More like Nvidi-OUT, amirite?

China says no to Nvidia: Despite politicking at home to regain access to the Chinese market, American semiconductor giant Nvidia has once again seen its ability to sell GPUs in China precluded. This time, by the Chinese government. The FT reports that the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) told tech companies nationwide to “end their testing and orders” of Nvidia’s new chip, which was specifically built for the country. Instead, Chinese AI companies will be expected to source their chips locally. Alibaba and Baidu have made progress on that front, but consensus remains that Nvidia’s gear still leads the global market.

Social platforms face more Congressional scrutiny: The U.S. House of Representatives Oversight and Government Reform Committee has asked the leaders of social platforms Discord, Steam, Twitch, and Reddit to testify in early October. The call for testimony comes in the wake of rising political violence in the United States, and calls for better understanding of how online communities may, or may not, bear some blame for domestic radicalization. This is not the first time that social tech firms have been hauled to the Capitol; Discord had to testify on child safety before the Senate back in 2024, for example.

Waymo taps Lyft: Alphabet’s Waymo self-driving project has selected Lyft as its expansion partner as it gears up to launch in Nashville. In particular, it’s adding Lyft’s Flexdrive fleet management service, which the ride-hailing service purchased in 2020. In time, Waymo cars in the city will be available via Lyft’s interface, but the test will begin exclusively inside Waymo’s app. Waymo also inked agreements with Uber, before the latter company announced its own robotaxi effort with Lucid and Nuro. Shares of Lyft rose nearly 14% in regular trading, pushing the company's value above $9 billion.

Juxta: There are several GPS-like systems in the world (Galileo, BDS, GLONASS, GPS), but the category has constraints, like limited coverage in areas where communication with satellites is difficult. Enter Juxta, which offers a GPS alternative that can track movement anywhere in the world “with no new hardware, minimal internet connection, and remote deployment.” Details are a bit scant, but if Juxta can pull this off, it could become a technology giant.

Okibi: Lovable is one of the fastest-growing tech companies of all time, scaling from zero to nine figures in revenue at nearly light speed. It’s done so well that other companies offering prompt-to-product services are name-checking the European startup. Okibi is one such upstart, calling itself the ‘Lovable for agents.’ Yep, you enter a prompt, and an agent pops out. Many in business expect human workers to be augmented by multiple agents over time, which implies the need for a simple tool to build all those agents. Okibi wants to help with that.

Tecto: Once you have all those agents, how do you ensure they are getting work done and not making mistakes? You would need a governance tool, right? That’s what Tecto is building. Think incident flagging, policy tracking, that sort of thing. The way I see it, both Tecto and Okibi are bets that the agentic AI revolution we’ve been promised comes good. If we do find ourselves down the road in a world where AI agents are as common as desks, chairs, and corporate badges, both startups could soar.

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