PARK CITY, Utah — Rivian Automotive CEO RJ Scaringe envisions a day in the not-so-distant future when the electric vehicle maker’s manufacturing employees will have a new type of colleague: humanoid robots.

“There’s going to be thousands of people that are collaborating alongside these robots. They’re going to be taking pictures, ‘Hey, check this out! My co-worker’s name is Phil, and he’s a robot,'” Scaringe said during a media event for the launch of the Rivian R2 EV.

The 43-year-old automotive enthusiast and tech entrepreneur started a robotics company last year called Mind Robotics. The company has raised more than $1 billion, according to Scaringe.

Humanoid robots are designed to be shaped and move like people. Artificial intelligence algorithms power their abilities along with complex hardware like semiconductors. Proponents say they could be used in various settings, from factories to hospitality and even in the home, while others have raised concerns about the devices replacing human jobs.

Scaringe said the company expects to reveal its first product in less than a year, with Rivian as a large minority shareholder and launch customer. Mind currently has roughly 20 open positions ranging from software and hardware engineers to data architects, according to its website.

Scaringe, who is executive chair and acting CEO of Mind, told CNBC that the plan is to keep the robotics company separate from Rivian, as opposed to the automaker partially shifting to make humanoid robots, like Tesla CEO Elon Musk is doing with his company.

“We have a deep relationship, and that was actually how we structured it,” Scaringe said during an interview. “A big part of structuring the business was to allow me to be able to spend time on both.”

The robotics strategy adds to a narrative of Scaringe doing things differently than Musk, despite obvious similarities in their companies. There have been enough comparisons that Rivian has even been called the “anti-Tesla” and Scaringe has been referred to as the “anti-Elon.”

“I’d say there’s a lot of alignment there, and I think that’s because, obviously, I’m biased, but I think they’re right … that autonomy is a super important technology,” Scaringe said about Tesla and Rivian. “But in terms of the products, they, in many ways, couldn’t be more different.”

So far Rivian and Mind are assisting each other, though, much like Musk’s companies have also done during developmental phases. That includes Musk’s xAI company merging with SpaceX before the company’s record-setting initial public offering on Friday as well as SpaceX purchasing vehicles from Tesla.

Scaringe said Rivian will be a “huge beneficiary” of Mind, which is using data from Rivian for training its AI models. Along with Rivian’s equity stake, the automaker will be Mind’s first customer for the robots.

“We realized it was such a big opportunity that deserved to be its own company,” said Scaringe. He said he believes there is a multitrillion-dollar total addressable market for industrial labor.

Scaringe was visibly excited when speaking with media about the potential for AI and humanoid robotics, calling it “one of the most exciting times, perhaps in human history.”

“One hundred years from now, they’re going to be inheriting the work that we do over our lifetimes, and so I just think we’re so lucky that we get to be alive at the birth of AI,” Scaringe said.

Despite the optimism for humanoid robots, Scaringe said he expects the devices to work alongside humans rather than replace them completely for the foreseeable future, saying it takes a “long time” for vehicle assembly plants to become so-called “dark factories” which can be almost entirely run by robots.

“What I see happening is the simplest tasks will be taken on by robots. The more complex tasks that require higher levels of reasoning or more complex, more tactile levels of dexterity [will be done by humans],” he said.

Scaringe said manufacturers are dealing with an “extreme lack of labor,” from other automakers. Rivian currently has more than 30 open manufacturing and engineering jobs, according to the company’s website.

The need for such workers, as well as the rapid development of AI, Scaringe believes, will mean human employees will be working alongside a robot named “Phil” far sooner than they may expect.

“The rate at which this is moving is far faster than I’d say — like an order of magnitude faster — than the average person in society understands,” he said. “That’s going to be a particularly big challenge in the short-term to just have the average person … realize how fast the models are learning and how capable they are at doing almost everything.”

— CNBC’s Arjun Kharpal contributed to this report.

SpaceX shares soared on Friday, propelling the rocket company’s valuation above $2 trillion, as trading commenced on the Nasdaq after a record-setting initial public offering.

The Elon Musk-led space company’s stock jumped more than 19% to $160.95 a share, putting its market value at roughly $2.1 trillion. At its session high, the stock traded at $176.52.

“This was a successful launch, no doubt about it,” said Jay Woods, chief market strategist at Freedom Capital Markets. “The public demand is there, so that’s a good thing. But now we’ll wait to see if it can hold that open price, or was it an euphoric retail crowd driving it.”

More than 500 million shares exchanged hands in SpaceX’s debut session, dwarfing all other IPOs seen this year.

SpaceX opened at $150 per share, marking a roughly 11% gain over its $135 IPO price. But that number was lower than the $175 level initially shown in indications of interest to trading desks.

“You have to give it a full trading day, which will be next week,” Woods said. “The initial thoughts on the trading desks were that it could get up to $200.”

Friday’s debut officially crowns Musk as the first trillionaire on record. The IPO is expected to mint thousands of new millionaires and multiple billionaires.

Goldman Sachs climbed more than 2% in Friday’s session, with traders applauding its role as lead-left bookrunner on the SpaceX transaction. Goldman was the second-biggest gainer in the Invesco KBW Bank ETF (KWBW).

But shares of space industry stocks tumbled as investors shifted focus to SpaceX. Redwire and Rocket Lab slid more than 11% and 10%, respectively, in Friday’s session. The Procure Space ETF (UFO) dropped 7%.

Tesla, another Musk-led company, swung between gains and losses in Friday’s session. The electric vehicle maker — which is a top stock among retail investors — is worth less than SpaceX by market cap.

Retail traders raced to get in on SpaceX’s IPO given their broad support for Musk following Tesla’s success. Yet SpaceX allocated a smaller-than-expected portion of its IPO to the retail class, a source told CNBC.

Still, SpaceX was the most-bought stock by retail traders on net in Friday’s trading, data from VandaTrack shows. It was also among the most-discussed stocks in Reddit‘s popular WallStreetBets forum in the days leading up to the IPO, according to meme stock tracker Breakout Point.

“Market sentiment is reflecting a book that looks like it was pretty robust,” said Dan Alpert, founding managing partner of Westwood Capital. “The folks who only got a portion of the shares they asked for are now looking for a stable market in which to buy.”

Multiple big investors have quietly built out stakes in SpaceX as a private company for nearly two decades. But some market participants have raised red flags about investing in SpaceX into the IPO, citing concerns over valuation and potential growth obstacles for the Starlink business.

SpaceX’s debut is expected to kick off a wave of high-profile IPOs. Anthropic and OpenAI both confidentially filed prospectuses with regulators in recent weeks.

SpaceX Operations Chief Gwynne Shotwell told CNBC in an exclusive interview that she “wasn’t sure we would go public.” But she said the current moment “actually feels like the right time.”

— CNBC’s John Melloy and Tobias Burns contributed to this report.

U.S. tech giants have backed a German company in its latest fundraising round to develop its humanoid robotics tech.

Neura Robotics’ Series C financing, which is worth up to $1.4 billion, featured Tether, Qualcomm, Amazon and Nvidia, alongside European industrial companies Bosch and Schaeffler and the European Investment Bank.

The company hit a valuation of around $7 billion, according to a source familiar with the matter, who asked to remain anonymous as they weren’t authorized to discuss the information. The company declined to comment on the valuation.

“The future of AI will not only live on screens,” said David Reger, founder and CEO of Neura Robotics, in a statement. “It will move, interact, learn and work beside us in the real world.”

The full funding is contingent on Neura hitting certain milestones based on company performance, the source added. Neura declined to comment on the milestones.

Investors have piled into robotics startups in recent times as attention turns to deploying AI in physical systems that can interact in real-world environments.

Robotics companies have raised $55.8 billion so far in 2026, according to Dealroom, a record figure nearly double the previous record raised last year.

The majority of that has been raised by companies in the U.S. and China, but new robotics companies in Europe are also being developed. They include German-based SoftBank-backed Agile Robots and U.K.-based Humanoid.

“Many believed globally relevant AI infrastructure companies could only emerge from Silicon Valley,” Reger said.

“We believe the next generation of AI leaders can emerge anywhere in the world where there is enough vision, engineering talent and execution speed,” he added.

“With this financing, Neura is firmly among the global leaders in the robotics race, alongside the best in the US and China.”

Amazon is paying Corning billions of dollars for optical fiber to power and connect its rapidly expanding U.S. data centers, the latest megadeal featuring two companies at the center of the artificial intelligence boom.

The agreement, announced Monday, will play out over several years and create 1,000 jobs at Corning’s North Carolina factories, the companies said. Corning’s fiber optic cable and networking solutions are becoming essential elements of AI infrastructure because they enable fast connections between data centers and the racks and chips they house.

Shares of Corning popped 4% on Monday. Amazon stock was little changed.

“Amazon’s data centers power the services millions of people and businesses rely on every day,” the companies said in a press release. “Corning’s fiber optics are a critical piece of that infrastructure, and together, these investments help fuel the U.S. economic engine.”

The deal also expands a Corning training program for fiber optic technicians in North Carolina. Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman said in the press release that the company’s investments in the state have created over 26,000 jobs. Last year, Amazon committed to spend $10 billion on new data centers in North Carolina.

Fresh demand from AI is reinvigorating the 175-year-old Corning as hyperscalers and AI labs scramble to meet their exploding needs for computing power. Corning’s shares have more than doubled so far this year and are up almost sixfold since the end of 2023.

In May, Nvidia committed to investing up to $3.2 billion in Corning as part of a deal that involves the glass company building three new advanced manufacturing plants entirely devoted to the chipmaker. And in January, Meta said it would spend up to $6 billion as the flagship customer helping Corning build out its optical cable plant in Hickory, North Carolina, an expansion that’s expected to create around 1,000 jobs.

Corning is well known for making all the display glass for Apple‘s iPhone, but optical communications remains its largest and fastest-growing business. Since inventing optical fiber for long-range communication in 1970, Corning has provided millions of miles of cables to connect racks together in AI data centers from all the major players.

The Trump administration has called on Big Tech to onshore as many steps in the AI supply chain as possible, and Corning helps answer that need. The majority of Corning’s business happens overseas, which CEO Wendell Weeks told CNBC earlier this year isn’t changing. But he also said “next year the hyperscalers will be our biggest customers.”

“This agreement with Amazon represents a significant milestone for Corning and for American manufacturing,” Weeks said in Monday’s press release, adding it will “lead the way toward building a resilient U.S. manufacturing base.” 

WATCH: Amazon’s biggest AI data center powers Anthropic without Nvidia

Meta shares dropped more than 5% on Friday after the Financial Times reported that the company could potentially raise tens of billions of dollars in a stock offering to fund its artificial intelligence investments.

The social media company is pondering the potential stock sale, the FT reported, after rival Alphabet said this week that it plans to raise $85 billion from selling equity, increasing that number from $80 billion. Alphabet has been on a tear over the past year, but the stock is down for a fourth straight week as investors worry about excessive AI spending.

Meta hasn’t hired banks and may not issue new stock, the FT noted.

A Meta spokesperson called the report “pure speculation.”

“We’ve been clear that huge opportunities lie ahead in AI, and we’ll continue focusing on raising capital in the most flexible ways to support that,” the spokesperson said in an email.

Like other tech giants, Meta and Alphabet are pouring record sums into capital expenditures as they race to build out AI infrastructure to meet what they see as insatiable demand.

In April, Meta raised its 2026 capex guidance to as high as $145 billion from a previous forecast of up to $135 billion. Alphabet said that month that it was hiking the top end of its capex guidance by $5 billion to $190 billion.

Wall Street has been treating the two companies very differently over the past year, largely because Alphabet has a prospering cloud business that helps justify its hefty spending. Alphabet’s stock is up more than 115% in the last 12 months, topping all of its megacap peers, while Meta’s stock is down 13%, the worst performer in the bunch.

WATCH: Evercore’s Mark Mahaney: Meta is one of my favorite stocks in the large cap internet space.

Waymo is starting to offer select customers rides in its new Ojai robotaxis, which are designed to work better in snowier conditions and are cheaper to manufacture than the company’s older fleet of cars.

Rides will be available to some public passengers in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Phoenix, before opening up in San Diego, Las Vegas and Denver this summer, Waymo said in a statement on Thursday.

Alphabet’s self-driving division already had 100 Ojai vehicles on the road as part of its almost 4,000-car fleet. The company will have thousands of Ojai cars on the road by the end of the year, Ryan Powell, Waymo’s head of design, told CNBC in an interview. 

Waymo first announced the Ojai design in 2024. In February, the company opened rides to employees and their guests in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

As Waymo expands its fleet in an effort to cement its lead in the U.S. over Tesla and Amazon’s Zoox, the company is aiming to control costs. The Ojai is the first vehicle to take advantage of the sixth-generation Waymo Driver, the company’s proprietary driving system, which includes technology that can better detect critical details in low-light situations.

The vehicles, integrating new hardware and software, are made by China’s Geely, and cost significantly less to manufacture than earlier Waymo cars made by Jaguar and others. The Ojai robotaxis require fewer costly cameras and sensors than the previous Jaguar I-PACE vehicles.

Waymo, which got a $16 billion cash infusion in February from parent company Alphabet and other backers, offers fully autonomous robotaxis in several U.S. markets and plans to begin service in London later this year. The company has driven over 20 million overall autonomous rides and is looking to hit 1 million weekly trips by the end of the year, Powell said.

In the new vehicles, Waymo uses its own custom chips. The cars have also has been outfitted with improved lidar that can see through heavy rain and snow conditions, and have upgraded audio receivers that can better hear sirens and and other noises, the company said.

Ojai cars are roomier and also have removable steering wheels in them. The doors open and close automatically.

Powell said Waymo has learned from the design team that the “familiar form factor of the I-PACE and having the steering wheel and the pedals up there” helps people get “over that hump of trying something new.”

When asked whether the cars will integrate Google’s Gemini technology, Powell said the company is exploring more “natural ways of interacting with the vehicle” using AI technology. He gave the example of telling the car to move up a little further.

“I get excited about some of the things that you see on the Gemini side that may make some of those things possible,” he said.

While Waymo rapidly expands, the company is also dealing with some safety-related setbacks.

Earlier this month, Waymo issued a voluntary recall of about 3,800 of its robotaxis to fix software issues that could allow them to drive into flooded roadways, after incidents were captured on social media. Waymo said last week that it’s temporarily pausing freeway rides after spotting problems with its performance around construction zones. 

—CNBC’s Lora Kolodny contributed to this report.

WATCH: Waymo says it’s raised $16 billion at $126 billion valuation

Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg said Wednesday that the company has met requirements set by the Federal Aviation Administration to increase its production of 737 Max aircraft to 47 jets per month.

The company is currently rolling out aircraft at a rate of 42 per month, Ortberg said at a Bernstein conference.

“We’ve passed the capstone review for rate 47, so we are now in the process of running the line at the 47-a-month rate,” Ortberg said. “It’ll probably take us a few months of stabilization there. … My guess is we continue to go up in rate. It may take a little bit longer, but we’re off and rolling now for the 47-a-month rate, and we should be there in the next couple months.”

In Boeing’s most recent earnings report last month, Ortberg said he expected the company to ramp up the production of its bestselling aircraft to 47 a month this summer. On Wednesday, he said Boeing is “highly confident” that it’s ready to meet that rate.

While Boeing has previously seen production as high as 57 aircraft a month, Ortberg said he doesn’t believe the company can currently sustain that rate with its safety and quality processes.

“We’d like to get someday to a 63-a-month rate, and so we’re looking forward to that,” Ortberg said. “The market will support those higher rates.”

Still, he acknowledged Boeing has “work to do” to get to a point where the company can further ramp up its production rates of the 737 Max aircraft. As the company looks toward reaching a 52-per-month production rate, Ortberg said that process could take at least six months, if not longer, if the newly approved rate goes into effect in July or August.

“I think the whole world’s watching to make sure we make 47 and 52,” he added.

— CNBC’s Meghan Reeder contributed to this report.

As Elon Musk prepares to lead a second trillion-dollar company into the public market, a move that will likely put him in charge of two of the 10 most valuable U.S. enterprises, chatter is building that Musk’s ultimate goal is to combine the entities into one.

SpaceX is expected to start trading on the Nasdaq in just over two weeks after obtaining a private market valuation of $1.25 trillion earlier this year, when it merged with xAI, Musk’s artificial intelligence company. Tesla’s market cap currently sits at around $1.6 trillion.

The two companies already have a laundry list of shared resources, and Musk has discussed with colleagues the possibility of folding the companies together, according to people familiar with the talks who asked not to be named due to the sensitivity of the topic.

A current Tesla employee told CNBC that many workers at the electric vehicle company have long expected such a transaction to eventually take place and that the topic is openly discussed internally. Another person close to the company said that shared challenges tied to power and compute constraints have led to regular collaborations.

While a company launching rockets based on contracts with the government may not seem to have a lot in common with an EV manufacturer, both of the businesses are increasingly focused on AI and the talent and computing resources necessary to build AI infrastructure and services. More than three-quarters of SpaceX’s $10.1 billion in capital expenditures in the first quarter were tied to AI, and Tesla said in its latest earnings report that capex will roughly triple this year, topping $25 billion.

“Tesla has to run powerful AI systems inside a moving vehicle with tight limits on power, cooling, latency, reliability and cost,” said Tomasz Tunguz, a former engineer who’s now a venture capitalist at Theory Ventures. “SpaceX has to think about compute in orbit, where radiation, thermal cycling, launch mass, power generation and heat rejection all become existential design constraints.”

Tunguz said a potential merger has captured the attention of tech enthusiasts in Silicon Valley, but he concedes that a deal of that size would be “complex.”

Representatives from SpaceX and Tesla didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Musk, the world’s richest person, is set to kick off SpaceX’s roadshow next week, as he tries to sell Wall Street on the promises of the 24-year-old company that’s already a big conglomerate. It consists of the reusable rocket business, the Starlink internet satellite service and xAI, which includes social media site X, formerly known as Twitter. SpaceX also has an agreement on the table to purchase AI coding startup Cursor for $60 billion.

“I think it’s been proven by Elon himself,” said Tejpaul Bhatia, a longtime SpaceX investor and CEO of Nebex, a startup that’s creating the financial infrastructure for space-related transactions. “Parallel entrepreneurship seems to work for him.”

SpaceX said in its prospectus that it bought $697 million worth of Tesla’s Megapack battery energy storage systems in 2024 and 2025 to power the data centers owned and operated by xAI in the area surrounding the company’s Colossus facilities in Memphis, Tennessee. SpaceX also said it spent $131 million on Tesla Cybertrucks in 2025, purchased at the manufacturer’s suggested retail price.

Prior transactions between the companies included Tesla selling solar equipment and car parts to SpaceX, Tesla using SpaceX private jets, and Tesla leaning on SpaceX to develop a special alloy for its Cybertruck.

Suppliers sometimes view Musk’s companies as one big customer. In 2024, Nvidia agreed to divert a $500 million order of GPUs from Tesla to xAI at Musk’s request.

Legal experts said that a SpaceX-Tesla merger likely wouldn’t spark antitrust issues but it would potentially raise concerns among shareholders in each of the two companies. Questions around which company would be the parent, how a stock swap would take place, and who determines the appropriate price are among the thorny challenges.

One thing that’s almost certain is Musk won’t have to worry about pushback from SpaceX’s board, given that the the CEO has 85% voting power. In the risk factors section of its prospectus, SpaceX notes that it’s a “controlled company,” which allows for exceptions when it comes to governance rules and means that Class A shareholders “will not have the same protections afforded to shareholders of companies that are subject to all of the corporate governance requirements” of the Nasdaq.

The biggest beneficiary of a tie-up between SpaceX and Tesla could be Musk.

SpaceX has linked Musk’s compensation rewards to two milestones: achieving a $7.5 trillion market cap and colonizing Mars with at least 1 million inhabitants. Meanwhile, Tesla shareholders approved a pay plan late last year that consists of 12 tranches, with each payout tied to market cap gains and operational achievements.

Ross Gerber, CEO of investment firm Gerber Kawasaki, previously told CNBC that a merger of SpaceX and Tesla would allow Musk to fulfill a dream of running one big company and that it would make it easier to raise and borrow the kinds of cash needed to compete in AI with the likes of Google.

Bhatia said a combination would be more about recognizing the opportunity ahead in SpaceX’s core market.

“I believe that the space market is huge right now,” Bhatia said. “And it’s just going to get bigger after the SpaceX IPO.”

Correction: A prior version of this story incorrectly identified Kimbal Musk’s current board seats.

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