Rivian is telling investors that it might see a better sales year than it expected, despite the many headwinds working against electric vehicles in the U.S. right now.

Rivian previously said it would ship between 62,000 and 67,000 vehicles this year, but the company now expects to deliver between 65,000 and 70,000 vehicles, the company said on Thursday.

It’s a small but potentially meaningful bump for the company, which only shipped 42,247 electric vehicles last year. The new forecast comes as EV sales growth has cooled off in the U.S., driven in part by Congress killing the $7,500 federal EV tax credit, and President Trump’s administration axing environmental regulations that encouraged the production and purchase of electric vehicles.

The new forecast could be a sign that the company’s high expectations for its brand new mass-market EV, the R2 SUV, are justified.

Rivian didn’t offer a specific reason for this newfound confidence, only saying it outperformed its own expectations in the second quarter thanks to “robust growth quarter-over-quarter in EDV and R1, coupled with the introduction of R2 deliveries.” (EDV is the name Rivian uses for its electric commercial van.)

Rivian said on Thursday that it built 12,613 vehicles last quarter and delivered 12,194. It had only expected to ship between 9,000 and 11,000.

Rivian has high hopes for the new R2 SUV, which it starting selling last month, starting at around $58,000. The company has expanded its factory in Normal, Illinois, to produce them, and is also building an entirely new production facility in Georgia as it works to manufacture hundreds of thousands of R2s per year.

Rivian hasn’t explicitly said how many R2s it expects to sell this year, but the company’s chief financial officer Claire McDonough has mentioned a range of 20,000 to 25,000 units. It’s unclear if that number has now increased along with the new forecast bump, or if the company expects the excess deliveries to come from its commercial vans and more expensive R1 line of trucks and SUVs.

Either way, more deliveries this year would be good news for Rivian’s bottom line, as the company is still working its way out of a multibillion-dollar hole. The company had said it may finally turn a regular profit in 2027, but it recently pushed that goal off to invest in developing autonomous software, mostly because it now has a deal to supply self-driving R2 SUVs to Uber.

Tesla delivered more than 480,000 vehicles in the second quarter of this year, an increase of more than 120,000 from the first quarter, in a sign that the company is still able to attract new buyers for its EVs despite a downturn in the U.S. market.

The company said Thursday that it built 451,758 in the second quarter, 442,936 of which were Model 3 sedans and Model Y SUVs. It delivered 467,762 of those vehicles, with the remaining 12,364 being “other models” — which includes the Cybertruck and the final-production Model S sedans and Model X SUVs. It was the company’s best second quarter by raw delivery numbers ever, and easily outpaced Wall Street’s expectations.

It’s Tesla’s best quarter for overall sales since the third quarter of 2025, when it shipped just shy of 500,000 vehicles around the world. And while the company still has an uphill battle to stop a two-year trend of declining overall sales, the second quarter results show Tesla is finding ways — through geographic expansion, and cheaper versions of the Model 3, Model Y, and Cybertruck — to buck that trend.

On Thursday, Microsoft announced a new operating business called Microsoft Frontier Company, focused on delivering successful enterprise AI deployments with Microsoft’s existing AI tools. The project will be backed by a $2.5 billion investment from Microsoft, as well as 6,000 industry and engineering experts.

In a statement announcing the venture, Microsoft’s Commercial Business CEO Judson Althoff resisted the Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) label that is often applied to these ventures. “This goes beyond what has been labeled as Forward-Deployed Engineering,” Althoff wrote, “and will be the largest, most capable, outcome-driven engineering organization in the industry.”

Nonetheless, the venture bears a striking similarity to a number of FDE-based AI ventures announced in recent months. Just two days earlier, Amazon Web Services announced an internal commitment of $1 billion for its own AI deployment venture, explicitly embracing the FDE model. Both OpenAI and Anthropic have launched joint ventures along similar lines, although those efforts also involve outside capital from private equity firms.

Microsoft’s existing client base will give the new effort a significant head start, as the company has already deployed engineers to much of the Fortune 500. The announcement cites an early partnership with the London Stock Exchange Group, as well as Unilever, Land O’Lakes, and Accenture.