Welcome to Cautious Optimism, a newsletter on tech, business and power.
Wednesday! Meta’s free speech era (2025-2025) has come to an end: Apple, Alphabet and now Meta have pulled user pages or apps people have been using to locate or identify members of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The lesson this year is that if you expect corporations to stand up to government encroachment on free speech rights, you’re going to be disappointed. To work! — Alex
📈 Trending Up: K-shaped recoveries … operating income? … complaints about data centers … spine in media … crypto in India?
📉 Trending Down: US-China relations … Apple-China relations … traditional TV … EU-China relations … the global birth rate … the Voting Rights Act
Things That Matter
OpenAI goes all out on its revenue push: There’s a big question-mark-shaped millstone around the stock market: How does OpenAI plan to pay for all the chips and compute it has lined up with its horde of partners? If the company can one day meet all its headline-worthy commitments, lots of companies that have traded higher on those deals’ announcements stand to profit handsomely.
If not, the stock market will have to give back hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of dollars worth of gains.
The AI giant doesn’t intend to fail. Instead, the FT reports, OpenAI is planning “bespoke products” for governments and large customers — advertising, hardware, and even renting out spare compute capacity. Think of a way OpenAI can make money; the company intends to pursue it. It’s not going to succeed at everything it tries, of course, but perhaps the successes will augment ChatGPT revenue enough to cash all the checks it’s written.
Only 5% of ChatGPT users reportedly pay for the service. That’s 40 million out of 800 million weekly active users. And now that OpenAI is bringing cheaper subscription tiers to more countries, improving ChatGPT conversions is probably the single largest lever the company has to continue scaling its top line and purchasing power.
All this dissent crushing is worrying: A second ‘No Kings’ rally is planned in the United States on October 18. Billed as a rallying cry to “show the world” that “America has no kings, and the power belongs to the people,” the upcoming protest, to be held in cities around the country, is irking the folks in power in D.C.
Senator Roger Marshall thinks the public protest is shadow-financed professional agitation (wrong), and Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy wants to know who is funding the event (here’s a list of partner organizations, if you’re curious) — trying to pin the event on the ‘antifa’ boogeyman. House Whip Tom Emmer claims the event is being pushed by “the terrorist wing” of the Democratic party, while House Speaker Mike Johnson is calling No Kings a “hate-America rally” for “the Antifa crowd, the pro-Hamas crowd, and the Marxists.”
Just last month, the White House dubbed antifa a “domestic terrorist organization,” and the President, in a memorandum on national security, called “anti-capitalism” a “rallying cry used by domestic terrorists to wage a violent assault” against the nation.
Are these normal political complaints? No. Such attempts to kneecap and brand citizen protests as lowly, astroturfed opposition are gross, but not novel. Calling protestors “terrorists,” or associating them with antifa/Marxism, however, is a clear bid to try and push the event into illegal territory. You know who was famously anti-capitalist?
The rhetoric that dissent is fake and/or illegal is picking up steam. And we’re only in the first year of the second Trump administration.
Waymo heads to London: Earlier this week, CO went over how we’re getting close to self-driving cars, since Wayve’s upcoming mega-round and progress across a range of factors in the industry indicate that we’re over the hump and are accelerating away from needing to drive ourselves about.
Today, Waymo announced that it’s heading to London in 2026 and would work with fleet partner Moove to get its automatic taxi service up and running in London. I missed it at the time, but this isn’t Waymo’s first international foray — that was Tokyo. Still, our perspective remains unchanged: it’s just a matter of time until we drop the steering wheel.
It’s a great time to be a bank: Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase crushed this week. Morgan Stanley reported better-than-expected profit of $2.80 per share, above expectations of $2.08 per share; Bank of America earned $1.06 per share in the third quarter, trouncing expectations of a $0.95 per share profit; and Goldman turned in net profit of $12.25 per share, better than the $11 the Street expected. JPMorgan Chase also performed similarly.
What’s driving such sunny days on Wall Street? Trading (benefiting from market chop) and investment banking (thanks to deals). We don’t have to dwell on the market movements of the year; you’ve lived through the ups and downs. Deal volume is harder to feel out, but transactions worth $5 billion or more are up 64% this year. That means more and larger fees for your favorite bank.
The government shutdown could slow deal-making if it continues, as regulatory approval could take longer. And with agencies shuttered or slowed, there’s less economic data being published. The problem is a minor headwind right now, but downside risk to deal-making increases each day the government remains closed.
Mixed news on the computing front
Alphabet, Microsoft and Amazon’s upcoming quarterly results will provide critical insight into how compute-constrained, or not, the hyperscaled cloud providers are. If these three tell the market that they still don’t have enough CPUs and GPUs running, then we can expect lots more spending from companies using AMD and Nvidia chips. If not, expect market sentiment to pull a peregrine falcon on the hunt.
In good news for the market, Microsoft is tapping Nscale (European neocloud) to expand a deal that will see “approximately 200,000 NVIDIA GB300 GPUs of hyperscale NVIDIA AI infrastructure across Europe and the U.S. in one of the largest AI infrastructure contracts ever signed.”
That’s what, $10 billion or more worth of spend? The huge sum implies that Microsoft, at least, is still scrambling to accumulate compute capacity, which in turn implies strong AI demand. And from that, we can infer that at least some of the current market enthusiasm for the AI biz is not insane.
The deal also implies that OpenAI is not entirely bonkers in thinking that it needs as many racks of blinking GPUs as it is racing to pre-purchase.
What other signals can we glean from current data? Token processing growth has stalled over on OpenRouter, in some bad news. Perhaps Google can set us straight:
May 2024: Google reported that it had “9.7 trillion tokens a month across [its] products and APIs”
May 2025: That figure rose to “over 480 trillion” per month
July 2025: Google reported that was processing “980 trillion monthly tokens, a remarkable increase”
September 2025: Google processed more than 1.3 quadrillion tokens
Recall that tokens are small pieces of data used by AI — a word might be a token or two, for example. So, more tokens processed implies more AI usage, roughly.
It’s great to see Google doubling its monthly token processing rate over the summer, but the subsequent gain, from July to September, was more modest. We’re working with approximate token count and token milestone dates here, so I don’t want to overstate the case, but it appears that AI usage at Alphabet is increasing more slowly in recent months.
What does all that mean? On one hand, we have Microsoft snapping up more compute capacity; on the other, Google could be seeing slowing demand for AI processing. Where do they net out? Who knows. But I think the market is so deep into the AI trade that the majors will have no choice but to go deep on AI demand in their upcoming earnings.
Microsoft reports earnings on October 29
Alphabet reports earnings on October 29
Amazon is expected to report earnings around October 30
It’s going to be a long two weeks until then. But I expect the results will be worth the wait.