Tesla Earns Fitch BBB Rating as 2026 AI Capex Tops $25 Billion

Gatik, the Silicon Valley-based autonomous trucking company, secured $200 million in Series D funding in late August, a round led by Qatar Investment Authority and joined by Koch Disruptive Technology, Millennium, and Cathie Wood's Ark Invest. CEO Gautam Narang said the capital will go toward scaling the company's driverless freight network, which currently operates across Pepsi's network in three markets in Texas, Arkansas, and Arizona. Gatik has over $600 million in contracted revenue, Narang said, against a total addressable opportunity of more than $300 billion. The company's dock-to-dock delivery model moves goods from customer distribution centers to retail stores using driverless trucks running 24/7 on highways and surface streets, managed through its Gatik Omni fleet platform and a human AV interface called HAVi. Narang said Gatik aims to scale to hundreds of driverless trucks by the end of this year and thousands next year, citing strong demand from commercial partners including Pepsi.

Uber and Lyft are underperforming the market as autonomous vehicle platforms from Waymo, Tesla, and Zoox begin deploying at scale, according to a new Bank of America note. Uber has cut 10% of its workforce and its stock is down 13%, while Lyft's market cap sits at a paltry $5.8 billion with shares off 20%. Bank of America analyst Justin Post wrote that Uber and Lyft expect their AV ramps to begin scaling in 2028, giving new AV platforms 18 to 24 months to build volumes without incumbent AV competition. Post estimated Waymo has around 4,000 vehicles operating in the US, Tesla has 420 driverless vehicles in operation based on Texas registration data, and Zoox had 50 AVs in operation in September 2025, mostly in Las Vegas. He projects the competitive AV fleet could scale from around 4,500 vehicles today and approximately $570 million in bookings in 2026 to approximately 118,000 vehicles and $15.3 billion in bookings in 2029, with a base case of $6 billion in competitive bookings by 2028, or 5% of the market. Lyft CEO David Risher is pushing out a robotaxi fleet in markets like Nashville and building an 80,000-square-foot warehouse to service it, while Post noted Uber is ramping partnerships with Nvidia, Lucid, Rivian, Volkswagen, Zoox, WeRide, and Pony.ai, which have committed 120k AVs to Uber.