Search results for "China"

Australia aims to protect, promote critical technologies

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison on Wednesday announced a new plan to protect and promote technologies critical to the national interest, including quantum technologies, in a challenge to China’s emerging dominance in key strategic fields. The initial focus would be on nine critical technologies on a list of 63. The top nine include quantum technologies […]

Key reason for supply shortages: Americans keep spending

Take a step back from the picked-over store shelves, the stalled container ships and the empty auto showrooms, and you’ll find a root cause of the shortages of just about everything. Even as the pandemic has dragged on, U.S. households flush with cash from stimulus checks, booming stock markets and enlarged home equity have felt […]

Rivian rockets past GM to become 2nd most valuable carmaker

Rivian Automotive, a company that has delivered about 150 electric pickup trucks mostly to employees, has surpassed General Motors to become the nation’s second most valuable automaker. The California company’s market valuation exceeded Ford’s in its first day a public company Wednesday. Its shares rose 10% at the opening bell Thursday pushing its valuation over […]

Chinese shoppers spend $139 billion during Singles' Day fest

Chinese shoppers spent $139.1 billion during this year’s annual Singles’ Day shopping extravaganza, breaking last year’s record even though spending slowed during the coronavirus pandemic. Alibaba tallied 540.3 billion yuan ($84.5 billion) in spending over the festival that spanned Nov. 1 to Nov. 11, the company said Thursday, a growth of 14% compared to a […]

Efforts to cut car, plane and ship emissions get small boost

Several countries and companies announced plans Wednesday to stop selling cars that run on gasoline or diesel over the next two decades, as part of efforts to clamp down on a significant source of planet-warming emissions. But the impact of the measures will likely be limited since several major car markets — notably the United […]

Uber Q3 loss widens on investment losses, revenue up 72%

Uber on Thursday posted a big rebound in third-quarter revenue thanks to riders and drivers returning from pandemic lockdowns, but its bottom-line loss was wider than Wall Street expected. The San Francisco-based ride-hailing company said its third-quarter loss widened to $2.42 billion, or $1.28 per share, from $1.1 billion, or 62 cents per share, in […]

Brazil's awaited 5G tender yields billions in investment

Brazil held its much-anticipated auction for build-out of the nation’s fifth-generation wireless network on Thursday, with the open question of whether China’s Huawei telecommunications company will be involved. The technology promises faster speeds, less lag when connecting to the network and the ability to connect more devices to the internet. But the ambitious auction also […]

Google bids on Pentagon program for Cloud computing technology

Three years ago, Google was pressured by its employees to drop a Pentagon project using artificial intelligence (AI), now, the Big Tech giant is chasing after another massive contract that will work on cloud computing to the military, according to The New York Times.  In 2018, Google backed away from Project Maven with the Department of […]

Facebook to shut down face-recognition system, delete data

Facebook said it will shut down its face-recognition system and delete the faceprints of more than 1 billion people amid growing concerns about the technology and its misuse by governments, police and others. “This change will represent one of the largest shifts in facial recognition usage in the technology’s history,” Jerome Pesenti, vice president of […]