Uber Gears Up for Autonomous Vehicles

Uber described 2024 as "a turning point for the industry, as autonomous vehicle (AV) technology began to mature and more people experienced the magic of their first autonomous ride."  

Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi added: "We estimate that the U.S. market alone is a 1 trillion dollar opportunity as you commercialise AV at scale and bring the unit economics down.....[but] we think that the commercialisation of the technology is gonna take way, way longer. And by the time that the technology commercialises all over the world and in the U.S., you're gonna see many, many more players get over the finish line as it relates to technology."  

"In the next five years, the addressable market is going to be probably in the order of 10% to 15% of the overall marketplace and then gradually is going to expand over a period of time over the next 15 years or so," he added.

Khosrowshahi identified five factors that are required for "scale commercialisation of this business," which he quantified as 10%, 20%, 30% of Uber's volumes. The five factors he cited are enabling regulation, "a consistently superhuman safety record",  cost-effective vehicles, excellent on-the-ground operations; and a "high-utilisation network" that can manage variable demand with flexible supply. 

Uber claimed that AVs currently cost more than 200,000 US dollars each to make, while also noting that  an "average-utilised AV" can run as much as 100,000 miles a year, compared to a typical consumer vehicle at 10,000-15,000 miles a year. "This means that AVs need to be charged multiple times a day and serviced monthly," Uber says.

As it partners with AV developers, Uber said it is spending "an enormous, yet appropriate, amount of organisational energy to execute on our AV strategy. We will have much more to share through the year, starting with our public launch with Waymo in Austin next month and Atlanta this summer. "

Outside of the US, Uber anticipates "several more international expansions in 2025" following its launch in Abu Dhabi. Source: Uber

Alphabet Plans Major Increase in Capex

For the full year 2024, Alphabet's revenue grew by 14% to 350 billion US dollars. Alphabet said it expects to invest approximately 75 billion dollars in capex in 2025, up from 52.5 billion dollars in 2024, primarily to expand its artificial intelligence capabilities.

Alphabet also reported that its Waymo self-driving vehicles served more than four million passenger trips in 2024. However, progress may have slowed - Alphabet also said Waymo is averaging over 150,000 trips each week - the same figure it cited in October 2024. Source: Alphabet

Meta Steps Up Investments in Wearables

Meta hopes to sell between 5 and 10 million units of the next iteration of its AI glasses, after declaring the second generation (the Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses) "a real hit." Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, said that 2025 will be "a defining year that determines if we're on a path towards many hundreds of millions and eventually billions of AI glasses -- and glasses being the next computing platform like we've been talking about for some time -- or if this is just going to be a longer grind."

Meta also suggested that 2025 is going to be a pivotal year for the metaverse. "This is the year when a number of the long-term investments that we've been working on that will make the metaverse more visually stunning and inspiring will really start to land," Zuckerberg said.

In 2025, Meta expects about half of its investments in Reality Labs, which is making a loss of about 17.7 billion US dollars a year, to be related to wearables (such as the AI glasses) and about half in metaverse, which includes its VR, mixed reality, and social platform initiatives.  "We do anticipate that operating losses in Reality Labs will increase in 2025, as they did in 2024," Meta added. "In terms of the increase, we expect our wearables devices to be the primary driver of Reality Labs operating losses growing in 2025 across both cost revenue and operating expenses. And that really comes from our efforts to further accelerate the adoption of our AI glasses products." Source: Meta 

Tesla Plots Robot Rollout in 2025 and 2026

Tesla is planning to build several thousand of its Optimus humanoid robots to work in its factories this year.  "They will do useful things," Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, told investors. "Those Optimus in use at the Tesla factories for production design 1 will inform how will we change for production design 2, which we expect to launch next year. ..very rough guess that we start delivering Optimus robots to companies that are outside of Tesla in maybe the second half of next year, something like that." 

Musk said that once Tesla is producing one million units a year, the production cost of Optimus will be less than 20,000 US dollars. But the price of Optimus will be set by the market demand, he added.

Tesla also hopes to be piloting its vehicles driving autonomously on the streets of Austin, Texas, by June this year. "We already have Teslas operating autonomously unsupervised full self-driving at our factory in Fremont, and we'll soon be doing that at our factory in Texas," Musk said. "I'm confident that we'll release unsupervised FSD California this year as well. Yes, in fact, I think we will most likely release unsupervised FSD in many regions of the country of the U.S. by the end of this year."  However, in 2025, the focus will be on internal testing - Musk indicated that the general public won't be able to start using self-driving Teslas, which will be offered on an Airbnb-style rental basis, until 2026. Source: Tesla

DeepSeek Raises Questions About AI Investments

News that Chinese company DeepSeek has trained a highly-capable open-source reasoning model (called R1) for less than 6 million US dollars has called into question the billions of dollars that US tech companies are spending to build their AI models. Leading AI chip maker Nvidia has called DeepSeek’s R1 model “an excellent AI advancement and a perfect example of test time scaling...DeepSeek’s work illustrates how new models can be created using that technique, leveraging widely-available models and compute that is fully export control compliant.”

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, has said his company will invest between 60 billion and 65 billion US dollars in capex in 2025,  up from about 40 billion dollars in 2024. In a Facebook post, he wrote: "In 2025, I expect Meta AI will be the leading assistant serving more than 1 billion people, Llama 4 will become the leading state of the art model, and we'll build an AI engineer that will start contributing increasing amounts of code to our R&D efforts. To power this, Meta is building a 2GW+ datacenter that is so large it would cover a significant part of Manhattan. We'll bring online ~1GW of compute in '25 and we'll end the year with more than 1.3 million GPUs." Source: Facebook post

Ericsson Reports Return to Growth

 

For the fourth quarter, Ericsson reported a 2% year-on-year rise in sales on an organic basis to 72.9 billon Swedish krona (6.7 billion US dollars), thanks to 54% growth in  North America.  Europe and Latin America also grew, while the other market areas declined significantly. 

Ericsson also reported "growing interest in network APIs, with financial fraud protection and quality on demand applications in focus." Source: Ericsson report

Apollo Go Seeks International Expansion

Apollo Go, Baidu’s autonomous ride-hailing service, provided 988,000 rides in the third quarter of 2024, up 20% year over year. As of October 28, 2024, the cumulative rides provided to the public by Apollo Go surpassed 8 million. 

During the third quarter of 2024, rides provided by Apollo Go’s fully driverless vehicles accounted for over 70% of total rides nationwide. The proportion of fully driverless rides further increased to 80% in October 2024. Apollo Go’s sixth generation autonomous vehicle, the RT6, is now operating on public roads in multiple cities in China. 

"The overall market is still in its infancy," said Robin Li, CEO of Baidu, on an earnings call with analysts. "So, competition should help accelerate the growth of the market and foster a more friendly, pro innovation regulatory environment. We believe such regulatory environment is essential for the healthy growth of the -- of this industry and we remain prepared for expansion when the time is right.

"We are actively seeking new opportunities for international expansion. We see significant potential in cities that enable large-scale, fully driverless operations, similar to Wuhan, Chongqing. Additionally, we are open to exploring different business model options, focusing on asset-light strategy to keep our operations flexible and efficient as we grow." Source: Baidu's results

Qualcomm Forecasts Major AR Market by 2029

Chip developer Qualcomm said it is aiming to generate more than 2 billion US dollars in revenue from the extended reality (XR) market in the fiscal year 2029 (ending September 2025). That figure is based on sales of 15 million augmented reality devices and 15 million virtual reality/mixed reality devices employing Qualcomm's Snapdragon chipset during that year. 

Qualcomm also set a target of 8 billion dollars in revenue from the automotive sector in fiscal 2029 up from 2.9 billion dollars in fiscal 2024. It claims to be working with all the major automakers to develop software-defined vehicles, helping to develop ADAS, autonomous driving technology and other digital systems. Source: Qualcomm Investor Day