Welcome to the Halftime Show.

The first time that I took an autonomous car was actually in Phoenix, Arizona in Feb last year via Waymo. We blasted drum n bass at 1 am, windows down, and it felt euphoric. Now in Shenzhen, it’s become a weekly routine.

There's something about watching a driverless car navigate rush hour chaos (in China) that never stops being surreal. As a regular Apollo customer, this issue is thrilling.

Let's lock in.

Apollo Go is China's Waymo - backed by Baidu, the AI company that built China's Google before search became a commodity.

300,000 weekly rides in Q4 2025. 200% growth YoY. 20 million cumulative rides globally.

Dubai via Uber in February. Abu Dhabi in January. South Korea announced February 27. London and Germany via Lyft in H1 2026. Switzerland in also in testing.

Every major Chinese tech player that has gone global built its own consumer app. After all, the token Chinese way: vertical integration, proprietary distribution, full control of the consumer relationship.

Why did Baidu do the opposite?

→ Uber announces partnership with Baidu/Apollo Go to launch robotaxis in Dubai. A deliberate asset light model: Uber controls demand and the customer interface, Baidu supplies the driverless stack. (Uber IR)

→ Apollo Go confirmed per vehicle profitability in Wuhan- at fares 30% cheaper than Beijing. "Once we can generate profit for every single car in a second tier city in mainland China, we can generate profits in lots of cities across the world." - Halton Niu, GM Apollo Go Overseas. (CNBC)

→ 20 million cumulative rides. 3.4 million fully driverless in Q4 2025. 200% YoY growth. Weekly rides peaked at 300,000. 26 cities as of February 2026. One airbag deployment per 12 million kilometers. (Benzinga)

→ Baidu's RT6 costs ~$28,000. Waymo's runs ~$75,000- nearly 3x. Waymo operates across five US cities at ~$2.00/mile. Apollo Go operates primarily in Wuhan at ~$0.35/mile. (The Driverless Digest)

→ Uber has signed four Chinese autonomous driving companies: Apollo Go, Pony.ai, WeRide, and Momenta- for commercial deployments across the Middle East and Europe. Every major Uber robotaxi partnership outside the US runs on Chinese AV technology. Pony.ai shares surged 48% on its Uber announcement. (TechCrunch)

The robotaxi race is usually covered as a tech competition. It isn't. It's an economics competition with a tech prerequisite.

The technology question: “can the car drive itself safely” has been met by at least four Chinese companies and one American one. That question is largely.. settled. What remains is which company built a model that actually travels: economically, geographically, and at scale.

Why MILES are the moat.

Social platforms compound with users. Ecom platforms compound with transactions. Autonomous driving compounds with miles - and miles can't be scraped, licensed, or synthesized.

Every city Apollo Go enters = not just a revenue opportunity

Every city Apollo Go enters = data collection operation that makes every other city in the fleet smarter. Dubai trains London. Seoul trains Wuhan.

So the Uber partnership makes more sense than it looks. Building a consumer app costs capital and attention that should be pointed at one thing: accumulating miles. Uber already has the riders. Baidu's job is to make the car drive itself.

In Uber we trust.

Uber hasn't just signed one Chinese robotaxi company. It's signed four: Apollo Go, Pony.ai, WeRide, and Momenta- across the Middle East and Europe.

Signing four AV partners is smart hedging. Signing four Chinese ones is a conviction call on where the most deployable autonomous driving technology currently lives.

The *second tier strategy.

Wuhan is a “second tier” Chinese city. Fares run 30% below Beijing, and a fraction of Dubai, London, or Seoul. Apollo Go proved its unit economics there first, deliberately.

The logic:

If that equation turns positive in Wuhan (at 30% less rev), it turns positive almost everywhere else.

Same playbook across each…tackle hardest market first, then export to higher margin ones.

Waymo is not losing.

It raised (a whopping) $16 billion at a $126 billion valuation in February 2026 - the LARGEST autonomous vehicle funding round in history. It also:

Waymo is technologically excellent, it’s proven that at scale. So the gap isn't technical, but structural.

So? Two bets are placed.

Waymo: Depth. Superior safety data, a dominant US position, Alphabet's compute infrastructure. That the US market alone: premium pricing, high density cities, regulatory familiarity- is large enough to build a significant business on.

Apollo Go: Portability. Prove the economics at the floor of the revenue curve first. Then let the model travel to markets where fares are structurally higher and the cost base is already validated.

In a world where autonomous vehicles could displace ride sharing incumbents faster than current models project, the variable that matters most is which approach scales without requiring the world to change around it.

This race keeps us on our toes.