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Congress Considers Bill To Force Sale Of TikTok
TikTok offices in Culver City, California (Mario Tama/Getty Images)

By some measures, TikTok has grown bigger than Facebook or Instagram in the US

Oracle’s potential TikTok takeover is a big deal to US competitors like Meta and Snap.

There’s more at stake with Oracle’s potential control of TikTok’s US operations than national security and geopolitical harmony. The fate of some of America’s biggest social media companies, like Meta, Snap, Reddit, and Pinterest, also hangs in the balance.

And judging by the latest data from Similarweb, reported exclusively by Sherwood News, TikTok is in some respects more popular among Americans — a very lucrative social media demographic — than its competitors.

Meta doesn’t break out user numbers anymore for its individual properties, and TikTok, a company owned by privately held ByteDance, last disclosed that it had 170 million monthly US users in March 2024, so Sherwood asked Similarweb, a digital market intelligence company, for more recent estimates.

Since TikTok briefly went dark and then was resurrected early this year, the platform has pulled ahead of Instagram and Facebook as far as app monthly active users (MAUs) in the US. In August, TikTok had 183 million monthly active users on iOS and Android, according to Similarweb, up 16% from a year ago. That’s more than Pinterest and Snapchat combined.

TikTok’s daily active users (DAUs) grew 19% year over year to 102 million, just shy of Facebook’s 107 million daily users — a testament to how ingrained the older social network has become for some Americans over the years. Facebook leads TikTok by a small margin on desktop and mobile web as well, but the audiences there are smaller than in the apps.

The details of the spin-off are still being hammered out and a lot could change. But what’s certain is that there’s plenty of potential value to be found in TikTok’s American user base for those who own it.

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$600B

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told employees at an all-hands meeting on Tuesday that he sees AI growing AWS sales to $600 billion a year by 2036 — double his prior estimate and more than four times last year’s revenue, Reuters reports.

Shares of Amazon, which were already up for the day, moved modestly higher on the heels of the report.

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OpenAI snags Amazon AWS deal for classified government work with Anthropic pushed aside

Following Anthropic being deemed a “supply chain risk” to national security, the field is clear for OpenAI. The Information is reporting that OpenAI just landed a deal with Amazon AWS to sell its AI services to government employees for both classified and unclassified work.

Previously, OpenAI was contractually obliged to use Microsoft Azure cloud hosting for the government contracts it handled as part of its $13 billion deal with the software giant, but since it restructured as a for-profit public benefit corporation and renegotiated the terms of the deal, OpenAI is free to use AWS, which is more commonly used in government work.

According to the report, contracts that sell AI services through another company like Amazon can be much larger then direct contracts with the government, which is crucial for OpenAI as it chases the success that Anthropic has had with enterprise customers.

Previously, OpenAI was contractually obliged to use Microsoft Azure cloud hosting for the government contracts it handled as part of its $13 billion deal with the software giant, but since it restructured as a for-profit public benefit corporation and renegotiated the terms of the deal, OpenAI is free to use AWS, which is more commonly used in government work.

According to the report, contracts that sell AI services through another company like Amazon can be much larger then direct contracts with the government, which is crucial for OpenAI as it chases the success that Anthropic has had with enterprise customers.

tech

Morgan Stanley thinks Tesla’s Terafab could cost an additional $35 billion to $45 billion in capex

Tesla’s Terafab project, which CEO Elon Musk said could launch this week, is poised to be one of the company’s most expensive bets yet. The facility is intended to manufacture the chips needed for Tesla’s autonomous vehicles and humanoid robots, and to avoid supply bottlenecks.

If the company reaches its long-term goal of producing 100 million humanoid robots annually, it could require more than 200 million chips a year — over 50x its current demand, Morgan Stanley said.

The firm estimates total capital expenditure for the facility could reach $35 billion to $45 billion, including construction costs and roughly $20 billion to $25 billion for wafer fabrication equipment alone. That spending is not included in Tesla’s already sizable $20 billion capex budget for this year. Morgan Stanley’s semiconductor analysts described the effort as a “Herculean task,” noting the difficulty of building leading-edge chip capabilities from scratch.

While Tesla would likely spread the investment out over several years — even on an aggressive timeline, initial output would likely not arrive until the latter part of the decade — the effort would still weigh heavily on free cash flow and mark a shift toward a more capital-intensive business model.

Tesla’s most expensive factory to date, its Nevada battery plant that it began building in 2014, is estimated to have cost about $10 billion over time — a fraction of the expected Terafab cost.

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Rani Molla

Lyft and Uber jump after announcing expanded robotaxi partnerships with Nvidia

Uber and Lyft both announced expanded AI and autonomous vehicle partnerships with Nvidia at the company’s GTC event, sending both ride-hailing stocks up after-hours on Monday and into Tuesday’s premarket session.

Uber is currently up more than 2%, while Lyft has risen around 1.3%.

Uber said Nvidia-powered Level 4 robotaxis will launch on its platform in Los Angeles and San Francisco in 2027, with plans to scale to 28 cities globally by 2028. Meanwhile, Lyft said it will use Nvidia’s AI infrastructure to improve ride-matching, mapping, and efficiency, while also using Nvidia’s DRIVE Hyperion platform as a foundation for future autonomous fleets.

Separately, Nvidia announced expanded autonomous driving partnerships with Kia and Hyundai.

The announcements highlight Nvidia’s growing push to provide the AI hardware and software powering next-generation robotaxi networks — packaging the technology needed for self-driving cars into a platform that other companies can use to compete with Tesla.

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