8/20: Waymo’s Chip

Happy Thursday, monitors. We had another incredible guest day: Martin Casado, the a16z General Partner and infra lead who just had a legendary week with the exits of Cursor and OpenRouter; Peter McCrory, the Head of Economics at Anthropic; Joshua Monrad of Sentinel Bio and the OpenAI Foundation, Simon Grimm of Stripe’s Works In Progress, and many more. Be sure to monitor with us live on X and YouTube, and follow us on Instagram.

• Waymo publishes some information on its new custom chip, built in collaboration with AMD, Micron, NVIDIA, Samsung, Sandisk, Socionext, and TSMC. The chip, a purpose-built 5nm ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit), will be installed in every Waymo Ojai. The Ojai is Waymo’s newest-generation vehicle, manufactured by Chinese EV company Zeekr1.

• California-based companies drew $366 billion in venture capital in 2026, over three times more than every other state combined. The AI boom has unexpectedly increased the state’s income tax revenue from $126B to $147B and sent Bay Area housing prices upward. Nearly 60% of the funding has gone to just two companies: OpenAI ($122B) and Anthropic ($95B).

• Datacenters are increasingly unpopular. In August 2025, 43% of Americans said they would support a data center being built near where they live. One year later, that number has fallen to 15%. Republicans have fallen from +14 net popularity to -43, and Democrats have fallen from -8 to -75. In the last day alone, multiple Republican politicians have come out against data centers.

• The OpenAI Strategic Futures team launches a new blog, AI Futures, with the goal of figuring out how societies can preserve individual rights and agency in the age of transformative AI.

• Meta is a major customer of Microsoft Azure. It spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year to access AI models through the platform. Meta is currently working on its own compute business, Meta Compute, which may compete with Azure.

• Ramp says OpenAI business spend grew faster than Anthropic QTD. According to data from the fintech company, enterprise spend on OpenAI’s API has grown 82% since the beginning of Q3 2026, compared to 76% for Anthropic.

• Nvidia is working on a chip for the Chinese market. The chip will be a variant of Nvidia’s LPU (language processing unit) inference accelerator developed with technology licensed from Groq. It remains to be seen whether the Chinese government will allow the chip to be sold.

• Ode with Anthropic is acquiring Casper Studios. Ode is a joint venture by Anthropic, Blackstone, Sequoia, and some other firms that helps enterprises adopt frontier AI. Casper Studios is an AI consultancy. This is Ode’s first acquisition.

• Alibaba profit falls 75% due to AI capex. The Chinese tech giant’s capex is now approaching $10B a quarter. Chinese AI companies often find it harder to make money due to their far lower pricing compared to American companies. Revenue rose 9%.

• Anthropic will allow zero-data retention for Mythos-class models, following an OpenAI announcement to allow ZDR for its frontier models yesterday. Under ZDR, service providers do not store or log requests after they are processed.

• Hudson River Trading announces a major deal with CoreWeave. HRT is a high-frequency trading firm and CoreWeave is a cloud computing provider. The deal will give HRT early access to CoreWeave’s Nvidia Vera Rubin chips.

• Nick Caputo (Asst. Professor, Johns Hopkins School of Government and Policy)

• Travis Fisher (Director of Energy and Environmental Policy, Cato Institute)

• Matt Duffy (independent data scientist)

• Simon Grimm (AI and European Progress Editor, Works In Progress)

• Martin Casado (General Partner, Andreessen Horowitz)

• Joshua Monrad (Co-founder, Sentinel Bio; Biosecurity Advisor, OpenAI Foundation)

• Peter McCrory (Head of Economics, Anthropic)