Latest news with #Waymo
CNBC
3 hours ago
- Business
- CNBC
Alphabet to report Q2 earnings after the bell
Alphabet is set to report its second-quarter earnings after the bell Wednesday. Here's what analysts polled by LSEG are expecting: Wall Street is also watching these numbers in the report: Alphabet is among the megacaps expected to be a major driver of earnings growth during the second-quarter earnings season. Wall Street is anticipating the search giant to report a 10.9% increase in revenue and 15% growth in earnings per share. Shares of Alphabet haven't moved much this year, lagging the other Magnificent Seven stocks and the S&P 500. Investors are primarily concerned about the rise of artificial intelligence chatbots, which could impact Google's ability to remain competitive in search. During the second quarter, the search giant rolled out a number of new AI products. At its annual Google I/O conference in May, Google announced a new subscription tier, called "Google AI Ultra," that offers access to the company's "cutting edge" AI features for $249.99 per month. Google also unveiled its return to the smart glasses market with a $150 million partnership with Warby Parker — the two companies said they plan to launch a series of smart glasses as soon as next year. Google in May also announced a venture fund to invest in AI startups. As part of the "AI Futures Fund," eligible startups will receive Google investment, early access to AI models, and hands-on support from Google researchers, engineers and go-to-market specialists. They also get credits to use on Google Cloud. Additionally in May, Google began testing the placement of its "AI Mode" product on its home page, directly beneath the Google search. Earlier this month, OpenAI added Google to its list of suppliers, saying it expects to use the search company's cloud infrastructure for its popular ChatGPT service. The announcement represented a win for Google, whose cloud unit is younger and smaller than those of Amazon and Microsoft. Google made a splash in the AI talent wars, announcing it would bring in Windsurf CEO Varun Mohan and other top researchers at the artificial intelligence coding startup as part of a $2.4 billion deal that also includes licensing the company's technology. Internally, Google also made a number of personnel changes during the quarter. The company added the new role of chief AI architect when it elevated Koray Kavukcuoglu from his position as Google DeepMind's chief technology officer in June. Google also made more workforce reductions by offering buyouts to U.S.-based employees across several of its divisions, including search, ads and commerce. Alphabet made several strides with Waymo, its self-driving car unit, during the quarter. Waymo reached 100 million "real world, fully autonomous miles" driven on public roads, the company said last week. Waymo also announced expansions into new markets. In June, Waymo announced plans to drive vehicles manually in New York, marking the first step toward potentially cracking the largest U.S. city. In July, the company said it will do limited testing in Philadelphia and it began offering accounts for teens ages 14 to 17, starting in Phoenix. The company also endured some less-flattering optics during the quarter. In June, Google's cloud suffered significant global outages knocking down or disrupting dozens of large internet services, including OpenAI and Shopify, among others.
Gizmodo
4 hours ago
- Automotive
- Gizmodo
Gizmodo
The future of getting from A to B without touching the steering wheel is finally here. And it's a fight between two of Silicon Valley's biggest names. On one side: Waymo, Alphabet's self-driving division that has spent over a decade perfecting robotaxis and just crossed 100 million driverless miles on public roads. On the other: Tesla, with Elon Musk promising a future where your car earns money for you while you sleep. In Austin, Texas, the battleground is clear. Tesla finally launched its long-delayed robotaxi service in late June, giving select influencers and shareholders access to its camera-only, Full Self-Driving (FSD)-powered Model Ys. At first, Tesla's service area was tiny. Then it expanded, marking the moment with a map shaped like, well, a crude joke. Waymo, meanwhile, doubled its coverage in Austin from 37 square miles to 90 square miles, spanning most of the city and linking up with Uber for easy hailing. That's more than double Tesla's 42-square-mile footprint, and Waymo's cars are available to the general public, not just hand-picked Tesla fans. Waymo has been playing the long game. It already runs robotaxi services in Phoenix, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Austin, books more than 250,000 paid rides per week, and has partnerships to bring autonomous trips to Washington, D.C., Atlanta, Miami in 2026, and even Tokyo. It just started testing its cars in New York and Philadelphia. Next stop: 10 more cities by year's end. Tesla, by contrast, is scaling from scratch. Its FSD system remains classified as Level 2—driver supervision required—though its robotaxi fleet runs driverless in limited geofenced areas. The difference in scale is stark: Waymo has roughly 1,500 autonomous vehicles today and plans to add 2,000 more next year, while Tesla's Austin fleet numbers in the low hundreds. Waymo relies on lidar sensors, high-definition maps, and a cautious safety-first approach that critics call slow but steady. Tesla bets on cameras and neural networks, arguing that cheaper hardware and a massive data advantage from millions of customer vehicles will allow it to scale faster and cheaper once it's ready. That difference shows up in the user experience: Waymo offers hands-off rides now. Tesla's long-term vision is that your personal car will moonlight as a taxi while you sleep, a future Musk says is inevitable. The question is when, and whether regulators, insurance companies, and passengers will buy in. On paper, Tesla has the potential to catch up thanks to its massive data engine and vertically integrated fleet. But today, Waymo is winning, by a lot. Its service areas are larger, its rides are fully driverless and open to the public, and it's rapidly expanding to new cities. Tesla, by comparison, is still in pilot mode, with limited access and plenty of kinks to work out.
Yahoo
6 hours ago
- Automotive
- Yahoo
Tesla Draws Optimism From JPMorgan on Robotaxi Debut
Tesla (TSLA, Financials) is set to report its second-quarter results after the market closes Wednesday, just as JPMorgan issued a cautiously optimistic note about its new robotaxi business. Analysts from JPMorgan rode the autonomous vehicle in Austin and described it as solid and consistently safe a rare endorsement from a firm that has maintained a long-standing bearish view on the stock. Tesla launched the ride-hailing service on June 22 and has already grown its geofenced coverage to 42 square miles in Austin, although Alphabet's Waymo has expanded faster in the same city. Despite the positive test ride, JPMorgan reiterated a Sell rating and a $115 price target on July 7, implying 65% downside from current levels. The firm cited Tesla's valuation as unjustified when compared to peers in the so-called Magnificent Seven. Wall Street expects Tesla to post Q2 adjusted earnings per share of $0.40 on revenue of $22.19 billion. Analysts are especially focused on any updates regarding full-self driving progress and the robotaxi rollout. Investors are also watching how the Trump administration's plan to end EV tax credits could affect Tesla's margins in the upcoming quarters. This article first appeared on GuruFocus. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Yahoo
7 hours ago
- Automotive
- Yahoo
Tesla Draws Optimism From JPMorgan on Robotaxi Debut
Tesla (TSLA, Financials) is set to report its second-quarter results after the market closes Wednesday, just as JPMorgan issued a cautiously optimistic note about its new robotaxi business. Analysts from JPMorgan rode the autonomous vehicle in Austin and described it as solid and consistently safe a rare endorsement from a firm that has maintained a long-standing bearish view on the stock. Tesla launched the ride-hailing service on June 22 and has already grown its geofenced coverage to 42 square miles in Austin, although Alphabet's Waymo has expanded faster in the same city. Despite the positive test ride, JPMorgan reiterated a Sell rating and a $115 price target on July 7, implying 65% downside from current levels. The firm cited Tesla's valuation as unjustified when compared to peers in the so-called Magnificent Seven. Wall Street expects Tesla to post Q2 adjusted earnings per share of $0.40 on revenue of $22.19 billion. Analysts are especially focused on any updates regarding full-self driving progress and the robotaxi rollout. Investors are also watching how the Trump administration's plan to end EV tax credits could affect Tesla's margins in the upcoming quarters. This article first appeared on GuruFocus. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Fast Company
8 hours ago
- Business
- Fast Company
They helped make Waymo go. Now they're building AI-powered robots to solve America's labor crisis
America's demand for new infrastructure is surging, driven by the AI data center boom, clean energy projects, and a growing national housing crunch. Yet just as the country needs to build faster than ever, it's facing a mounting challenge: a severe construction labor shortage. The U.S. construction industry is already short more than half a million workers, and nearly 41% of its workforce is expected to retire by 2031. For a sector still heavily dependent on manual labor and analog tools, there soon may not be enough people left to do the building. To confront this growing labor crisis, Boris Sofman—a Carnegie Mellon robotics Ph.D. and early Waymo executive—cofounded Bedrock Robotics in 2024. Instead of building autonomous machines from scratch, Bedrock retrofits existing construction equipment like excavators, bulldozers, and loaders with AI-powered operating systems, sensors, and lidar to make them fully autonomous. Sofman has brought together fellow engineers from Waymo, Google, and Caterpillar (CAT), many of whom were instrumental in scaling autonomous technologies in some of the world's most complex machines. The team shares a fundamental belief: the future of construction lies in autonomy, not more manpower. 'I saw the powerful potential of applying modern ML approaches we developed at Waymo to construction. This is a problem you could not solve without the modern approaches we saw to be so effective, and helped deploy, in transportation, so it felt like a huge opportunity to address this critical need,' Sofman tells Fast Company. 'We can get to a deployed product for a fraction of the cost it took Waymo, and continue to build toward the full potential while growing revenues and serving real customers.'
