Shares of Microsoft and General Motors rose Tuesday after the company announced that Microsoft joins institutional investors Cruise. Cruise will rely on cloud-based Azure platform in the launch of its unmanned vehicles.
Shares of General Motors (GM) and Microsoft (MSFT) rose on Tuesday by 9.75% and of 1.78%, respectively amid news of Microsoft joining the new round of financing of $2 billion division of unmanned vehicles Cruise General Motors.
As a result, a new assessment of the company’s Cruise was $30 billion, which roughly corresponds to the level of competing firms, as Waymo from Google (GOOGL, GOOG) or Rivian.
General Motors aims to take a significant share in the new market of unmanned electric vehicles, belonging to her Cruise approaches to obtaining permission from the authorities of California for the movement of its self-driving taxi and the subsequent commercialization of this technology. Among other investors Cruise: T. Rowe Price Associates, Honda Motor and other institutional investors.
As part of the deal Cruise will use the cloud platform Microsoft Azure, which will allow to process huge volumes of data coming from sensors and control systems for its unmanned vehicles.
As the plan Cruise – the creation of the Park unmanned vehicles that will carry people and cargo, she is going to need a reliable cloud computing platform, with the possibility of extensions and scaling. For any company of this sector is a supplier of cloud computing will be the largest partner, and the costs of its services – the largest cost item.
Through investment in Cruise, Microsoft, in turn, gets a long-term strategic partnership and becoming the preferred cloud provider for GM.
“As the preferred cloud for Cruise and GM, we will use Azure’s capabilities to help them scale and make Autonomous mass transportation,” said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.
According to Sam Abuelsamid, chief analyst for research in Guidehouse Insights, to support such a cloud giant like Microsoft is a great incentive to Cruise, and funding in a timely manner, as many startups of this industry are closed or sold to other companies because of lack of funding.
So, last year, the startup for Autonomous Robotics transportation Starsky closed because of lack of money and the Zoox was sold to Amazon (AMZN) after it failed to provide new funding round. The leader of the cloud computing market, Amazon also participated in a recent round of financing the manufacturer of electric trucks Rivian in the amount of $2.65 billion.
Source:
Bloomberg
