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.

Rani Molla

Tunnel Vision

12h

Tesla gets permit to test autonomous cars in Nevada as autonomous driving heats up there

Amazon’s self-driving Zoox launched service this week, and Google’s Waymo is testing there.

Las Vegas Exteriors And Landmarks - 2024

Jon Keegan

9/11/25

OpenAI and Microsoft reach agreement that moves OpenAI closer to for-profit status

In a joint statement, OpenAI and Microsoft announced a “non-binding memorandum of understanding” for their renegotiated $13 billion partnership, which was a source of recent tension between the two companies.

Settling the agreement is a requirement to clear the way for OpenAI to convert to a for-profit public benefit corporation, which it must do before a year-end deadline to secure a $20 billion investment from SoftBank.

OpenAI also announced that the controlling nonprofit arm would hold an equity stake in the PBC valued at $100 billion, which would make it “one of the most well-resourced philanthropic organizations in the world.”

The statement read:

“This recapitalization would also enable us to raise the capital required to accomplish our mission — and ensure that as OpenAI’s PBC grows, so will the nonprofit’s resources, allowing us to bring it to historic levels of community impact.”

A joint statement from OpenAI and Microsoft

The statement read:

“This recapitalization would also enable us to raise the capital required to accomplish our mission — and ensure that as OpenAI’s PBC grows, so will the nonprofit’s resources, allowing us to bring it to historic levels of community impact.”

Rani Molla

9/11/25

BofA doesn’t expect Tesla’s ride-share service to have an impact on Uber or Lyft this year

Analysts at Bank of America Global Research compared Tesla’s new Bay Area ride-sharing service with its rivals and found that, for now, it’s not much competition for Uber and Lyft. “Tesla scale in SF is still small, and we don’t expect impact on Uber/Lyft financial performance in ’25,” they wrote.

Tesla is operating an unknown number of cars with drivers using supervised full self-driving in the Bay Area, and roughly 30 autonomous robotaxis in Austin. The company has allowed the public to download its Robotaxi app and join a waitlist, but it hasn’t said how many people have been let in off that waitlist.

While the analysts found that Tesla ride-shares are cheaper than traditional ride-share services like Uber and Lyft, the wait times are a lot longer (nine-minute wait times on average, when cars were available at all) and the process has more friction. They also said the “nature of [a] Tesla FSD ‘driver’ is slightly more aggressive than a Waymo,” the Google-owned company that’s currently operating 800 vehicles in the Bay Area.

Apple AI was MIA at iPhone event

A year and a half into a bungled rollout of AI into Apple’s products, Apple Intelligence was barely mentioned at the “Awe Dropping” event.

Jon Keegan9/10/25

Jon Keegan

9/10/25

Oracle’s massive sales backlog is thanks to a $300 billion deal with OpenAI, WSJ reports

OpenAI has signed a massive deal to purchase $300 billion worth of cloud computing capacity from Oracle, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.

The report notes that the five-year deal would be one of the largest cloud computing contracts ever signed, requiring 4.5 gigawatts of capacity.

The news is prompting shares to pare some of their massive gains, presumably because of concerns about counterparty and concentration risk.

Yesterday, Oracle shares skyrocketed as much as 30% in after-hours trading after the company forecast that it expects its cloud infrastructure business to see revenues climb to $144 billion by 2030.

Oracle shares were up as much as 43% on Wednesday.

It’s the second example in under a week of how much OpenAI’s cash burn and fundraising efforts are playing a starring role in the AI boom: the Financial Times reported that OpenAI is also the major new Broadcom customer that has placed $10 billion in orders.

Exclusive | Oracle, OpenAI Sign Massive $300 Billion Cloud Computing Deal