Emad Dlala, a top executive at EV-maker Lucid Motors, has left the company just months after being promoted to a leading role, TechCrunch has learned.

Dlala’s exit is the first major executive departure since Lucid Motors named Silvio Napoli as its new CEO in April. Napoli joined Lucid after a career in various leadership positions at escalator and elevator maker Schindler Group and formally took over the CEO role just last week.

In a statement to TechCrunch, Lucid Motors confirmed Dlala’s departure and said the company is “transforming its organization to accelerate innovation and strengthen execution under CEO Silvio Napoli.”

As part of that transformation, Lucid Motors said that Vivek Attaluri, the company’s vice president of vehicle engineering, and Marc Solsona Palomar, its vice president of software, will now report directly to Napoli. 

“Emad Dlala has elected to leave the company to pursue other opportunities. We thank Emad for his many contributions over the years and wish him continued success in his future endeavors. Lucid remains focused on streamlining our organization and processes to fully leverage the strength of our team and will communicate further actions soon,” the company said in a statement.

Dlala declined to comment.

Dlala had been with Lucid Motors for more than a decade, making him one of the company’s longest-serving employees and executives. Over the past five years, he served as both Lucid Motors’ vice president and senior vice president overseeing the company’s powertrain team.

In November, he was elevated to a role overseeing all of “Engineering and Digital” at the same time that Lucid Motors parted ways with its long-time chief engineer Eric Bach. Bach has since sued Lucid Motors for wrongful termination — though that lawsuit was recently stayed pending arbitration, according to federal court records.

The company has been in flux in the months since. Lucid Motors laid off 12% of its workforce in February, as TechCrunch first reported. It then completed its search for a new CEO after spending a year trying to replace Peter Rawlinson, who suddenly departed in early 2025.

The departure of Dlala comes just a few months ahead of the launch of Lucid Motors’ first mass-market vehicle built on its mid-sized platform, called the Cosmos, a mid-size EV that’s supposed to start below $50,000. It would be the Saudi-owned company first real chance at delivering a more affordable, widely-adopted car.

This next-generation EV is also now a cornerstone of Lucid’s deal to provide robotaxis to Uber. Lucid Motors has agreed to develop robotaxis with autonomous vehicle company Nuro, starting with its Gravity SUV. The self-driving Gravity is supposed to hit the road in San Francisco by the end of this year.

As tech companies race to secure the computing power needed to train and deploy AI systems, Meta is making its first AI infrastructure bet in India, striking a data center partnership with conglomerate Reliance Industries in a market that is rapidly emerging as a hub for AI infrastructure.

The partnership, announced on Wednesday, will see Meta collaborate with Reliance on a 168-megawatt AI-enabled data center in Jamnagar, Gujarat, expanding a relationship that has evolved from Meta’s multibillion-dollar investment in Reliance’s Jio Platforms to a $100 million joint venture launched last year to develop enterprise AI solutions for customers in India and overseas markets.

The deal comes as India cements its status as a natural destination for AI infrastructure investments, with tech giants seeking new geographies for data centers amid soaring demand for computing power to train and deploy AI models. Companies including Microsoft, Amazon, Google, OpenAI, and Uber have recently announced AI and cloud infrastructure investments in the country, which has rapidly expanded its data center footprint in recent years.

The rush into India extends beyond global technology firms. Earlier this week, Blackstone-backed AirTrunk announced plans to invest $30 billion to build 5 gigawatts of data center capacity in the country by 2030, while Indian conglomerates including Adani and Tata Consultancy Services have also unveiled major data center expansion plans aimed at supporting AI workloads.

New Delhi has sought to attract such investments through policy incentives, including tax exemptions through 2047 for foreign cloud providers on services sold overseas, so long as those workloads are run from Indian data centers.

India’s installed data center capacity has risen from about 375 megawatts in 2020 to around 1.5 gigawatts in 2025, according to government data. Industry estimates project that figure could grow more than fivefold to over 8 gigawatts by the end of the decade, driven by cloud adoption, AI workloads, and rising demand for local data processing.

The Meta-Reliance agreement marks the latest chapter in a relationship that has steadily deepened since Meta invested $5.7 billion in Jio Platforms in 2020. Since then, the companies have expanded their collaboration across digital services, enterprise AI, and now the infrastructure underpinning next-generation AI systems.

As part of the partnership, Meta is leasing capacity at Reliance’s new Jamnagar facility, which the companies said will be powered by renewable energy and cooled using desalinated seawater. Meta has committed to covering the entire cost of the energy and water required to support its operations there.

Reliance said the 168-megawatt facility will ready within two years and can be expanded over time. Further, the data center will also support Meta’s global infrastructure and AI computing requirements, plugging India more directly into the company’s worldwide network of AI facilities.

Under the agreement, Reliance said it would provide end-to-end services ranging from design and construction to renewable power, connectivity, and ongoing operations, a sign of the conglomerate’s ambitions to become a one-stop shop for AI infrastructure among global technology companies.

Separately, Meta said it had contracted nearly 1 gigawatt of new renewable energy capacity in India through agreements with CleanMax and Fourth Partner Energy, which will supplement the renewable power supporting the Jamnagar facility.

The companies did not disclose the value of the agreement, the type of AI workloads that will run from the facility, or whether Meta plans additional AI infrastructure investments in India.

Waymo has created a new computer model designed to more accurately answer a fundamental question: how does its autonomous driving software stack up against humans?

The Alphabet-owned robotaxi company, which developed the computer model of human driving capabilities in conjunction with TU Delft, published a research paper about it in Nature Communications on Wednesday.

Waymo said it expects the new model to be more accurate than the previous version it has used over the past several years. The new model was built using a framework called active inference — the theory that a driver is constantly imagining possible futures and taking actions to reach the safest, most predictable one.

Waymo said the new model will help it better understand how humans behave in crash scenarios that its robotaxis encounter.

“For decades, the automotive industry has used physical and virtual crash dummies to evaluate a car’s safety features, including its hardware and structural integrity,” Waymo wrote in a blog post on Wednesday. The new model, Waymo said, “evolves this concept, serving as a behavioral benchmark for autonomous driving systems able to realistically represent reasonable expectations on how a careful and competent human driver responds to traffic conflicts.”

A more accurate model of human driving behavior is table stakes for autonomous vehicle companies that need to understand and grade the performance of its robotaxis in crashes. And it comes at a critical juncture for Waymo, which is scaling to more cities and facing greater scrutiny from regulators and the public.

In January, when a Waymo robotaxi struck a child near a school in Santa Monica, California, the company relied on its previous computer model to claim that an attentive human driver would have made impact at around 14 miles per hour. The Waymo robotaxi hit the child at just 6 miles per hour, after decelerating from 17 miles per hour, and the company said she sustained minor injuries. (The crash is still under investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board.)

The biggest difference between this new model — which Waymo calls the Reference Driver — and its predecessor is that it is able to reproduce a human driver’s behavior in the run-up to a crash. Previously, Waymo’s models (and other industry models) focused on replicating “last-second, reactive” human maneuvers, according to the company.

The Reference Driver, meanwhile, can “simulate the internal ‘surprise’ a driver feels during a conflict, providing a more human-like benchmark for autonomous driving systems that was previously impossible to automate at scale,” Arkady Zgonnikov, an assistant professor at TU Delft, said in a statement.

Waymo says this new driver model can be adapted to model a “wide range of road user behaviors beyond collision avoidance,” and that it is better-equipped to be applied to “large test sets with thousands of scenarios.”

“The model can represent and evaluate numerous complex, real-world crashes in a virtual environment, identifying performance improvements with unprecedented speed and efficiency,” the company wrote.

Waymo wants others to collaborate on pushing the Reference Driver further, too. The company said Wednesday that it is making the research code for the model available under an academic, non-commercial license that allows it to be used for research, teaching, personal experimentation, and scientific publication.