# NVIDIA, Zoox, and Google DeepMind Strategic Moves

**Podcast:** TechCrunch Daily Crunch
**Published:** 2026-09-04

## Transcript

This is TechCrunch.
Why we still still are still busy.
Now listen to the podcast for technology-over-thinkers everywhere, where there are podcasts.
Air France.
Alles hin und zurück inklusive Steuern und Gebühren.
Buchbar bis 23.09.
auf airfrance.de.
12.93 billion with a B dollars.
Yeah, Hugging Face's platform hosts 3 million models, 1 million applications used by over...
18 million developers, and half a million datasets.
In a blog post, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Wong said that Hugging Face will continue to support open source and open-weight models and will work on expanding developer access.
Wong touted NVIDIA's contribution and said that the chip company has released more than 500 models and 250 open datasets on Hugging Face.
He argued that the company builds upon models to get developers across the world to use them.
For a company like NVIDIA, which is a dominant hardware platform for AI development and inference, an open ecosystem that it controls is, well, beneficial, as it can create a platform suited for its chips.
Plus, as TechCrunch wrote earlier, NVIDIA will be able to sell its unused capacity to enterprise customers, packaged with HoggingFace's offering.
Zoox ain't wasting any time now that it's allowed to operate and charge for rides in its custom-built robo-taxi.
You see, the company has extended its commercial robo-taxi service in Las Vegas to include rides to and from Harry Reid International Airport.
Customers will be able to hail rides to the airport beginning Thursday, according to Zoox.
The expansion, which unlocks a critical ride-hailing destination, builds on a series of recent wins for the Amazon-owned autonomous vehicle technology company.
You see, Silicon Valley-based Zoox spent more than a decade developing its self-driving system and custom robo-taxi that lacks traditional controls like a steering wheel and pedals.
Now, while it's made progress, even providing rides to customers in Las Vegas for a year, it wasn't able to operate as a true commercial robo-taxi service.
Well, that changed in August after federal safety regulators gave Zoox a temporary exemption from certain motor vehicle safety standards.
Scientists at Google DeepMind and Google Research released a new artificial intelligence model for weather forecasting today that sees our changing atmosphere more clearly and predicts its behavior.
more often.
WeatherNext 3 is the latest wave of a sea change in meteorology brought out by deep learning techniques, and Google says it'll start feeding into weather information, user-seeing search, Google Maps, and Gemini, as well as being available to users and researchers on Google's cloud platforms.
The new model's already proven to be most accurate among leading contenders tested on Operational WeatherBench, which is a utility for comparing AI forecasts.
built by the startup Brightband.
It looks at metrics like temperature, wind speed, and humidity, as well as beating out other deep learning models built by Google, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting.
It also beats traditional forecasts from the U.S.
National Weather Service and the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting.
And folks, that's your Daily Crunch.
Today's stories were reported by Tim Ferenholz, Ivan Mehta, and more awesome TechCrunch journalists.
We'll see you here tomorrow.
Same Tech Time, same Crunch channel.
And until then, find us at TechCrunch.com.