A Waymo self-driving car in San Francisco, California (Getty Images)

WE, ROBOT 🤖

Tesla’s robotaxi event is finally here — will it be a watershed moment for autonomous vehicles?

Tesla’s self-driving rival Waymo is already doing 100,000+ paid trips per week

10/9/24 7:32AM

For a decade, Elon Musk has crafted a narrative about the potential of robotaxis — a self-driving, self-funding Optimus Taxius that could transform the economics of Tesla. Now, a grand reveal is finally upon us at the company’s “We, Robot” event, which starts at 7 p.m. ET tomorrow.

Will Musk deliver? For Tesla and its shareholders, the stakes are high. As competition in electric vehicles has intensified, squeezing the company’s margins, and Tesla’s rapid sales growth has slowed, Tesla’s stock has come under pressure. At its peak in November 2021, Tesla was worth more than $1.2 trillion; today it’s closer to $770 billion (though that’s still more than 3x what its next most valuable competitor, Toyota, is worth). Some financial analysts bill robotaxis as the company’s future.

Let’s talk reality

The truth is, robotaxis are already here. In June, Google-backed Waymo opened up its services to the public, and it now counts ~700 vehicles in several cities, which are completing more than 100,000 self-driving rides a week. That progress is off the back of years of testing — Waymo autonomous vehicles racked up ~4.9 million miles in 2023, according to the California DMV, more than any other company that filed reports (Tesla does not report data).

Waymo has plans to expand slowly, with a small number of robotaxis in geofenced environments. Elon Musk described Waymo’s technology as “quite fragile” and not able to scale because it is a “very localized solution.” Amazon’s Zoox has also released plans to launch services in Las Vegas from next year, whilst GM-owned Cruise recently resumed its operations after an accident in 2023.

If Tesla does deliver its iPhone moment, revealing some amazing prototype that could bring robotaxis to the masses, the question will pivot once again to: how do you convince people they are safe? A Forbes legal survey from July revealed that 93% of people have at least some concerns about self-driving cars.

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Rani Molla20h

Meta reportedly strikes multibillion-dollar AI chip deal with Google as it struggles to design its own

Meta has signed a deal with Google to rent tensor processing units to develop new AI models and is in talks to buy the chips for its data centers, The Information reports.

The agreement comes on top of a recently announced “multi-generational” partnership with Nvidia and a chip supply deal with Advanced Micro Devices that could be worth more than $100 billion, as Meta scrapped its most advanced in-house AI training chip amid design challenges.

A Meta deal with Google, which has been rumored since November, would position the search giant more directly as a competitor to Nvidia in its core business of AI processors. Some analysts have said selling its custom chips to outside customers could become a business worth hundreds of billions of dollars for Google.

Google Strikes Multibillion-Dollar AI Chip Deal With Meta, Sharpening Nvidia Rivalry

Jon Keegan2/26/26

Delays in permitting, power, and zoning cause first drop in data center construction since 2020

Despite incredible demand, the number of data centers under construction in North America fell for the first time since 2020, according to new research from CBRE.

Total data center capacity under construction dropped about 5.6% year on year from 6.35 megawatts in 2024 to 5.99 megawatts by the end of 2025.

What’s causing the delay? Slow permitting, constrained supply chains, and growing public engagement with how deals are approved at the local level. Labor constraints also were cited in the report; a tight supply of skilled workers will increase costs.

US Data Center Construction Fell Amid Permit and Power Delays

-13%📱

Rani Molla2/26/26

Smartphone shipments are expected to decline 13% — the biggest drop ever — to 1.12 billion in 2026, according to new data from IDC, as the memory shortage drives up costs and prices for phones. The firm expects the average smartphone selling price to jump 14% to a record $523 this year.

The shortfall will mostly affect makers of lower-end smartphones, whose customers are more cost-conscious, while higher-end manufacturers like Samsung and Apple are likely to be more insulated from the pressure.

“The memory crisis will cause more than a temporary decline; it marks a structural reset of the entire market, fundamentally reshaping long‑term TAM (Total Addressable Market), the vendor landscape, and the product mix,” said Nabila Popal, senior research director with IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker. “We expect consolidation as smaller players exit, and low-end vendors to face sharp shipment declines amid supply constraints and lower demand at higher price points.”

Jon Keegan2/26/26

Google drops new Nano Banana

Google is hoping to recapture the viral boost it received when it released its Nano Banana image generation model. Nano Banana 2 arrives today, which Google has rolled into its Gemini app.

The new model promises more accurate text rendering and translation and “advanced world knowledge,” which “pulls from Gemini’s real-world knowledge base, and is powered by real-time information and images from web search to more accurately render specific subjects,” according to the company’s press release.

New creative controls let users keep groups of characters consistent across scenes, render images with higher resolution, and parse complex prompts.

The first version of Nano Banana became popular for making action figures out of users, and helped catapult the Gemini AI app to the top of the charts, bumping ChatGPT from its perch.

Nano Banana 2: Combining Pro capabilities with lightning-fast speed

New creative controls let users keep groups of characters consistent across scenes, render images with higher resolution, and parse complex prompts.

The first version of Nano Banana became popular for making action figures out of users, and helped catapult the Gemini AI app to the top of the charts, bumping ChatGPT from its perch.

Rani Molla2/26/26

Tesla’s ride-hailing service is looking a lot more like Uber’s than Waymo’s

Despite numerous promises about amassing a giant network of driverless cars, so far it seems like Tesla’s Robotaxis are a lot more similar to Uber’s plain old ride-hailing service than Waymo’s expanding autonomous fleet.

In California, where Tesla has its largest ride-hailing service, the company has taken no formal steps to gain approval for a truly driverless car service, according to Reuters. Throughout 2025, Tesla failed to log a single mile of autonomous test driving on state roads, and has not applied for the necessary permits to test or deploy vehicles without a human present. Currently, Tesla holds only a basic permit that requires a human safety monitor to remain in the driver’s seat at all times.

Currently, Tesla’s California Robotaxi service consists of roughly 300 Teslas operated by human drivers using the company’s supervised Full Self-Driving tech. In Austin, where the company has about 45 vehicles, Tesla made a big show earlier this year of announcing it was removing the safety monitors sitting in the front seats during rides. However, to date, only a handful of those vehicles have been reported to be actually operating without a safety monitor onboard.

In other words, it’s performing a service more akin to a tech-heavy Uber ride than the one operated by Alphabet subsidiary Waymo, which earlier this week announced it now has driverless rides available to the public in 10 markets. Even Uber is trying to put space between itself and the old driver-having Ubers of yore: this week its autonomous software partner said the company plans to launch a driverless service in London this year, with plans for 10 markets.

During its earnings report last month, Tesla said it planned to offer Robotaxi service in a half dozen new cities in the first half of this year, including Phoenix, Miami, and Las Vegas. Judging by Tesla’s progress so far, it’s likely those services will also feature a human in the front seat.

Tesla touts California robotaxis but does nothing to get permits

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