Tesla’s long-awaited entry into the robotaxi market — expected later this month — is coming to Austin, Texas, which has emerged as a key battleground for self-driving technology.

CEO Elon Musk wrote in a post on X last week that the company has been testing Model Y vehicles with no safety drivers on board in the Texas capital for several days.

Tesla’s Austin robotaxi service will kick off with 10 vehicles and expand to thousands, moving into more cities if the launch goes well, Musk said in a May 20 interview with CNBC’s David Faber.

But while the market remains nascent, Tesla already faces a hefty amount of competition.

The electric vehicle maker is one of several companies using Austin as a testing ground and debut market for self-driving technology. They’re all taking advantage of Austin’s robotics and AI talent, tech-savvy residents, affordable housing relative to other technology hubs and a city layout with horizontal traffic lights and wide roads that makes it particularly conducive to mapping software.

But the biggest reason they love Texas may be the state’s robotaxi-friendly regulation.

Already in Austin are Alphabet’s Waymo, Amazon’s Zoox, Volkswagen subsidiary ADMT, and startup Avride.

Waymo began offering robotaxi rides in Austin with Uber in March. Zoox started testing there last year, while ADMT has been testing Volkswagen’s electric ID vehicles in the city since 2023. Avride is headquartered in Austin and is testing its autonomous vehicles and delivery robots in the Texas capital. Avride said it plans to begin offering paid robotaxi rides in the city later this year.

“The winners of the space are emerging, and it’s just a matter of scaling,” said Toby Snuggs, ​​head of sales and partnerships at Avride.

According to Uber, its Austin launch with Waymo has proved successful thus far. Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi told investors in May that riders are choosing the robotaxis over regular cars, and the company is preparing to scale its Austin autonomous fleet to hundreds of vehicles in the coming months, ahead of a robotaxi expansion into Atlanta later this year.

“These approximately 100 vehicles are now busier than over 99% of all drivers in Austin in terms of completed trips per day,” Khosrowshahi told investors in May.

Avride, which spun out of former parent company Yandex last year, has delivery robots in a fleet of about a dozen Hyundai Ioniq 5 vehicles in downtown Austin. The company said it plans to expand its Austin fleet to 100 vehicles later this year and aims to begin offering robotaxi rides in Dallas with Uber in 2025.

Tesla primarily relies on camera-based systems and computer vision to navigate its vehicles rather than the Waymo model of using sophisticated sensors such as lidar and radar. Tesla’s “generalized” approach to robotaxis is more ambitious and less expensive than Waymo’s, Musk said during Tesla’s first-quarter earnings call with investors in April. Musk has been promising Tesla investors that a self-driving car is on the way for roughly a decade and has repeatedly missed self-imposed deadlines.

“There’s probably a lot of ways it can be done, but we’re the only ones that have done it,” Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana told CNBC’s Deirdre Bosa in May. “We’ve been doing it 24 hours a day for almost five years. And so to us, it’s really important to focus on safety … and then cost — not cost and then safety.”

“You have to be able to see at night, you have to be able to have this vision that’s better than humans,” Mawakana said.

In addition to Austin, Phoenix is an AV hub for companies such as Waymo, which has been testing in the region since 2016. Waymo and the auto manufacturer Magna International announced in May that they plan to double robotaxi production at their new plant in the Phoenix suburb of Mesa by the end of 2026.

The San Francisco Bay Area, where Google began working on its self-driving car project in 2009, also has a large fleet of Waymo vehicles. Waymo opened its paid ride-hailing service to all local users almost a year ago, and said earlier this year that it’s expanding its service to include another 27 square miles of coverage in the region. Zoox is also testing in San Francisco.

While Tesla was started in the Bay Area, Musk moved its corporate headquarters to Austin in late 2021. In California, regulators at individual municipalities closely control where and how companies can operate autonomous vehicles. Texas has more relaxed regulations that benefit AV companies.

When Waymo decided on Austin, it “looked at the operational structure and how friendly the regulatory environment is,” said Shweta Shrivastava, Waymo’s senior product and strategy executive. “It’s a tech-forward city — there’s a lot of openness in terms of welcoming and adopting new technologies, so that’s been great.”

Part of that friendliness is a 2017 Texas law that prohibited municipalities from regulating autonomous vehicles, giving the state full authority.

“It’s not like California, where you have certain regulations in LA, separate regulations in San Francisco, and municipalities between,” said Yulia Shveyko, Avride’s head of communications. “In Texas, it’s the same all across the state, and this is one of the great things about being here as an operator.”

The state is responsible for establishing the framework for autonomous vehicle operation, which includes that AVs must adhere to the same regulations as traditional vehicles, including registration, insurance and compliance with traffic laws. Texas law also requires AVs to have data recording systems to document potential accidents and incidents.

The Texas Department of Transportation’s “role is to work with autonomous vehicle (AV) companies on what is needed to ensure the state’s infrastructure is prepared for the safe and efficient rollout of AVs,” a spokesperson said in an emailed statement.

Texas law allows for AV testing and operations on Texas roadways, “as long as they meet the same safety and insurance requirements as every other vehicle on the road.”

Companies are choosing to test their AVs in Austin because of its “lower barriers both in terms of regulation and the acceptance by consumers in the area,” said Wassym Bensaid, chief software officer at EV maker Rivian.

“This is really what makes Austin and San Francisco more open to this technology,” Bensaid added. Rivian in March rolled out a “hands-free version” of its driver-assistance system for highway driving, and the company plans to have an “eyes-off-hands-off” system available by the end of next year, Bensaid said.

Texas’ transportation department created an AV task force in 2019. Formal meetings take place two to four times per year. Members of the task force include representatives from other agencies in the state and public entities as well as key industry stakeholders, its website says.

Waymo is an active member of the task force, the company confirmed.

The state’s transportation department didn’t respond to CNBC’s requests for further information about the task force.

Waymo has built goodwill with Austin officials by engaging with Texas stakeholders since it began testing in the city in 2015, the company told CNBC.

Known then as Google’s self-driving car project, the company started driving on Austin streets a decade ago with safety drivers on board.

Waymo closed Austin operations in 2019 to focus on its testing efforts in Phoenix, the spokesperson said, adding that it returned in March 2023, when the company’s technology was “more mature.”

Long before Waymo began testing in Austin, University of Texas at Austin’s Peter Stone entered his team’s vehicle in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Urban Challenge in 2007. Stone is the director of the Learning Agents Research Group at UT, and his team’s entry was called Austin Robot Technology — one of the first deployments of a partially automated driving system on the streets of Austin.

Stone has been at the university for 23 years and has taught several students who are now employees at Waymo and other car companies, he said. Advancements in machine learning and years of testing have contributed to companies such as Waymo being able to navigate roads better than some human drivers, he said.

Officials from around the U.S. and the world are looking to Texas as a model for self-driving regulations, experts said. Some regulation, however, is still being sorted out.

Lewis Leff, City of Austin assistant director, said that more cities are reaching out to ask, “How do you handle these situations?” Cities that have inquired include New Orleans and Nashville, Tennessee, as well as some outside the U.S., Austin officials told CNBC.

“We were in Japan launching our service with Rakuten earlier this year and the minister of economics, and the questions they were asking was, ‘What is the regulation in Texas like?’” Avride’s Snuggs said.

Meanwhile, the AV industry is pushing for federal-level standards that would ease regulatory uncertainty around putting new tech on public roads. In Tesla’s third-quarter earnings in October, Musk said that should Donald Trump win the coming election, he would use his influence with the administration to push for federal AV regulation.

As president, Trump and his transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, have both been supportive of federal-level standards, Waymo’s Mawakana told CNBC in May, adding that she’s “optimistic” it will be arranged sometime during this presidential term. Waymo supports proposed federal frameworks for national safety standards and has voiced that support to the Trump administration, a company spokesperson said.

“Now’s the time,” Mawakana said, pointing to places such as China, which invests in AV supply chains and grants and has federal AV rules. “We should be in the exact same position.”

The concentration of regulatory power, however, comes with some concern that cities will be mostly powerless should issues arise, experts said.

A state senate transportation hearing in September addressed the lack of regulation in Texas for driverless vehicles.

“To many of our first responders communities, this is new territory for them,” Democratic Texas state Sen. Sarah Eckhardt reportedly said at the hearing. “I mean pulling over an autonomous vehicle, you know, what do you do? An autonomous vehicle in an accident, what do you do?”

In one example, Houston city officials reportedly faced delays in enforcement instructions from state regulators after Cruise cars caused a backup on the city’s Montrose Boulevard in 2023.

Texas has at least 17 companies that have deployed or tested on roads, said Nick Steingart, director of state affairs at Alliance for Automotive Innovation, at the state hearing.

“As the technology matured and evolved, we fully expected that the laws would evolve as well,” Steingart said.

The state is considering legislation that may provide some clarity, according to Austin’s transportation department.

Several AV companies in Austin have safety protocols and proactively work with local first responders. Zoox, for example, has held trainings with first responders and met with city officials, a spokesperson said. But there is technically no requirement for AV companies to engage with emergency services, Austin officials confirmed.

Companies hoping to succeed in Texas often begin their conversations with the state by focusing on safety first, Austin’s Leff said. “They note their technology can recognize a fire vehicle or a hand signal, so there’s a lot of focus on things like that,” he said.

Austin’s transportation department has been collecting information about incidents that pose a risk to public safety and relaying that data to the appropriate operators, the city said. It places “all reports we receive about AV incidents into our dashboard, about half of which over time have come from our city department colleagues,” city officials said.

Waymo, which has become one of the most visible leaders in the robotaxi market, has said it has made safety a priority. Mawakana and co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov told employees at a November all-hands meeting that they should scale up as aggressively as possible but do so with safety at the forefront of all their efforts, people familiar with the matter told CNBC. The people asked not to be named because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

Waymo tracks incidents involving its vehicles but doesn’t share city-level data publicly, a company spokesperson said.

With Texas regulation around AVs relatively lax, some AV makers worry what impact a collision by one of the players in the state could mean for the entire industry.

“It takes a long time to earn trust, and it doesn’t take that long to lose it,” Mawakana said. “There can always be an overreaction by regulators — their job is to protect the public.”

Already, the AV industry has suffered a number of black eyes. General Motors shut down its Cruise robotaxi service in December after one of its vehicles dragged a woman 20 feet on a street in San Francisco in 2023. Uber also pulled out of the self-driving space after one of its self-driving test vehicles struck and killed a woman in Arizona in 2018.

In Austin, a woman posted a TikTok video in April showing a Waymo vehicle that she said had abruptly stopped underneath a highway with her and another passenger inside. After other cars began honking at them, they contacted customer support for help but were told the Waymo couldn’t be moved. The woman said the car locked the passengers inside until they threatened to go live on TikTok.

“Now we’re walking,” the woman says in the video, “and our Waymo is still there. This is insane.”

Riders “always have the ability to pause their ride and exit the vehicle when desired by pulling the handle twice — once to unlock and another to open the door,” a Waymo spokesperson said in response to the video.

Despite such incidents, UT’s Stone said he thinks cities are being overly cautious.

“The standard people are aiming for is perfection, and the standard they should be aiming for is better than people,” he said. “A fatal car accident rarely makes the local news, but if autonomous cars reduce that number, it should be seen as a huge societal win.”

— CNBC’s Lora Kolodny and Deirdre Bosa contributed to this report.

Snacktime is nigh at the Golden Arches.

On June 3, McDonald’s announced exactly when the Snack Wrap will return to partipating restaurants nationwide: July 10. And, thankfully, it’s not a limited-time offer, either — it’s here for good.

The Snack Wrap, which has been off menus for almost a decade, features one of the chain’s new McCrispy Strips — a chicken strip made with all-white meat — and is topped with shredded lettuce and shredded cheese, wrapped in a flour tortilla.

This go-round, the Snack Wrap comes in two flavors: Spicy, which McDonald’s says “brings the heat with a habanero kick” reminiscent of its Spicy McCrispy sandwich; and Ranch, which “delivers a satisfying burst of cool ranch goodness,” according to the brand, along with hints of garlic and onion.

Customers can get the Snack Wrap on its own or as a combo meal, which will come with two wraps, a medium fries and your drink of choice.

It’s been a long journey for Mickey D’s devotees: On Dec. 5, Joe Erlinger, president of McDonald’s USA, first revealed that the Snack Wrap was on its way back while discussing the new McValue menu.

“The Snack Wrap will be back in 2025,” Erlinger said at the time, declining to reveal the exact date. “It has a cult following, I get so many emails into my inbox about this product.”

Then, on April 15, the chain teased the official release date: “snack wraps 0x.14.2025,” it posted on X, without specifying the month.

Now, for the official rollout, McDonald’s is leaning into the fact that for years, fans have inundated the chain with pleas to reinstate the item after it was kicked off menus in 2016. A Change.org petition started in 2021 in its honor garnered over 17,000 signatures, and fans resorted to posting TikToks and making dedicated Instagram accounts devoted to bringing it back.

While the chicken-craving masses waited for the Snack Wrap’s return, other fast-food chains have dropped their own versions: In March 2023, Wendy’s introduced its Grilled Chicken Ranch Wrap; in July 2023, Taco Bell reintroduced its Crispy Chicken Taco for a limited time; and in August 2023, Burger King launched BK Royal Crispy Wraps for a limited time, too.

Most recently, a single day before McDonald’s announcement, Popeyes dropped its own Chicken Wraps as a limited-time offer. Let the wrap battle commence.

Elon Musk’s brain tech startup Neuralink has closed a $650 million funding round, the company announced Monday.

ARK Invest, Founders Fund, Sequoia Capital, Thrive Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners and other firms participated in the round, according to a press release. Neuralink said the fresh capital will help the company bring its technology to more patients and develop new devices that “deepen the connection between biological and artificial intelligence.”

Neuralink is building a brain-computer interface, or BCI, which is a system that translates brain signals into commands for external technologies.

The company’s first system, called Telepathy, involves 64 “threads” that are inserted directly into the brain. The threads are thinner than a human hair and record neural signals through 1,024 electrodes, according to Neuralink’s website.

The initial aim of the technology is to help patients with severe paralysis restore some independence. As of Monday, five patients have been implanted with Neuralink’s technology, and are able to “control digital and physical devices with their thoughts,” the release said.

Neuralink is currently carrying out four separate clinical trials around its Telepathy system.

BCIs have been studied in academia for decades, and several other companies, including Synchron, Paradromics and Precision Neuroscience, are developing their own systems.

Paradromics on Monday announced it successfully implanted its BCI in a human for the first time.

It’s not clear what devices Neuralink will look to develop next, but Musk has for years espoused grand ambitions for the brain tech startup. He has even claimed that he would be willing to get an implant himself.

One of the capabilities Musk has repeatedly highlighted is the ability to restore vision to blind patients.

Neuralink received a “Breakthrough Device” designation from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for a device called Blindsight. This designation is granted to medical devices that have the potential to provide improved treatment for debilitating or life-threatening conditions.

In a post on his social media platform X in September, Musk said Blindsight will enable even those who have lost both eyes and their optic nerve to see.

Neuralink still has a long road ahead before it can commercialize these technologies.

Uber said Monday that Pierre-Dimitri Gore-Coty, one of the company’s longest-tenured top executives and the head of is delivery business is leaving after almost 13 years.

Gore-Coty joined Uber as a general manager in France in 2012, and worked his way up to become vice president of mobility for the Europe and Middle East region four years later, according to his LinkedIn profile. He was named senior vice president of delivery in 2021.

“It’s hard to imagine Uber without Pierre, because there hasn’t been much Uber without Pierre,” CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said in a statement that was part of a regulatory filing. “As one of our first employees, he was a driving force behind our global Mobility expansion and stepped up to run Uber Eats just weeks before the first Covid lockdowns.”

The company didn’t say what Gore-Coty plans to do next.

Uber also said that Andrew Macdonald, the company’s senior vice president of mobility and business operations, will become chief operating officer, reporting to Khosrowshahi. Macdonald, 41, will oversee the company’s global mobility, delivery and autonomous businesses in addition to “key cross-platform functions like membership, customer support, safety, and more,” the filing said.

Gore-Coty is one of 11 people listed on Uber’s executive team page. Macdonald is the only one who has worked at the company longer. He joined in May 2012, four months before Gore-Coty, according to LinkedIn.

“These last nearly 13 years have been the ride of a lifetime,” Gore-Coty said in the statement. “It was a true team effort, and I’m so proud of what we’ve built and the impact we’ve had on daily life in cities around the world.”

Uber shares were little changed in extended trading after closing on Monday at $83.64. The stock is up 39% this year, while the Nasdaq is about flat.

Last month, the company reported first-quarter results that beat on earnings but missed on revenue. A month earlier, the Federal Trade Commission sued Uber, alleging that the company engaged in “deceptive billing and cancellation practices” related to its Uber One subscription service.

In an interview with CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” Khosrowshahi characterized the lawsuit as “a bit of a head-scratcher for us.”

Byron Allen is putting his broadcast TV stations up for sale.

Allen Media Group said on Monday it has retained investment bank Moelis & Co. to sell its group of 28 owned and operated broadcast TV stations, which are affiliated with ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox in 21 markets across the U.S.

In a news release, Allen said the company has invested more than $1 billion into acquiring the stations over the past six years and after receiving “numerous inquiries and written offers” for most of the stations, has decided to explore a sale.

The Allen Media Group stations join others that have recently hit the sale block. Last year, CNBC reported that Sinclair was exploring the sale of more than 30% of its stations. Apollo Global Management is also reportedly exploring a sale of its Cox Media Group portfolio of TV and radio stations.

Allen Media Group said a sale of the stations would significantly reduce its debt load. Earlier this year, the company refinanced a $100 million debt facility. While S&P Global Ratings said it expected the company to maintain sufficient liquidity over the next 12 months, it noted that Allen Media Group still maintained a junk rating and faced future debt risks.

Last year, CNBC reported that Allen Media Group had been consistently late in making payments to its network owners, in some cases as much as 90 days past due, with the payments totaling tens of millions of dollars throughout the year. The reason for the lateness had been unclear, and representatives for Allen Media Group declined to address the details of CNBC’s reporting.

The stations have also reportedly undergone layoffs.

Allen, a former comedian, founded Entertainment Studios, now known as Allen Media Group, in the early 1990s. He later formed Allen Media Group Broadcasting in 2019 and has built up his profile and business ever since with a string of smaller deals.

He has also become known for expressing interest in buying various media assets to bulk up his media empire. In recent years, he has made a $30 billion bid for Paramount Global when it was up for sale in 2024, as well as a $10 billion offer for ABC and other Disney networks, and he reportedly offered $3.5 billion for Paramount’s BET Media Group.

Disclosure: Comcast’s NBCUniversal is the parent company of CNBC and broadcast network NBC.

While U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs play out in U.S. courts, another one of his proposed laws could weaponize the American tax system.

Investment banks and law firms warn this step could prove to be as significant as the impact of duties on investors.

The “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” which passed through the U.S. House of Representatives last week, includes the most sweeping changes to the tax treatment of foreign capital in the U.S. in decades under a provision known as Section 899. The bill must still gain the Senate’s approval.

“We see this legislation as creating the scope for the US administration to transform a trade war into a capital war if it so wishes,” said George Saravelos, global head of FX research at Deutsche Bank on Thursday.

“Section 899 challenges the open nature of US capital markets by explicitly using taxation on foreign holdings of US assets as leverage to further US economic goals,” Saravelos added in the note to clients, under the subtitle “weaponization of US capital markets in to law.”

Section 899 says it will hit entities from “discriminatory foreign countries” — those that impose levies such as the digital services taxes that disproportionately affect U.S. companies.

France, for instance, has a 3% tax on revenues from online platforms, which primarily targets big technology firms such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple. Germany is reportedly considering a similar tax of 10%.

Under the new tax bill, the U.S. would hit investors from such countries by increasing taxes on U.S. income by 5 percentage points each year, potentially taking the rate up to 20%.

Emmanuel Cau, head of European Equity Strategy at Barclays, suggested that the mere passage of the tax legislation could make dollar assets less valuable for foreign investors.

“In our view, this is a risk for those companies generating US revenues, and domiciled in countries that have enacted Digital Services Taxes (DST) or are implementing the OECD’s Under Taxed Payment Rule (UTPR),” Cau said in a Friday note to clients.

He highlighted companies such as London-listed Compass Group, which provides catering services to U.S. schools, and InterContinental Hotels, which owns at least 25 luxury hotels in the U.S., are likely to be affected by the proposed law.

“Given US net international investment position is sharply negative, there is indeed scope for capital outflows if indeed S899 passes through the Senate in its current form,” he added.

The impact of the bill won’t be limited to European companies or individuals from those states.

The bill “could significantly increase tax rates applicable to certain non-U.S. individuals and business, governmental, and other entities,” said Max Levine, head of U.S. tax at the law firm Linklaters.

This means it could also ensnare governments and central banks, which are large investors of U.S. Treasuries. France and Germany, for instance, held a combined $475 billion worth of U.S. government bonds as of March.

The proposed tax would lower returns on U.S. Treasuries for those investors as “the de facto yield on US Treasuries would drop by nearly 100bps,” Deutsche Bank’s Saravelos added. “The adverse impact on demand for USTs and funding the US twin deficit at a time when this is most needed is clear”.

“It’s very bad,” said Beat Wittmann, chairman of Switzerland-based Porta Advisors. “This is huge — this is just one piece in the overall plan and it’s completely consistent with what this administration is all about.”

“The ultimate judge for this is not our opinions, it’s the bond market,” Wittmann added. “The U.S. bond market is discounting these developments, and we have seen in the last few weeks, that if there was a safe haven move, investors clearly prefer German bunds.”

Large Australian pension funds with U.S. investments have also been reportedly concerned by the bill, since Australia operates a medicines subsidy scheme that is opposed by large U.S. pharmaceutical companies.

Legal experts at the Mayer Brown law firm suggest that “significant changes” could be made to the bill as it passes through the U.S. Senate before it’s enshrined into law by Trump.

“As such, there may be questions about whether the provisions of the proposal that override tax treaties could be included in the US Senate’s version of the tax bill,” Mayer Brown’s experts said.

Amazon’s devices unit has a new team tasked with inventing “breakthrough” consumer products that’s being led by a former Microsoft executive who helped create the Xbox.

The ZeroOne team is spread across Seattle, San Francisco and Sunnyvale, California, and is focused on both hardware and software projects, according to job postings from the past month. The name is a nod to its mission of developing emerging product ideas from conception to launch, or “zero to one.”

Amazon has a checkered history in hardware, with hits including the Kindle e-reader, Echo smart speaker and Fire streaming sticks, as well as flops like the Fire Phone, Halo fitness tracker and Glow kids teleconferencing device.

Many of the products emerged from Lab126, Amazon’s hardware research and development unit, which is based in Silicon Valley.

The new group is being led by J Allard, who spent 19 years at Microsoft, most recently as technology chief of consumer products, a role he left in 2010, according to his LinkedIn profile. He was a key architect of the Xbox game console, as well as the Zune, a failed iPod competitor.

Allard joined Amazon in September, and the company confirmed at the time that he would be part of the devices and services team under Panos Panay, who left Microsoft for Amazon in 2023 to lead the group.

An Amazon spokesperson confirmed Allard oversees ZeroOne but declined to comment further on the group’s work.

The job postings provide few specific details about what ZeroOne is building, though one listing references working on “conceiving, designing, and bringing to market computer vision techniques for a new smart-home product.”

Another post for a senior customer insights manager in San Francisco says the job entails owning “the methodology and execution of concept testing and early feedback for ZeroOne programs.”

“You’ll be part of a team that embraces design thinking, rapid experimentation, and building to learn,” the description says. “If you’re excited about working in small, nimble teams to create entirely new product categories and thrive in the ambiguity of breakthrough innovation, we want to talk to you.”

Amazon has pulled in staffers from other business units that have experience developing innovative technologies, including its Alexa voice assistant, Luna cloud gaming service and Halo sleep tracker, according to Linkedin profiles of ZeroOne employees. The head of a projection mapping startup called Lightform that Amazon acquired is helping lead the group.

While Amazon is expanding this particular corner of its devices group, the company is scaling back other areas of the sprawling devices and services division.

Earlier this month, Amazon laid off about 100 of the group’s employees. The job cuts included staffers working on Alexa and Amazon Kids, which develops services for children, as well as Lab126, according to public filings and people familiar with the matter who asked not to be named due to confidentiality. More than 50 employees were laid off at Amazon’s Lab126 facilities in Sunnyvale, according to Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) filings in California.

Amazon said the job cuts affected a fraction of a percent of the devices and services organization, which has tens of thousands of employees.

Nvidia shares jumped on Thursday after posting a positive set of earnings, sparking a rally in global semiconductor stocks.

Shares of Nvidia were 6% higher after the company posted better-than-expected earnings and revenue on Wednesday, even as it took a hit from U.S. semiconductor export restrictions to China.

Nvidia has been seen by investors as a bellwether for the broader semiconductor industry and artificial intelligence-related stocks, with its latest strong numbers sparking a rally among global semiconductor names.

Nvidia’s earnings helped boost other chip names, with Taiwan Semiconductor, AMD and Qualcomm all up about 1%.

In Japan, Tokyo Electron closed more than 4% higher, while SK Hynix, which is a supplier of high bandwidth memory to Nvidia, was nearly 2% up at the close of markets in South Korea.

In Europe, ASM International, BE Semiconductor Industries and ASML were all in positive territory.

The semiconductor industry has faced a number of headwinds from uncertainty around tariff policy in the U.S. and chip export restrictions to China.

Companies such as ASML, which makes machines that are critical for manufacturing the most advanced chips, have seen billions wiped off their value as a result.

Nvidia on Wednesday said it wrote off $4.5 billion of H20 chip inventory that it couldn’t ship to China because of export curbs, saying it also calculated $2.5 billion of lost revenue as well.

The restrictions on China do not seem to be going away.

The U.S. has ordered a number of companies, including those producing chemicals and design software for semiconductors, to stop shipping goods to China without a license, according to a Reuters report on Thursday.

Despite this, Nvidia still managed to post financial results for the April quarter that beat market expectations, allaying fears that demand for its graphics processing units, which have become key for training huge AI models, is dwindling.

Boeing’s airplane deliveries to China will resume next month after handovers were paused amid a trade war with the Trump administration, CEO Kelly Ortberg said Thursday, as he brushed off the impact of tit-for-tat tariffs with some of the United States’ largest trading partners this year.

Ortberg had said last month that China had paused deliveries.

“China has now indicated … they’re going to take deliveries,” Ortberg said. The first deliveries will be next month, he told a Bernstein conference on Thursday.

Boeing, a top U.S. exporter whose output of airplanes helps soften the U.S. trade deficit, has been paying tariffs on imported components from Italy and Japan for its wide-body Dreamliner planes, which are made in South Carolina, Ortberg said, adding that much of it can be recouped when the planes are exported again.

“The only duties that we would have to cover would be the duties for a delivery, say, to a U.S. airline,” he said.

Regarding the rapidly changing trade policies that have included several pauses and some exemptions, Ortberg said, “I personally don’t think these will be … permanent in the long term.”

He reiterated that Boeing plans to ramp up production this year of its best-selling 737 Max jet, which will require Federal Aviation Administration approval.

The FAA capped output of the workhorse planes at 38 a month last year after a door plug that wasn’t secured when it left Boeing’s factory blew out midair in the first minutes of an Alaska Airlines flight.

Ortberg said the company could produce 42 Max jets a month by midyear and assess moving up to 47 a month about half a year later.

The company’s long-delayed Max 7 and Max 10 variants, the largest and smallest planes in the narrow-body family, are scheduled to be certified by the end of the year, he said.

Many airline executives have applauded Ortberg’s leadership since he took the reins at Boeing last August, tasked with stemming years of losses and ending reputational and safety crises, including the impact of two fatal Max crashes.

CEOs have long complained about delivery delays from the company that left them short of planes during a post-pandemic travel boom.

“I do think Boeing has turned the corner,” United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” earlier Thursday. He said supply chain problems are limiting deliveries of new planes overall.

“We over-ordered aircraft believing the supply chain would be challenged,” he said.

E.l.f. Beauty announced on Wednesday plans to acquire Hailey Bieber’s beauty brand Rhode in a deal worth up to $1 billion as the cosmetics company looks to expand further into skincare.

The acquisition — E.l.f.’s biggest ever, according to FactSet — is comprised of $800 million in cash and stock, plus an additional potential $200 million payout based on Rhode’s performance over the next three years. The deal is expected to close in the second quarter of the company’s fiscal 2026 — or later this year.

“I’ve been in the consumer space 34 years, and I’ve been blown away by seeing this brand over time. In less than three years, they’ve gone from zero to $212 million in net sales, direct-to-consumer only, with only 10 products. I didn’t think that was possible,” CEO Tarang Amin told CNBC in an interview. “So that level of disruption definitely caught our attention.”

In a news release, Bieber said she’s excited to partner with E.l.f. to bring her brand to “more faces, places, and spaces.”

“From day one, my vision for rhode has been to make essential skin care and hybrid makeup you can use every day,” said Bieber. “Just three years into this journey, our partnership with e.l.f. Beauty marks an incredible opportunity to elevate and accelerate our ability to reach more of our community with even more innovative products and widen our distribution globally.”

Launched in 2022, Rhode has more than doubled its customer base over the past year and generated $212 million in revenue in the 12 months ended March 31. The company’s growth has primarily come through its website, but it plans to launch in Sephora stores throughout North America and the U.K. before the end of the year.

As part of the acquisition, Bieber will serve as Rhode’s chief creative officer and head of innovation, overseeing creative, product innovation and marketing. The brand was launched alongside two co-founders, Michael and Lauren Ratner, but it was Bieber’s influence and name that turned it into a billion-dollar brand.

Under her direction, Rhode last year became the No. 1 skincare brand in earned media value — or exposure through methods other than paid advertising — with 367% year-over-year growth.

Rhode is a solid match for E.l.f., which has seen growth skyrocket in recent years in large part to its digital prowess. The company has legions of online fans and is known for TikTok marketing that feels more natural to consumers.

The company is also looking to dig deeper into skincare, which has become more popular with all age groups, particularly E.l.f’s younger, core consumer. In 2023, it acquired skincare brand Naturium for $355 million. Its acquisition of Rhode will allow it to build on its skincare growth and reach a higher income consumer.

“E.l.f. cosmetics is about $6.50 in its core entry price point, Rhode, on average, is in the high 20s, so I’d say it does bring us a different consumer set to the company overall, but the same approach in terms of how we engage and entertain them,” said Amin.

E.l.f. made the announcement as it posted fiscal fourth quarter results, which beat Wall Street’s expectations on the top and bottom lines.

Here’s how the beauty retailer performed compared with what Wall Street was anticipating, based on a survey of analysts by LSEG:

The company’s reported net income for the three-month period that ended March 31 was $28.3 million, or 49 cents per share, compared with $14.5 million, or 25 cents per share, a year earlier. Sales rose to $332.7 million, up about 4% from $321.1 million.

E.l.f.’s sales have increased rapidly in recent years, but investors have grown concerned as that growth started to slow and the threat of tariffs began weighing on its business. The company sources about 75% of its products from China, which currently faces a 30% duty on exports to the U.S. Last week, it announced plans to raise prices by $1 to offset higher costs from tariffs.

While U.S. duties on Chinese imports are 30% now, that could change as President Donald Trump negotiates with Beijing. As a result, E.l.f. said it isn’t providing a fiscal 2026 outlook “due to the wide range of potential outcomes related to tariffs.”

Amin said E.l.f. paid more than 145% in duties before Trump agreed to slash the levies on Chinese goods, but those costs didn’t come through during the quarter and will show up when the company reports its fiscal 2026 first-quarter earnings.

E.l.f. shares dropped more than 13% in extended trading Wednesday.