Amazon Boosts Singapore Investment; UK Self-Driving Car Startup Secures $1bn Investment; Tesla Continues Workforce Cuts

On today’s news digest: Amazon Boosts Singapore Investment; UK Self-Driving Car Startup Secures $1bn Investment; Tesla Continues Workforce Cuts

Amazon is the latest big tech player to boost investment in Southeast Asia: the tech giant has announced plans to expand its cloud computing infrastructure with a USD$9bn (£7.18bn) investment in Singapore. The investment will help to meet the growing customer cloud services, as well as accelerating the adoption of AI. The outlay will be carried out over the next four years, doubling the investment of subsidiary Amazon Web Services in the region. 

In the UK, Wayve – a self-driving car technology startup – has secured USD$1bn (£800m) of investment to develop the next generation of AI-powered vehicles. The investment is backed by the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank, Microsoft, and AI chip maker Nvidia. With the investment, Wayve will develop and launch the first “embodied AI” tech for self-driving vehicles in the UK – this tech will allow automated vehicles to learn from and interact with their environment. 

Meanwhile in the US’ self-driving car sector, Tesla is making further cuts to its workforce: more employees said they had received layoff notices over the weekend and on Monday. The latest layoffs appear to have hit the software, services, and engineering departments of the company. It remains unclear how many more employees have been laid off – the cuts began last month, with Tesla reportedly cutting 10% of its global workforce of 140,000 people. 

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