Hello, and welcome to TechScape. I’m your host, Blake Montgomery, writing to you from Barcelona, where my diet has transformed at least half my body into ham.
Who will dominate the autonomous vehicles market?
We are on the verge of the global arrival of self-driving cars. Next year, major firms from both the US and China will deploy their robotaxis to metropolises around the world, in major expansions of their existing operations. These companies are posturing in the press like male birds fighting for the same mate; the dance sets the stage for the global competition to come.
On the US side, there’s Waymo, Google’s driverless venture. The company has invested billions of dollars in Waymo in the past 15 years. The company opened its robotaxi service to the public in June 2024 in San Francisco after years of testing and has been rolling it out steadily since. Now, vehicles are very visible in most of Los Angeles, and they are going to Washington DC, New York City, and London next year.
On 2 November, the Chinese internet search giant Baidu issued a challenge to Google. Baidu announced that its autonomous vehicle subsidiary, Apollo Go, regularly conducts the same number of rides as Waymo: 250,000 each week. Waymo reached the milestone in the spring.
The majority of Chinese electric vehicles, even without self-driving software, cost a fraction of those made by US companies. Building each Waymo vehicle costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, experts estimate, though the exact figure is not known. The CFO of Pony AI, a leader in autonomous vehicles in China, told the WSJ: “Our vehicle’s hardware cost is much, much lower than Waymo’s.”
Google now needs to convince future customers that it is the higher-quality option to achieve a return on its billions of dollars of investment in Waymo.
Google is using a discrepancy in transparency as a point of differentiation. There is far less publicly available data on Baidu’s cars, which raises questions about the trustworthiness of its safety record. Baidu itself claims its vehicles have suffered “not a single major accident” in their millions of miles of driving. Google pointed out in a statement to the Wall Street Journal how extensive its disclosure to US transportation authorities has been in a story about the success of Chinese self-driving companies.
But Apollo Go, which has let its taxis loose in Dubai and Abu Dhabi as the gulf states court tech deals of all stripes, isn’t Waymo’s only challenger. The wheels of WeRide, another Chinese autonomous vehicle company, have touched down in the United Arab Emirates and Singapore. All of the significant players in the Chinese market are expanding in Europe, Reuters reports. Cars made by the firm Momenta and deployed by Uber are slated to start driving in Germany in 2026. WeRide, Baidu and Pony AI also have plans to begin robotaxi service in various European locales in the near future. Many more people are about to see self-driving cars in the course of their daily lives.
After the first question of self-driving cars – can we make one that works? – the question now becomes: who will dominate the market?
Read more: Driving competition: China’s carmakers in race to dominate Europe’s roads
The week in AI
Elon Musk’s faithful vote to make him $1tn richer
Tesla is not doing well. The impending expiry of a tax credit for electric vehicles in the US brought a rush of buyers to dealerships for several months, and still the company reported a 37% drop in profits in late October. The weak earnings add to a string of weak quarters for the EV maker.
Despite Tesla’s performance, Tesla shareholders voted to pay Elon Musk $1tn over the coming decade if he can boost Tesla’s valuation from $1.4tn in market value today to $8.5tn. If he reaches that and other goals, he will earn the largest payout in corporate history.
The result of the vote was announced at the annual shareholder event in Austin, Texas, with more than 75% of investors voting in favor of the plan. Chants of “Elon” erupted in the room at the news of its approval.
Though the pay package ties him to Tesla for a decade, Musk has rarely focused his attention on one company. Nor has he turned away from politics. My colleague Nick Robins-Early reports on the ways that Musk has made himself into a fixture of the international far right:
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Musk’s political endeavors since leaving the Trump administration have included leveraging his social media platform as a pulpit to influence New York City’s mayoral race and creating an AI-generated, rightwing knockoff of Wikipedia. In interviews, he has said there is a “homeless industrial complex” of non-profits ruining California and complained that “it should be okay to have white pride”. On X, he proclaimed that the UK would fall into civil war and western civilization would collapse.
The social and financial backlash to Musk’s politics has not quelled his public embrace of the far-right, and in characteristically stubborn fashion, he has begun flaunting his affiliations more openly while suggesting that being labeled racist or extremist is now meaningless to him.
Read more: How Tesla shareholders put Elon Musk on path to be world’s first trillionaire
Can you defeat a data center?
The data centers that power the artificial intelligence boom are beyond enormous. Their financials, their physical scale, and the amount of information contained within them are all so huge that the idea of stopping their construction can seem like opposing an avalanche in progress. Silicon Valley’s biggest firms are spending hundreds of billions as fast as they can.
Despite the scale and momentum of the explosion of data centers, resistance is mounting in the United States, in the United Kingdom, and in Latin America, where data centers have been built in some of the world’s driest areas. Local opposition in all three regions has often focused on the environmental impacts and resource consumption of the gargantuan structures.
Paz Peña is a researcher and fellow with the Mozilla Foundation who studies the social and environmental impact of technology, particularly data centers and particularly in Latin America. She spoke to the Guardian at the Mozilla Festival in Barcelona about how communities in Latin America are going to court to pry information away from governments and corporations that would much rather keep it secret. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Read my Q&A with Paz Peña here.
Read more: ‘The city that draws the line’: one Arizona community’s fight against a huge datacenter
