Waymo with the Bay Bridge in the background in San Francisco, California (Smith Collection/Getty Images)

Mapped: Where Google’s Waymo is, will be, and might go

Waymo is operating more than 2,000 autonomous vehicles and testing in many markets. Meanwhile, Tesla’s autonomous operations are tiny, but its ambitions are huge.

Rani Molla

9/15/25 8:25AM

As Tesla stakes its future on autonomous cars and as self-driving competitors like Amazon’s Zoox start popping up, Google’s Waymo remains the elephant in the room.

Currently, Waymo is publicly operating more than 2,000 autonomous vehicles in five markets — Los Angeles, Atlanta, Austin, Phoenix, and the San Francisco Bay Area — and the company already intends to launch in five more: Dallas, Denver, Miami, Seattle, and Washington, DC.

It has also tested, or is currently testing, the service in a dozen other markets. We’ve comprehensively mapped Waymo’s operations for the first time, showing that the service has quietly made inroads across the country:

Meanwhile, Tesla CEO Elon Musk is pushing to surpass Waymo with the flip of a switch, as he theorizes that once the technology is tested sufficiently, many Teslas can drive themselves autonomously with the parts and software they already have.

“I think we’ll probably have autonomous ride-hailing in probably half of the population of the US by the end of the year,” Musk said on the company’s earnings call in July.

Tesla currently operates approximately 30 autonomous ride-hailing vehicles in Austin with safety monitors sitting in the passenger seat. The company is also operating a more traditional ride-hailing service in the Bay Area, where people can pay to be driven around by a person in the driver’s seat using the company’s supervised full self-driving tech.

While the public can download the app and join the waitlist for both, the company hasn’t stated how many people it’s allowing to use the program. (I’m still on the waitlist.)

Musk has repeatedly said Tesla will be able to scale its autonomous driving service far faster than Waymo, as Tesla owners will be able to add their personal vehicles to the robotaxi network for extra income. On the last earnings call, he pegged that milestone for “next year.”

But for now at least, Waymo is far in the lead.

Republican Presidential Nominee Former President Trump Holds Rally In Butler, Pennsylvania

Tesla investors don’t want Elon Musk involved in politics

The Tesla CEO is spending big on the GOP in midterm elections.

Rani Molla37m

Jon Keegan1h

Report: China’s “Manhattan Project” built an advanced EUV chip fab prototype

The most advanced chipmaking process in the world is currently owned by one company: Dutch chipmaker ASML.

The process, known as extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV), allows for the smallest, most complex semiconductors to be etched onto silicon chips.

These advanced chips are used in a huge number of crucial industries such as AI, mobile phones, and weapons manufacturing.

A new report from Reuters says that China has completed a factory-sized prototype of an EUV chip fab, a first that could have huge ramifications for the balance of power in the global technology race.

The prototype was built in a high-security facility in Shenzhen by former ASML employees and made use of secondary markets to acquire older, used ASML parts, according to the report. Despite a goal of delivering working chips by 2028, sources say China is likely a couple years behind that schedule.

ASML’s $250 million EUV machines are used to manufacture advanced chips for Nvidia, Advanced Micro Devices, and for chips made by TSMC.

ASML shares were down about 4.8% as of 12 p.m. ET.

Exclusive: How China built its ‘Manhattan Project’ to rival the West in AI chips

These advanced chips are used in a huge number of crucial industries such as AI, mobile phones, and weapons manufacturing.

ASML’s $250 million EUV machines are used to manufacture advanced chips for Nvidia, Advanced Micro Devices, and for chips made by TSMC.

ASML shares were down about 4.8% as of 12 p.m. ET.

Alexander C. Kaufman

Powerhouse

Inside Oklo’s audacious plan to turn leftover weapons-grade plutonium into a nuclear bridge fuel

“There’s enough energy in nuclear waste to power the country for 150 years, and every year we produce enough for another four years,” the CEO of Oklo told Sherwood News.

Blastoff of Missile from Underground Bunker

Jon Keegan2h

Google is reportedly working with Meta to expand software support for its AI chips

Nvidia dominates the market for AI chips. But its advantage is not limited to hardware.

The company has a growing suite of software tools that are usually paired with its chips, optimized to get the most out of the GPUs crunching the data.

Any challengers to Nvidia’s dominance will need to make it easy for developers to walk away from the Nvidia software-hardware lock-in. That’s what Google and Meta are teaming up to do.

A new report from Reuters says Google is working on an initiative code-named “TorchTPU,” which aims to make it easier for AI developers who use the ubiquitous, open-source PyTorch software framework to switch the hardware layer to Google’s tensor processing units (TPUs).

Meta is a huge backer of the PyTorch project, so the company is teaming up with Google to help develop its TorchTPU software, per the report.

Last month, it was reported that Google is planning on selling TPUs worth “billions of dollars” to Meta, which follows other Big Tech players who are hedging their bets against Nvidia’s dominance.

Exclusive: Google works to erode Nvidia's software advantage with Meta's help

Any challengers to Nvidia’s dominance will need to make it easy for developers to walk away from the Nvidia software-hardware lock-in. That’s what Google and Meta are teaming up to do.

Meta is a huge backer of the PyTorch project, so the company is teaming up with Google to help develop its TorchTPU software, per the report.

$100B

Rani Molla4h

Waymo, Alphabet’s autonomous driving subsidiary, is in talks to raise more than $15 billion in a funding round that would value the company near $100 billion, Bloomberg reports. That’s more than double the valuation from its last round in October 2024, reflecting its lead in driverless ride-hailing.