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Alphabet’s Waymo will offer its autonomous rides on Via Transportation’s public transit platform, starting with Chandler city in Arizona, the companies said on Thursday. The service will be introduced this fall in the city’s on-demand small-scale public transportation service, Chandler Flex, which is powered by Via’s software. The transit technology makers suite of software and technology-enabled services powers public transportation systems in hundreds of cities across more than 30 countries, the company said. “We’re delighted that this partnership with Waymo paves the path for AVs (autonomous vehicles) to become accessible to millions of global public transit riders, enhancing mobility, lowering operating costs, and improving safety outcomes,” said Daniel Ramot, Vias co-founder and CEO. Waymo has been ramping up operations in the U.S. as the robotaxi race heats up. On Wednesday, it said that it plans to start offering autonomous cab rides in Nashville, Tennessee, next year in collaboration with ride-hailing firm Lyft. After starting in Phoenix in 2020, Waymo now offers paid driverless rides to the public in the San Francisco Bay Area, along with parts of Los Angeles, Phoenix, Austin and Atlanta. EV maker Tesla deployed a limited robotaxi service in Austin in June. The company has said it plans to expand the service to the San Francisco Bay Area. Yazhini MV, Reuters
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E-Commerce
Nvidia said on Thursday it would invest $5 billion in Intel, throwing its heft behind the struggling U.S. chipmaker just weeks after the White House engineered an extraordinary deal for the U.S. government to take a massive stake in the company. The stake instantly will make Nvidia one of Intel’s largest shareholders, giving it roughly 4% or more of the company after new shares are issued to complete the deal. Nvidia’s support represents a new opening for Intel after years of turnaround efforts at the famed U.S. manufacturer failed to pay off, and it triggered a 30% jump in the troubled chipmaker’s shares in premarket action. The company once the chip industry’s flagbearer that claimed to put the “silicon” in Silicon Valley appointed a new CEO, Lip-Bu Tan, in March. He came under fire from U.S. elected officials, including U.S. President Trump, who called for him to resign due to concerns about his connections with China. That led to a swiftly arranged meeting in Washington that ended with Intel’s unusual arrangement to give the United States a 10% stake in the company. The pact includes a plan for Intel and Nvidia to jointly develop PC and data center chips, but crucially will not involve Intel’s contract manufacturing business, known as a “foundry” in the chip industry, making chips for Nvidia. Most analysts believe that for Intel’s foundry to survive, it would need to eventually win a large customer such as Nvidia, Apple, Qualcomm or Broadcom. Nvidia, whose must-have chips are powering a global artificial intelligence boom, said in a statement it would pay $23.28 per share for Intel common stock, a price slightly below the $24.90 at which Intel shares closed on Wednesday. However, that is higher than the $20.47 price per share that the United States government paid for an extraordinary 10% stake it took in Intel last month. “It’s a reflection of Nvidia looking to diversify to an extent its investment within the U.S. and as well to gain some brownie points with the U.S. government,” said Chris Beauchamp, chief market analyst at IG Group in London. “It doesn’t change the bigger problem which Nvidia is facing with China, but it keeps it in favor with the U.S. government.” The pact represents a potential risk to Taiwan’s TSMC. TSMC currently manufactures Nvidia’s flagship processors, a business that the world’s most valuable company could one day extend to Intel. AMD, which competes with Intel for supplying chips to data centers, also stands to lose thanks to Nvidia’s backing. Shares of Nvidia rose more than 3%. AMD slipped nearly 4%, while U.S.-listed shares of TSMC slid 2%. TSMC and AMD did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The deal adds to a growing reserve of capital that Intel has accumulated weeks after it announced a $2 billion investment from Softbank and received $5.7 billion from the U.S. government. David Zinsner, Intel’s chief financial officer, told investors at a Deutsche Bank conference last month that the company was in a “good cash position” and would not require much more capital until it saw significant demand for 14A, a next-generation manufacturing process that it expects to invest heavily in building. CEO Tan has vowed to make Intel’s operations lean and build factory capacity only when there’s demand to match it. SPEEDY LINKS Under the deal announced Thursday, Intel is planning to design custom data center central processors that Nvidia will package with its AI chips, known as GPUs. A proprietary Nvidia technology will let the Intel and Nvidia chips communicate at higher speeds than before. Speedy links are a key differentiator in the AI market because many chips must be strung together to act as one to chew through massive amounts of data. At present, Nvidia’s best-selling AI servers with those speedy links are only available using Nvidia’s own chips, but the deal would now put Intel on equal footing, giving it a chance to make money off each Nvidia server. The combined Nvidia-Intel chips could provide a major competitive challenge to AMD, which is developing its own AI servers, and Broadcom, which also has chip-to-chip connection technology and helps companies such as Google develop AI chips. “Anything that NVIDIA decides to endorse just by association will make that stock of Intel appear attractive because it implies that Nvidia sees value in Intel,” said Peter Andersen, founder of Andersen Capital Management in Boston. Broadcom did not immediately respond to a request for comment. For consumer markets, Nvidia will provide Intel with a custom graphics chip that Intel can package with its PC central processors with the same speedy links, potentially giving it an edge against rivals such as AMD. While Intel’s x86 computing architecture has lost ground in both data centers and PCs to chips with technology from Arm Ltd, it still has a majority market share. “This historic collaboration tightly couples Nvidia’s AI and accelerated computing stack with Intel’s CPUs and the vast x86 ecosystem a fusion of two world-class platforms,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in a statement. “Together, we will expand our ecosystems and lay the foundation for the next era of computing.” The two companies did not disclose the financial terms of their technical collaboration but said they would make “multiple generations” of future products. Nvidia and Intel officials described the collaboration as a commercial arrangement under which they will provide chips to one another to create products and said there was no licensing component to the deal. “For Nvidia, the financial impact is small, but the political upside is big: this move aligns with U.S. policy and could help ease restrictions on selling advanced chips to China,” said Matt Britzman, senior equity analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown. Nvidia has struggled to sell its H20 chips in China, with the company trying to navigate demands from Washington and Beijing at the same time. In mid-August, Trump engineered a deal that granted Nvidia licenses to sell H20 chips to China in exchange for a 15% cut of those sales, but Nvidia has said it has not sent any H20 chips to China. The companies declined to give a date for when the first joint products would come to market but said that their product plans prior to the joint deal had not changed. Nvidia, in recent years, has entered both the PC central processor market and the data center central processor market. Meanwhile, Intel has tried to sell several AI chips that compete with Nvidia and has said it plans to develop an AI data center server that would compete with Nvidia. Stephen Nellis, Jeffery Dastin and Max Cherney, Reuters
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E-Commerce
The Federal Reserve’s nearly unanimous decision Wednesday to reduce its key interest rate was seen by many observers as a quiet show of unity and independence amid President Donald Trump’s relentless pressure for steeper cuts and his unprecedented effort to fire a top Fed official.Many Fed-watchers expected a contentious two-day meeting this week, with the economy’s future uncertain and a Trump appointee hastily added to the board just hours before the meeting began. The White House has also floated several members of the Fed’s governing board as potential replacements for the current chair, Jerome Powell, when his term ends in May, creating incentives for those officials to push for the deep rate cuts Trump has demanded.Some economists expected as many as three dissenting votes among the 12 voting members of the rate-setting committee, which would be the most in five years and somewhat unusual for a consensus-driven organization. Even four dissents which hasn’t happened since 1992 weren’t out of the question.Trump has appointed three members to the Fed’s governing board two in his first term all of whom could have voted in favor of steeper cuts.And many officials on the rate-setting committee are wary of cutting too quickly, with inflation still clearly above the Fed’s 2% target. Some observers thought one of those policymakers could dissent in the other direction in favor of not cutting rates at all.Instead, just one official dissented from the Fed’s decision to reduce its rate by a quarter-point: Stephen Miran, who was nominated by Trump to an empty seat and hurriedly approved by the Senate late Monday, just hours before the two-day meeting began.Brian Bethune, a Boston College economist, was impressed by the Fed’s unity in the face of White House pressure.“They all came together to support what seems to be a very balanced decision,” he said. The nearly unanimous vote “sends a very strong message that they’re not going to bow to the monarch. They’re going to do what’s appropriate for the economy.”Trump has said that one of the Fed governors he appointed in 2018 Christopher Waller is a potential replacement for Powell, and Waller dissented in favor of a rate cut in July, when the Fed kept borrowing costs unchanged. Another Trump appointee from his first term, Michelle Bowman, also dissented in July. Yet on Wednesday they both voted with their colleagues.On social media, Jason Furman, a top economic adviser in the Obama White House, posted that he was “thrilled” that Trump appointees Bowman and Waller did not join in Miran’s dissent. “Bodes well for the Fed’s independence,” wrote Furman, now an economist at Harvard University.In the weeks leading up to the meeting, Trump sought to fire Fed governor Lisa Cook, who was appointed by former President Joe Biden, after accusing her of mortgage fraud, which she has denied. It was the first time in the Fed’s 112-year history that a president has sought to remove a governor.Many legal experts consider the firing a threat to the Fed’s independence, as Trump has openly discussed securing a majority on the Fed’s governing board. Cook sued to keep her job and a court ruled she could remain on the Fed’s board while her lawsuit is resolved.An appeals court upheld that decision late Monday, enabling Cook to vote in favor of a rate cut Wednesday. Also late Monday, the Senate voted along party lines to confirm Miran as a Fed governor. He was sworn in Tuesday morning.Previous presidents have appointed their economic advisers to the Fed. Former chair Ben Bernanke was an adviser in the Bush administration before being appointed chair of the Fed. But Miran’s case is unusual because he is keeping his position at the White House, while taking unpaid leave.Powell has always sought to avoid a direct confrontation with Trump and avoided commenting on Cook’s case during a news conference Wednesday, and he didn’t say anything directly about Miran’s status.“We’re strongly committed to maintaining our independence and beyond that I really don’t have anything to share,” Powell said when asked about Miran.Powell also repeatedly noted that with inflation still above the Fed’s 2% target, while unemployment has also risen, it’s not clear what steps the Fed should take next. If it cuts its rate too much, it could overstimulate the economy and accelerate inflation. If it keeps its rate too high, an ongoing hiring slowdown could get worse.“It’s challenging to know what to do,” Powell said. “There are no risk-free paths now.”Nevertheless, “we came together at the meeting and acted with a high degree of unity,” he added.Claudia Sahm, a former Fed economist and now chief economist at New Century Advisors, said Fed policymakers likely acted out of support for the Fed as an institution.“The institution is under attack,” she said. “This was not the time for three dissents.” AP Business Writers Paul Wiseman and Alex Veiga contributed to this report. Veiga contributed from Los Angeles. Christopher Rugaber, AP Economics Writer
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