last week to acquire E.W. Scripps. These companies, like their larger media counterparts, have been trying to find ways to bolster their businesses as profitability tied to the traditional cable bundle shrinks.

But as CNBC’s Lillian Rizzo and Alex Sherman report, Sinclair’s attempt to scale up has been marred by family ownership challenges. Meanwhile, the Nexstar-Tegna deal requires changes to decades-old regulatory rules.

Boeing investors needed their seatbelts for yesterday’s ride.

Shares soared more than 10% — their best day since April — after CFO Jay Malave said the plane maker expects higher deliveries of its 737 and 787 jets in 2026. He also said the delayed certification for the 737-10 model could come later next year.

Malave notably said the higher deliveries will be “a big driver” for cash flow. As CNBC’s Laya Neelakandan notes, the Virginia-based company hasn’t posted an annual profit since 2018.