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But that mid-sized vehicle, which is supposed to start at under $50,000, is now delayed until next year. It was supposed to start shipping by the end of 2026.

“Our objective is clear: Mid-size will launch only when every process and quality requirement have been met,” Lucid’s new CEO Silvio Napoli said on a conference call Tuesday. “We will not repeat the mistakes of the past by bringing a product to market before it is ready.”

The turnaround plan, led by Napoli, aims to pull Lucid out of its spiral of growing EV inventory and unchecked spending. To reach that $1.4 billion in cash savings, Lucid said it will reduce capital expenditures by $500 million and projected savings of between $600 million and $800 million in inventory, according to its second-quarter earnings statement. The company said it will also reduce operating expenses by $200 million.

The effort, if successful, will provide sufficient liquidity runway well into 2027, Napoli said during Tuesday’s earnings call with investors.

Napoli didn’t mince words during his first quarterly earnings call as CEO.

“The way we operate has to change,” he said. “While there is no question that Lucid brought leading innovations and outstanding products to the market, we have disappointed on several fronts, and for far too long. We have not executed consistently, we miss commitments, launched products before they were ready, underinvested in service, responded too slowly to quality issues, and allowed complexity to slow decisions down.”

Napoli has already set some of this plan in motion. The company has shaken up its leadership ranks and hired several top execs, including a new chief financial officer, chief technology officer, chief customer officer, chief digital officer, and chief transformation officer. Napoli has also cut in half the number of people who directly report to him and in June directed the company to lay off 18% of its workforce, or around 1,500 employees, just four months after the EV maker made a cut of 12%.

Lucid also eliminated the second shift of EV production at its factory in Casa Grande, Arizona. The layoffs and elimination of that second shift generated $158 million in projected annualized savings, Napoli said during the company’s earnings call.

Despite these moves, Lucid’s second-quarter earnings show a company that continues to lose money. The EV maker reported revenue of $405 million, up from $259.4 million in the same quarter last year. It reported a net loss of $1.26 billion, or $3.30 a share, compared with a loss of $855.3 million, or $2.80 a share, a year earlier.

Lucid said it ended the second quarter with $3 billion in total liquidity.

While a reduction in spending is central to this reset, Napoli listed several must-win projects, including its upcoming mid-sized EV, finishing its AMP-2 factory in Saudi Arabia, and its robotaxi program with Uber and Nuro, that will eventually make it profitable.

The midsize EV, known as Cosmos, will be the first model from Lucid’s mid-sized platform, which “remains an essential element of Lucid’s strategic plan,” Napoli said. But “the work ahead is substantial,” he said on the call. Napoli said Lucid has so far “not executed consistently” and “responded too slowly” to quality problems, which is why he’s delaying the vehicle.

Napoli is also bullish on its robotaxi program with Uber and Nuro and sees it as an opportunity to boost earnings outside of selling directly to consumers. In a sign of this program’s value to Lucid, the company has created a new business unit called Lucid Technologies that will be led by chief digital officer Kai Stepper. The new unit will focus on AI, an advanced driver assistance system, and digital technology.

“We project the margins vastly exceeding those of the traditional retail model,” Napoli said, referring to the robotaxi program that integrates Nuro’s self-driving technology into Lucid’s Gravity SUVs. Uber will operate the premium robotaxi service, which will allow users to hail the self-driving vehicles on its app.

Nuro and Uber are testing a fleet of 100 vehicles in Houston and the San Francisco Bay Area. The company said that last month it began delivering production validation vehicles assembled at a facility in Coolidge, Arizona. Regular vehicle production for the robotaxi will begin in the fourth quarter with an expected launch in late 2026.

On the call, Napoli also took a moment to slap down speculation from last month that the company had hired consulting firm AlixPartners to consider bankruptcy.

“Their engagement has been focused solely on supporting our cost-savings plan and streamlining our operations; we will be wrapping up their assignment once that work is complete, which we expect at the end of this month,” he said.

This story has been updated with more information from Lucid’s earnings call.

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Here's how the chipmaker did versus LSEG consensus estimates for the quarter ended June 27:

• EPS: $1.66, adjusted, versus $1.62 expected
• Revenue: $11.54 billion versus $11.28 billion expected

Overall, AMD revenue climbed 50% from $7.69 billion a year ago, a sign of the company's central position in the market for artificial intelligence chips.

AMD's Data Center unit is what is driving the company's growth. Data Center sales were $6.7 billion, up 107% on an annual basis, which the company attributed to central processing unit and graphics processing unit sales.

The chipmaker's stock has nearly tripled over the past year, both on optimism that its AI chips, branded Instinct, will take a meaningful amount of a growing market from Nvidia, as well as the resurgence of the CPU — which AMD sells under the brand name Epyc — which AI experts now say is an essential component for running agents.

AMD said it expects about $13 billion in revenue for the current quarter, plus or minus $300 million, versus LSEG expectations of $12.52 billion. Some analysts had been looking for guidance as high as $14 billion.

In July, AMD raised its expectations for the size of the semiconductor industry, saying it could be worth $2 trillion per year by 2028. The chipmaker sees $1.4 trillion of that coming from AI accelerators, or GPUs, up from a previous estimate of $500 billion by 2028.

The company will also start shipping Helios, its first rack AI system, this quarter to companies like Meta, OpenAI, and Oracle. It's AMD's first rack-scale system, using its CPUs, GPUs, and networking chips, which directly competes with Nvidia's complete systems, not just its chips. AMD said on Tuesday that it expected Helios shipments to ramp up in the fourth quarter.

"We expect Data Center sales to accelerate in the second half of 2026, driving stronger overall revenue growth and continued earnings expansion," AMD CFO Jean Hu said in a statement.

Lisa Su, chair and chief executive officer of Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD), holds up the AMD Ryzen AI Halo, an AI developer platform, during an AMD news conference ahead of the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nevada, on Jan. 5, 2026.

Caroline Brehman | AFP | Getty Images

On an earnings call with analysts, AMD CEO Lisa Su said that the company expects its data center sales to double in 2027, and that server revenue will up more than 80% on an annual basis in the second half of the company's fiscal 2026.

"Demand for both accelerators and CPUs is growing well above our prior expectations," Su said.

Su added on the earnings call that the company's CPU business has taken market share during the quarter. AMD's main CPU rival is Intel.

"Hyperscalers continued expanding Epyc across their internal infrastructure and public cloud offerings, including AWS, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, and others," Su said.

AMD's business selling CPUs and GPUs for consumer devices like laptops and consoles, called client and gaming, was only up 6% year-over-year to $3.8 billion. Its embedded segment, which includes chips for industrial purposes, grew 19% on an annual basis to $977 million.

The company said it spent $808 million on capital expenditures, a steep increase from $282 million in the year-ago period and $389 million in the March quarter.

"Our first half performance has been very strong and although we are expecting that the market will decline in the second half, the market has actually held up better than most people would have thought," Su said about the company's PC business.

AMD reported $2.3 billion in net income, or $1.38 per diluted share, versus $872 million in net income, or 54 cents per diluted share in the year-ago period.

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It’s no secret that short-form videos have been a layman’s doorway into moviemaking in the AI era, with companies luring users with the notion of bringing their imaginations to life in ways unfathomable before the advent of generators. Google knows this as well, and the short-film exhibition seems as designed to present the films and the technology as it does to showcase the company’s eagerness for the film industry to embrace AI’s potential, moves further reflected in its DeepMind research partnership with A24 and its work with filmmakers including Darren Aronofsky and Doug Liman.

That includes hiring a filmmaker-in-residence, Henry Daubrez, who has worked with each cohort to shepherd their ideas from concept to generated reality. Daubrez says the AI era means one doesn’t need a professionally creative background to tell stories, as those from other industries have found a pathway to tell stories that would’ve otherwise lain dormant in their minds.

“Life is messy,” he tells me in a video interview ahead of the latest screening. “Sometimes that was my dream career, and they get there. Sometimes they had [a dream] and it didn’t work out. Sometimes they had to keep in the family business. I think what AI is doing — and I understand the pushback about most people can say, ‘Hey, you have a camera on your phone. What prevents you from going outside and shooting?’ Depends what you want to say — the story, VFX is expensive, it’s still complicated to put things together. But I think for a lot of people, it’s gonna give them a new door.”

It’s a sentiment Google’s keen to put out there, from the cast of creators they’ve enlisted to the venue they’ve chosen. The sessions’ screening venue moved from Tribeca’s Roxy Cinema to the much bigger Metrograph in the Lower East Side, an ode to the cinephile demographic that reveres the theater. (A prior July event at Metrograph: Charli xcx’s early listening event for her latest album “Music, Fashion, Film.”)

But it’s one that still contrasts with the industry consternation around AI generators, which studios and creative unions have still torn into for scraping copyrighted content without creators’ consent. Such concerns remain evident in some of this cohort’s films themselves — the screening of the meditation-focused short ”One Breath at a Time,” by director Santiago Carrasquilla, featured a prominent shot of a Nintendo Game Boy logo that was promptly blurred for its online release. (Google never explicitly banned logos from the shorts, one director told me, though it was suggested they blur them.)

The short films themselves ran the gamut from the abstract to the questionable, with layers of emotion sprinkled in throughout the hourlong session. One, “Two Chairs,” dove into director Dion Lee’s existential crisis over whether to have children, with AI aiding in animated sequences. It’s a story rooted in emotion, a far cry from the wholly AI-generated, “Texas Chainsaw Massacre”-inspired horror short “Mascot,” which featured a costumed character in Times Square assaulting a man who didn’t pay for the photos he took of them. Another short, “Nothin’ Beats a Cheeseburger,” revolved around an alien arriving on Earth to indulge in the alleged “world’s best cheeseburger,” using real actors for the two leads while AI generated the alien’s likeness onto one of them.

The credits for “Mascot” featured behind-the-scenes shots of the two characters — the violent costumer and the frightened photographer — that made me question whether its director, short-form filmmaker Daniel Garcia, took a hybrid approach of real actors within AI sequences. But those shots, too, were also wholly AI, a choice Garcia says was a cheeky choice to lampoon those interested in how films are made but one that left me worried over whether it clouded reality.

“Seeing is not believing anymore,” he says. “So I just thought that, especially with AI, the behind-the-scenes is more important than the actual product. And I think now, because everyone has access to the tools, everyone can make cinematic stories easily, and what I find now is that most people are not interested in the actual film. They’re more interested in how you made it.”

Still, humanity emerged in Lee’s film, which physically featured the 35-year-old creative director in the six-minute project as she wrote letters to her future self and potential daughter. Lee tells me it was paramount she starred in the film because of its personal nature. “It would be weird if it was someone else,” she says.

Lee, a freelance art director who’s worked everywhere from Vox.com to the New York Times, says over drinks at the post-screening reception how she uses AI models to help generate assets, such as, in “Two Chairs,” a chair. But she understood people’s hesitancy toward the technology and doesn’t believe it needs to be forced upon those who aren’t already eager to embrace it.

“I think it’s good for things that you need but you can’t necessarily have access to on a day-to-day basis, and if you’re happy with that, then that’s great,” she says. “If you don’t need that or want that, then that’s totally fine too. I just feel like take what you can from it. It’s a tool. If it doesn’t work for you, then it doesn’t work for you.”

Still, Lee says she’d use AI to help produce other video projects, suggesting Google’s gambit — whether embraced by Hollywood or not – may pay off. %!s()

Key Facts

A 10-Q form filed by American Bitcoin on Monday said it agreed to pay $2.5 million to settle the allegations that Gryphon Digital Mining, a company it merged with last year, wrongfully received a Paycheck Protection Program loan, which were given out to small businesses during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

A filing for the quarter ended March 31 from American Bitcoin said there was “no formal demand for return of the PPP Loan proceeds, and no formal claim or lawsuit has been initiated."

The loan at the heart of the allegations was for $2.2 million and given to Gryphon when it operated as a software provider for the cannabis industry, which the Small Business Administration said made it ineligible for the PPP.

The loan was forgiven by the SBA in 2021, but the agency walked its decision back in 2024, saying in a letter it was “considering a full denial of the previously received forgiven amount” as the Justice Department issued a civil investigative demand.

Gryphon, which used to operate as Akerna, responded to the letter and argued why it believed it was eligible for the PPP loan.

Tangent

American Bitcoin shares closed up nearly 5% at $6.14 on Tuesday, continuing a series of gains after reporting earnings, which logged record bitcoin production and mentioned the settlement in the commitments and contingencies footnote.

Key Background

American Bitcoin launched last year and was co-founded by Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. The company was formed through a transaction in which digital compute platform Hut 8 offered its cryptocurrency mining fleet to a new entity that merged with Gryphon last September, inheriting Gryphon's legal liabilities and the PPP dispute. American Bitcoin designated the matter as an unresolved contingency through its first quarter filing this year, just disclosing it was cooperating with the Justice Department. The $2.5 million settlement exceeds the original $2.2 million loan, suggesting additional costs were added to the resolution in addition to repayment. %!s()

Successfully claiming that Perplexity violated the law requires Amazon to prove that the company intentionally accessed a computer without authorization, obtained information from that protected computer and that there was a loss "to one or more persons during any one-year period" that averaged at least $5,000 in value. Because Comet, Perplexity's AI browser, requires user direction to use Amazon on its own, the appeals court determined it was the Comet user who was accessing Amazon's "computers" (the servers that host Amazon.com) and not Perplexity itself.

Per the court, an injunction "against conduct that likely does not violate the CFAA or the CDAFA would not serve the public interest." Additionally, the harm Amazon could suffer by letting Perplexity offer Comet's shopping capabilities didn't warrant an injunction in the first place.

"We respectfully disagree with today's decision on the preliminary injunction," Amazon said in a statement to Engadget. "We remain confident in our case and are evaluating our next steps."

Amazon sent Perplexity a cease-and-desist letter in November 2025 demanding that it block its AI browser from accessing Amazon's online store. According to Amazon, both companies had agreed to an earlier pause on agentic shopping in 2024, but Perplexity went back on the agreement and re-enabled the feature by disguising Comet's AI bot as a normal Chrome browser. In response, Amazon filed a lawsuit against Perplexity in March 2026 and was awarded a temporary injunction not long after.

While the appeals court decision eliminates Amazon's injunction, it doesn't close the case in either company's favor. Amazon can ask for a rehearing or ask the Supreme Court for a review. And even if it doesn't pursue either option, the company's lawsuit will still play out in the San Francisco federal court where it was originally filed, giving Amazon another opportunity to argue its case. %!s()