Alphabet Waymo Storage Facility in San Francisco

San Francisco, CA - August 6, 2023: Aerial view of Alphabet’s Waymo fleet storage facility in the Bayview-Hunters Point district.

Waymore rides

Waymo’s had a quiet — but huge — increase in ridership

In one year in California, Waymo’s paid driverless rides increased from 12,000 to over 312,000 a month, though the unit still loses parent company Alphabet money.

Yiwen Lu

11/4/24 3:55PM

Waymo has quietly ramped up its status. A lot.

Last year, Waymo started offering paid, driverless rides to passengers in San Francisco. In the year since, Waymo went from 12,000 rides in August 2023 to over 312,000 rides in August 2024. Its service area in California also expanded from one city to multiple, including San Francisco, Los Angeles, and three cities in the San Francisco Peninsula, where the region’s main airport is located.

During an earnings call, CEO Sundar Pichai of Alphabet, Waymo’s parent company, said Waymo is now driving more than 1 million fully autonomous miles and over 150,000 paid rides each week. That’s about 50% more than what the company announced just last quarter. Now, Waymo has about 700 cars operating across three states: California, Arizona, and Texas.

Waymo doesn’t seem to face much competition yet. Cruise, the only other company that has obtained a driverless-deployment permit in California, is not providing driverless ride-hail service to the public in the state.

In an oversubscribed fundraising round this October, Waymo said it had raised $5.6 billion in new capital, led by Alphabet and outside investors like Andreessen Horowitz and Fidelity. Bloomberg reported last week that the latest round valued Waymo at more than $45 billion — which was more than the market size of Ford and the company’s partner, Hyundai.

Still, the success of Waymo begs a reality check. Uber racks up millions of rides every hour globally, and it dominates the US ride-hailing market with more than three-quarters of market share. The company is also now profitable. Alphabet’s so-called “other bets,” which include Waymo and other subsidiaries, lost $1.12 billion in Q3 2024, though less than the $1.19 billion in Q3 2023.

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Rani Molla7h

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 Keegan21h

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 Molla23h

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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