Waymo announced on Tuesday that it will be expanding its service to include another 27 square miles of coverage around the San Francisco Bay Area.
TakeAway Points:
- In the San Francisco Bay Area, Waymo said Tuesday it is extending its service to include an additional 27 square miles.
- Salesforce on Wednesday announced plans to invest $1 billion in Singapore over the next five years.
Waymo extends robotaxi offering
With the expansion, Waymo will now take passengers around Mountain View, Los Altos, Palo Alto, and parts of Sunnyvale, California. The Alphabet-owned company opened its robotaxi service to the general public in San Francisco in June.
Waymo will initially limit the availability of its Silicon Valley service to users of the Waymo One app who are residents with ZIP codes in the area, the company said. Waymo plans to serve more riders across the region over time. The fleet of vehicles that will be in use in the new coverage areas are fully electric Jaguar I-Pace vehicles with Waymo’s fifth generation of self-driving sensors, software and other technology.
“Opening our fully autonomous ride-hailing service in Silicon Valley marks a special milestone in our Bay Area journey,” Waymo product chief Saswat Panigrahi said in a statement. “This is where Waymo began and where we’re headquartered.”
Waymo expanded its San Francisco Bay Area robotaxi service last summer into Daly City, Broadmoor and Colma. Its robotaxis do not yet carry passengers to San Francisco International Airport.
A spokesperson told CNBC that Waymo is in “active discussions with SFO,” and added that the company is “working to connect” Silicon Valley and San Francisco to “provide seamless autonomous rides across more of the Bay Area in the future.”
Waymo also recently launched a commercial robotaxi service in Austin, Texas, just in time for the city’s annual South by Southwest festival.
While would-be competitors, including Elon Musk’s automaker Tesla and Amazon-owned Zoox, are continuing their own robotaxi testing and development, Waymo has pulled far ahead of self-driving companies in the U.S.
Before Tuesday’s expansion, Waymo said it was serving more than 200,000 paid trips per week across San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Phoenix.
Alphabet doesn’t disclose financial results for the autonomous vehicle business, but Waymo is part of its “Other Bets.” That business unit generated $400 million in the fourth quarter of 2024 and incurred operating losses of $1.17 billion, according to the company’s most recent financial filing.
Salesforce to invest $1 billion in Singapore in the next 5 years
Salesforce on Wednesday announced plans to invest $1 billion in Singapore over the next five years.
The cloud software giant said the investment is designed to accelerate the country’s digital transformation and the adoption of Salesforce’s flagship AI offering Agentforce.
Salesforce is among the many technology companies hoping to boost revenue with generative AI features.
The company launched the newest version of Agentforce last month. It has previously described the system — which it says can tackle sophisticated questions in Salesforce’s Slack communications app, based on all available data — as the first digital AI platform for enterprises.
“We have had a fantastic experience here. We’ve been here for about 25 years at Salesforce and we’re investing another $1 billion in our operations here,” Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff told CNBC’s Sara Eisen at CONVERGE LIVE in Singapore on Wednesday.
“We don’t just do sales and marketing here. We also do extremely advanced artificial intelligence development. We have dozens of some of the very best AI engineers in the world here in our Singapore research center,” he added.
Salesforce said Agentforce can help Singapore to “rapidly expand” its labor force in several key service and public sector roles at a time when the country is grappling with an aging population and declining birth rates.
Jermaine Loy, managing director of the Singapore Economic Development Board, welcomed Salesforce’s investment, saying it will help to boost the country’s efforts “to build a vibrant hub for AI innovation.”
