Plus: The maker of Rubik’s Cubes and Paw Patrol is buying AI company Hapiko, the maker of Stickerbox. And warehouses are bringing in more robots, per a new report. Julie Chang hosts.
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[00:00:01] Here's your afternoon TNB Tech Minute for Monday, August 17. I'm Julie Chang for The Wall Street Journal. SpaceX's biggest investors are being revealed in regulatory filings. NVIDIA said it owned nearly 123 million shares. SpaceX recently agreed to use NVIDIA chips exclusively. Meanwhile, Alphabet's Google held a 7.2% stake based on an investment it made more than a decade ago.
[00:00:27] Antonio Gracias's entities held a 6.5% stake. Gracias currently sits on SpaceX's board. And VC investor Peter Thiel had a 5.5% stake. As for non-tech investors, Harvard University's Endowment Fund held a $2.2 billion stake in SpaceX at about 12.9 million shares. And we should note, Elon Musk himself had a 48.4% ownership stake.
[00:00:54] SpinMaster, the maker of Rubik's Cubes and Paw Patrol, is buying a company that develops so-called kid-empowered AI for about $35 to $50 million. Brooklyn-based HappyGo makes StickerBox, a machine that uses AI to generate images based on children's spoken descriptions. It then prints them as stickers which users can color. And warehouses are bringing in more robotics.
[00:01:20] A report from the Association for Advancing Automation found that North American companies ordered nearly 18,000 robots worth $1.2 billion in the first half of this year. That's up from last year by 2% in units and 7% in value. And companies last year bought more than 36,700 robots, the highest number since 2022's pandemic-driven e-commerce surge.
[00:01:46] Despite new U.S. tariffs and high fuel prices, 92% of companies surveyed by market intelligence firm Interact Analysis say they plan to increase warehouse automation spending to cut costs. For a deeper dive into what's happening in tech, check out Tuesday's Tech News Briefing Podcast. We'll watch you next time of interview with the台 with Katya. I will see you next time of interview with the panelists睡nism Podcast. Thank you. You're welcome. Thank you.