Dec 9, 2025 4 min read Daily Rundown

⛵ Trump’s Chip Crackdown Ends

Plus: Paramount vs. Netflix, Waymo Are Scaling

Good Morning, Early Adopters!

The next phase of the tech and power race is no longer theoretical; it’s already in motion.

CHIPS

Trump’s Chip Crackdown Ends With a Checkout

👀 What’s happening: The Trump administration just approved Nvidia’s H200 exports to China, reversing months of “national security” rhetoric. The chips allowed in are older models, and Washington will take a 25% cut of all sales. Congress is fuming, with a new bipartisan bill still on the table to block advanced AI exports entirely, but the president has already moved the goalposts.

🔥 How this hits reality: The so-called “AI containment policy” just turned into a toll booth. Trump’s Commerce Department framed it as a balance between innovation and security, but it’s really a licensing racket in which America taxes the flow of silicon while pretending to guard the gates. For China, this means robots and industrial AI can keep moving; for Washington, it means cash flow without political fallout.

⛵ Key takeaway: The stick of Trump's regulation was never about control; it was about collection.

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ACQUIRE

Paramount Goes Full Berserker on Netflix’s WBD Deal

👀 What’s happening: Just days after Netflix sealed an $82.7B (including $72B in cash-and-stock consideration) handshake to buy Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount Skydance returned with a $108.4B hostile offer — all cash, all in. It bypassed WBD’s board and went straight to shareholders, framing Netflix’s part-cash, part-stock deal as “inferior” and risky. The Ellison family, RedBird Capital, and a $54B debt war chest are bankrolling the move.

🔥 How this hits reality: This isn’t just a bidding war; it’s a knife fight over Hollywood’s control center. WBD holds the catalog that can still shift global market gravity: HBO’s crown IP, Warner’s production machine, and CNN’s distribution reach. Whoever wins doesn’t just own a studio; they dictate what the rest of the industry must orbit. That’s why both Paramount and Netflix are willing to burn every bridge, spend every dollar, and take every antitrust punch.

⛵ Key takeaway: Everyone now knows WBD is the control panel. Whoever grabs it gets to rewrite the map.

ROBOTAXI

Waymo’s Robotaxis Are Scaling

👀 What’s happening: A leaked Tiger Global investor letter quietly dropped a bomb. Waymo is now running 450 thousand robotaxi rides every week, almost doubling the 250 thousand it disclosed just six months ago. The company is already live in five cities and plans to plant flags in twelve more by 2026, turning its once slow crawl into a full-blown expansion sprint.

🔥 How this hits reality: Robotaxi commercialization was supposed to be a decade of pilots, burn rate, and polite optimism. Waymo just tore the timeline in half. Every additional city speeds up data flywheels, chops per-ride costs, and widens the gap between Waymo and every latecomer still stuck in PowerPoint mode. The market thought autonomy would be a marathon. Waymo is running it like a series of quarterly sprints and the numbers show the demand is already there.

⛵ Key takeaway: Robotaxi is not creeping forward any longer. It is compounding and the commercial curve is steeper than anyone priced in.

BAY AREA MEMOS

IBM is reportedly in advanced talks to buy Confluent for about $11 billion, with an announcement possible as early as Monday.
Singapore’s SCCP has broken ground on a 100MW Osaka data center, fully funded and aimed at meeting rising hyperscale and enterprise demand in Asia.
Unconventional AI raised $475M to build neuromorphic AI chips targeting thousand-fold efficiency gains.
Nvidia and SoftBank are weighing a $1B investment in Skild AI, backing its robot-agnostic “brain” model for next-gen autonomous robots.
CoreWeave is issuing another $2B in debt despite mounting concerns and a falling stock, underscoring its structurally debt-dependent business model.

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