A person steps out of the front passenger seat of a driverless Tesla Robotaxi in Austin in June (Jay Janner/Getty Images)

Musk says Tesla’s robotaxi will open to the public next month

There are reasons to believe this won’t happen, or at least not as a normal person would expect it to happen.

Rani Molla

8/11/25 12:25PM

Over the weekend, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said Tesla’s robotaxi service “will be open access next month.” He made the statement in the way he makes lots of other important business statements: in a reply to a follower on X.

But like other reply announcements he’s made on the site, there’s reason to be wary.

It will be open access next month
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 11, 2025

For example, in July Musk told a follower inquiring about the expansion of the company’s self-driving service that it would grow to the Bay Area in a month or two. Tesla did roll out a service in the Bay Area, but it has a driver using supervised full self-driving and doesn’t have Robotaxi branding — a bit closer to an Uber than a self-driving car.

From Musk’s latest comments, it’s unclear if he’s referring to the Robotaxi app doing Uber-like ride-hailing with Teslas in the Bay Area or the robotaxi self-driving service in Austin, which has a person monitoring in the passenger seat but seems a bit more like a car driving itself.

If it’s the former, California residents already have that service with Uber and Lyft (as well as true driverless ride-hailing with Google’s Waymo). If it’s the latter, at last count Tesla only had 10 to 20 vehicles operating in Austin, so if the program is indeed opened to the broader public, the company will also have to roll out many more robotaxis (and their passenger seat monitors) in order for the service’s broader availability to matter in practice, given likely high demand.

The stock is up more than 4% today.

Jon Keegan3h

Humanoid robot maker Apptronik raises $520 million

Apptronik, an Austin, Texas-based robot manufacturer, said it has closed out its Series A fundraising round, raising $520 million. The fundraising is an extension of a $415 million round raised last February, and included investments from Google, Mercedes-Benz, AT&T, and John Deere. Qatar’s state investment firm, QIA, also participated in the fundraising round.

Apptronik makes Apollo, a humanoid robot targeted for warehouse and manufacturing work. The company is one of several US robotics companies that are racing to apply generative-AI breakthroughs to humanoid robots, in anticipation of a new market for robots in homes and workplaces.

Apptronik Raises $520 Million in New Funding to Build More Humanoids

Ives: Microsoft and Google’s giant capex plans are worth it

Don’t mind the AI sell-off, says Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives, who thinks fears around seemingly unfettered Big Tech capex budgets are unfounded, especially in the case of Microsoft and Google. Together, the two hyperscalers are slated to spend around $300 billion on the purchases of property and equipment this year as they double down on AI infrastructure, but he says both have already shown that they can turn the spending into revenue and growth.

“They are reshaping cloud economics around AI-first workloads that carry higher switching costs, deeper customer lock-in, and longer contract durations than before,” Ives wrote, adding that these giant costs will be spread out over time and set the companies up for success in the long run. Per Ives:

“While near-term free cash flow optics remain noisy, the platforms that invest early and at scale are best positioned to capture durable share, pricing power, and ecosystem control as AI workloads mature. Over time, we expect utilization leverage to turn today’s elevated investment into a meaningful driver of long-term value creation.”

How the Big Tech companies are spending their huge capex budgets

“While near-term free cash flow optics remain noisy, the platforms that invest early and at scale are best positioned to capture durable share, pricing power, and ecosystem control as AI workloads mature. Over time, we expect utilization leverage to turn today’s elevated investment into a meaningful driver of long-term value creation.”

Jon Keegan2/10/26

Meta reportedly expands Hyperion data center site, purchasing an additional 1,400 acres

Construction is humming along on at Meta’s gargantuan Hyperion data center in Richland Parish, Louisiana.

And Meta is seemingly already moving ahead with plans to greatly expand the site.

A new report from Forbes revealed that Meta has purchased an additional 1,400 acres adjacent to the construction site, increasing the overall size of the project by 62%. The massive size of the site is nearly 5 miles long and 1 mile wide.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said that the site “will be able to scale up to 5GW over several years.”

Meta is quietly expanding its $10 billion Hyperion AI data center, now sprawling to four times the size of Manhattan’s Central Park | Fortune

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said that the site “will be able to scale up to 5GW over several years.”

$290K

Rani Molla2/10/26

Tesla has been quoting the price of its long-awaited long-range Semi truck at $290,000, Electrek reports. The $290,000 price point represents a significant increase from the original $180,000, roughly 60% higher. However, it’s still well below the industry average for Class 8 electric semi trucks. California Air Resources Board data shows that the average cost of a zero-emission Class 8 truck was $435,000 in 2024, meaning Tesla is undercutting competitors by about $145,000.

On its last earnings call, Tesla said it would start production on the “designed for autonomy” electric commercial truck this year.