Aug 25, 2025 5 min read Daily Rundown

⛵ Planetary Ethernet

More Stories: Battle For Street, Innovation Beats State Power

Good Morning, Early Adopters!

The future isn’t being drafted in government playbooks—it’s being wired on the streets. The real contest isn’t borders versus networks, but whether invention can keep outrunning the systems meant to contain it.

Nvidia Wants To Ethernet The Planet

👀 What’s the move: Nvidia just dropped Spectrum-XGS Ethernet, a networking platform that doesn’t just wire up one data hall — it stitches together whole cities of GPUs. The system automates latency and congestion management over long distances and nearly doubles the performance of Nvidia’s Collective Communications Library. CoreWeave is already testing it to link its data centers.

💡 Why it’s not boring: This isn’t about faster pipes — it’s about AI factories at continental scale. By collapsing scale-up and scale-out into Huang’s new “scale-across” model, Nvidia isn’t just selling chips, it’s dictating the network fabric that hyperscalers must adopt if they want to keep up. Every cluster stitched into Spectrum-XGS further locks customers into Nvidia’s ecosystem — turning the interconnect itself into a moat.

⛵ Key takeaway: Nvidia isn’t just wiring AI factories — it’s tightening its monopoly by owning not just the chips, but the very arteries that connect them.

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Vietnam’s EV Taxi Tycoon Declares War on Grab

👀 What’s the move: Pham Nhat Vuong, Vietnam’s richest man, is weaponizing GSM (Green & Smart Mobility) as both a ride-hailing competitor and a funnel to seed VinFast, Vietnam’s EV flagship, across Southeast Asia. With 40% market share in Vietnam and a $1B bet on the Philippines, GSM is rolling cyan-colored fleets into Indonesia and India, aiming to turn every cheap ride into a rolling showroom.

💡 Why it’s not boring: Grab built its empire on asset-light gig drivers; Vuong is flipping the model with an asset-heavy, vertically integrated EV fleet. That means thinner margins but higher brand leverage—VinFast sales already get a 20%+ boost from GSM riders. The coming fight won’t be just about fares, but about who defines the platform: Grab as the superapp, or GSM as the hardware-led Trojan horse. Expect street-level subsidy wars, but the real prize is consumer lock-in for Southeast Asia’s EV future.

⛵ Key takeaway: Grab wants to own mobility; Vuong wants to own the car you ride in. This fight won’t end at the curb—it ends in the showroom.

SPACE

Innovation Beats State Power

👀 What’s happening: China once looked unbeatable in space — a state-backed rocket machine cranking out Long March launches like GSM flooding Southeast Asia with EV taxis. But Musk flipped the script. SpaceX industrialized rockets, made reusability boring, and turned launches into something closer to Southwest Airlines than Cold War spectacle. Today, Falcon carries 90%+ of global payloads.

💡 Why it’s not boring: This isn’t about who has more money or who controls the launchpad. China’s state playbook is resource-heavy, but Musk’s is innovation-heavy. That’s the asymmetry. Beijing is now fast-tracking private players like LandSpace and iSpace, but they’re chasing a bar that SpaceX already reset: rockets as a scalable product, not a national monument.

⛵ Key takeaway: The future of space isn’t written by subsidies — it’s written by innovation. Musk proved rockets can be a business, not just a flag.

STARTUP SPOT

🛡️ Netskope
“SASE-first, AI-secured cloud.”
Cloud-native SASE/SSE: CASB, SWG, ZTNA, DLP with AI-powered SkopeAI on global NewEdge network.
→ Founded 2012 by Sanjay Beri; $1.4B+ raised, last at $7.5B valuation; 4,000+ customers incl. 30% of Fortune 100. Aug 2025 filed for US IPO, targeting $500M raise; FY revenue $571M (+33% YoY), net loss -$113M; underwriters Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan.

🤖 Tecton
“Real-time features, ML turbocharged.”
Feature platform from Uber Michelangelo team—sub-100 ms freshness, sub-10 ms latency for fraud, recsys, agentic AI.
→ Founded 2019 by ex-Uber engineers; customers include Coinbase, Atlassian, HelloFresh. Raised $160M (Series C $100M in 2022 at $900M valuation); Aug 2025 acquired by Databricks to power Agent Bricks.

🧠 Databricks
“AI lakehouse at $100B scale.”
Unified lakehouse + AI stack: Delta Lake, MLflow, Unity Catalog, new Lakebase OLTP + Agent Bricks for AI agents.
→ Founded 2013 by Spark creators; 15K+ customers incl. 60% of Fortune 500. Aug 2025 raised Series K at $100B+ valuation; $3.7B ARR; aggressive M&A (MosaicML, Neon, Tabular, Tecton); IPO buzz growing.

BAY AREA MEMOS

Apple is reportedly in early discussions to license Google's Gemini AI for a major Siri overhaul.
SpaceX delayed Starship’s 10th test flight over ground issues, a key step for Moon and Mars plans.
Cloud security provider Netskope files to go public, revealing 31% revenue growth alongside continued losses.
Nvidia is reportedly ending production of its China-specific H20 chip and will only release the next-gen B30A if cleared by the U.S. government.
Databricks acquires machine learning startup Tecton to enhance its real-time AI agent capabilities.

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