Good morning. Switching things up today in celebration of our fifth annual Fortune Brainstorm AI, which continues today in San Francisco.
We kick things off with OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap and close out the day with Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe. (See the agenda here; watch here.)
Below, three highlights from Day 1 of our gathering, plus the day’s tech news in “More tech.” —Andrew Nusca
Want to send thoughts or suggestions to Fortune Tech? Drop a line here.
Amazon robotaxi service Zoox to start charging for rides in 2026
Amazon’s self-driving robotaxi subsidiary, Zoox, expects to start charging passengers for rides in Las Vegas in early 2026, with paid rides in the San Francisco Bay Area coming later next year, a company executive said Monday.
The move, which would represent a key milestone for Zoox as it seeks to catch up with Alphabet’s Waymo, depends on obtaining federal regulatory and state approvals, Zoox cofounder and chief technology officer Jesse Levinson told the audience at Fortune Brainstorm AI in San Francisco.
Levinson said that Zoox is “laser focused” on moving people around cities, an addressable market he sees as being “just profoundly huge.” That directive has come “all the way from the very top” at Amazon, he added, despite the retailer’s significant interest in driverless package delivery.
“It’s harder to move people around than packages in terms of what you have to do with your vehicle,” Levinson said.
Zoox crossed the 1 million mile technical threshold for autonomous rides just last week, Levinson added. The company’s distinct, carriage-seated vehicles, which have no steering wheels or manual controls, currently provide rides to passengers free of charge in portions of Las Vegas, and Zoox is slowly opening up the waitlist to use the service in San Francisco.
Despite its progress, Zoox won’t generate revenues that are meaningful to parent Amazon for at least several more years, Levinson said. And then? The business will become more “financially interesting,” he said. —Amanda Gerut
Google Cloud CEO lays out 3-part strategy to meet AI’s energy demands
The immense electricity needs of AI computing were flagged early on as a bottleneck, prompting Alphabet’s Google Cloud to plan for how to source energy and how to use it, according to Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian.
Speaking at Fortune Brainstorm AI in San Francisco on Monday, he pointed out that the company has been working on AI since well before large language models came along and took the long view.
“We also knew that the most problematic thing that was going to happen was going to be energy, because energy and data centers were going to become a bottleneck alongside chips,” Kurian told Fortune’s Andrew Nusca. “So we designed our machines to be super efficient.”
The International Energy Agency has estimated that some AI-focused data centers consume as much electricity as 100,000 homes, and some of the largest facilities under construction could even use 20 times that amount.
At Brainstorm, Kurian laid out Google Cloud’s three-pronged approach to ensuring there will be enough energy to meet all that demand.
First, the company seeks to be as diversified as possible in the kinds of energy that power AI computation.
Second, an important part of Google Cloud’s strategy is being as efficient as possible, including how it reuses energy within data centers.
And third, Google Cloud is working on “some new fundamental technologies to actually create energy in new forms,” Kurian said. He didn’t elaborate further. —Jason Ma
Cursor’s AI Help Desk handles 80% of its employees’ support tickets
AI coding-assistant start-up Cursor isn’t just using artificial intelligence to help developers write code, it’s deploying AI across its own internal operations, CEO, Michael Truell, told the audience at Fortune’s Brainstorm AI in San Francisco.
Truell said the company had already automated roughly 80% of its customer support tickets with the help of the technology. He said the company had also implemented an internal AI-powered communication system that allows employees to query information across the organization.
“We’ve actually done a lot of work internally on customizing that setup,” he said.
Cursor also uses AI for internal communications, he said.
“We have a system where folks can ask any question about the company and get it answered by an AI,” Truell said, as well as a project with “a few forward-deployed engineers internally embedded throughout, building custom tooling right now for operations, for sales and experimenting.”
Cursor, which is valued at $29.3 billion, said last month it had crossed $1 billion in annualized revenue and now has more than 300 employees. The company has seen rapid growth since it was founded by a team of four MIT graduates in 2022.
The company’s AI coding tool, which first launched in 2023, has been popular with software developers who use it to help both generate and edit code. —Beatrice Nolan
More tech
—Nvidia China sales unlocked. The White House will allow Nvidia to ship more powerful H200 chips to “approved customers,” with 25% of chip sales paid to the U.S.
—Paramount makes hostile bid for Warner Bros. $108.4 billion, all cash.
—Robinhood enters Indonesia. The fintech firm acquires a pair of local brokerages.
—U.S. state AI regulation ban would exempt child safety laws. AI czar David Sacks shares the Trump administration’s strategy for pushing through an unpopular policy.
—Google “four eyes.” Two types of AI-powered smart glasses are in development: one with screens and one that’s audio-only.
—AI is fabricating research papers, journals, and archives, warns the International Committee of the Red Cross.
—Apple chip chief Johny Srouji will stay put. “I don't plan on leaving anytime soon,” reads a staff memo.
