Bengaluru, August, 2026 – Amazon is shutting down its 21-year-old Mechanical Turk crowdwork platform as AI-native data-labeling firms take over, Waymo named Munich its first European robotaxi market, and China’s DeepSeek is closing in on a $74 billion funding round ahead of a planned Shanghai listing.
Amazon Winds Down Mechanical Turk as AI-Native Labeling Rivals Gain Ground
Amazon Web Services notified users this week that it will retire on September 30, 2026, ending a service Jeff Bezos once described as “artificial artificial intelligence,” according to Tech Startups.
Launched in 2005, Mechanical Turk let businesses farm out small tasks — labeling images, transcribing audio, checking data — to a crowd that at its peak topped 500,000 registered workers, Tech Startups reported. Amazon appears to have scaled back investment in the platform as newer, AI-focused data-labeling companies such as Scale AI, Mercor and Prolific built businesses specifically around training and fine-tuning large models, the outlet said.
The shutdown lands as a symbolic marker for the industry: the human-in-the-loop task marketplace that helped seed the current era of machine learning is being displaced by firms purpose-built to supply labeled data and human feedback for frontier AI systems. Amazon has not said what, if anything, will replace Mechanical Turk internally for its own AI training needs.
Waymo Names Munich Its First European Robotaxi Market
Alphabet’s Waymo said it is preparing a fully autonomous ride-hailing launch in Munich, Germany, marking the company’s first entry into the European Union, according to Waymo plans to start driving through Munich in the coming weeks with trained specialists behind the wheel while it builds detailed maps and tunes its software to local traffic conditions, ahead of a commercial launch targeted for late 2027, Electrive reported. The company will deploy a small fleet of all-electric Jaguar I-PACE vehicles and has already registered an operating entity in Germany.
German officials framed the move as validation of the country’s regulatory approach to autonomous vehicles, according to Euronews, with Bavarian state officials pledging to cut red tape to speed deployment. Waymo’s move follows Uber and Israeli firm Autobrains, which announced a separate robotaxi program for Munich in June, positioning the city as an early European test bed for competing autonomous-driving approaches.
DeepSeek Nears $74 Billion Funding Round Ahead of Shanghai Listing Push
Chinese AI lab DeepSeek is nearing the close of a new funding round that would value the Hangzhou-based company at roughly 500 billion yuan, or about $74 billion, ahead of an anticipated listing on Shanghai’s STAR Market the citing sources familiar with the matter.
DeepSeek is seeking to raise about 50 billion yuan in the round, which people close to the deal said was expected to close before the end of August, according to SCMP. Backers include existing investors Monolith and Shixiang Capital along with Chinese battery maker Contemporary Amperex Technology Limited, while new investors reportedly in talks include CPE, Legend Capital and semiconductor-focused Stony Creek Capital, the report said.
The round follows a roughly $7.4 billion first external funding round DeepSeek closed earlier this year, and comes after the company briefly paused fundraising last month following leaked comments from founder Liang Wenfeng to investors, SCMP reported. DeepSeek is said to be targeting an IPO filing as soon as this year, with a public debut expected in 2027 — a timeline that would make it one of the most closely watched Chinese tech listings since the AI boom began.
Ruchi Kumar is the associate editor at Entrepreneur News Network and TVW News India, where she leads editorial strategy, brand storytelling, and startup ecosystem coverage. With a strong focus on innovation, business, and marketing insights, he curates impactful narratives that spotlight India’s evolving entrepreneurial landscape. She has written extensively on fintech, AI and emerging startups.