Nvidia, the chipmaker whose products have powered the generative AI craze in Silicon Valley, continues its winning streak. In its earnings call last week, the company reported revenue of $13.51 billion in the second quarter, more than doubling its performance in the same period a year ago and jumping 88% from Q1.

• The company’s results beat the already bullish expectations of analysts polled by Zacks Investment Research.

Investors and analysts had looked to the earnings report on Wednesday as a bellwether of the continued health of the hype around generative AI. The company’s range of specialized graphic processing units (GPUs) have been central to the development of large language models like ChatGPT, which has vaulted Nvidia into the upper echelons of Big Tech with a market capitalization that crossed the $1 trillion mark earlier this year.

“A new computing era”: Nvidia co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang has framed his company’s newfound dominance as part of a broad shift in the amount of computing power necessary for business, as generative AI changes the way companies navigate information. Huang reiterated that framing in the earnings call this week.

“A new computing era has begun. The industry is simultaneously going through two platform transitions: accelerated computing and generative AI,” Huang said. “Nvidia has been preparing for this for over two decades and has created a new computing platform that the world’s industries can build upon.”

Ray of light: AI-related demand has been a bright spot in an otherwise sluggish market for chips used in smartphones, PCs, and data centers, which has left major chipmakers with a glut of supply following a previous shortage.

Keep reading here.—PK

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Uber and Lyft have proved that ultimatums really do work, by threatening to end services in Minneapolis in response to a proposed city ordinance that would have established a minimum wage for local rideshare drivers.

On Tuesday, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey vetoed the proposal—which sought to establish a base pay of $1.40 per mile and 51 cents per minute, with a minimum of $5 per ride—over concerns about its potential impact on fair pay, safety, and ridesharing’s future in the city. Instead, Frey said he negotiated a deal with Uber directly to guarantee that drivers receive Minneapolis’s minimum wage and a minimum of $5 per trip.

• This is the second time the issue has come up in Minnesota this year. In May, Governor Tim Walz blocked a bill, which narrowly passed the Minnesota Senate, that attempted to establish base pay for drivers statewide.

Zoom out: Minneapolis isn’t the first city to push for expanded gig worker protections. Seattle’s City Council established a minimum wage for drivers back in 2020, following the lead of New York City, which did so in 2018.

Elsewhere, rideshare platforms have had some success in staving off such efforts: After a long legal tussle over a ballot measure funded by companies including Uber, Lyft, and DoorDash, a California state court ultimately ruled the platforms can classify drivers as independent contractors. Proposition 22, which California voters approved in 2020, exempts gig workers from the state’s strict worker status test known as AB5. The March 2023 decision to uphold Proposition 22 was something of a split win for companies, however, as courts tossed out a section that limited lawmakers’ ability to amend the rule, such as by allowing drivers to unionize.

More to come at the federal level: Last year, the Department of Labor proposed a new rule for determining who is an independent contractor and who must be classified as an employee and therefore given protections under the Fair Labor Standards Act. That controversial proposal—for which a final rule is expected in October—would make it harder for companies to classify workers as independent contractors.—MA

Coworking is a weekly segment where we spotlight Tech Brew readers who work with emerging technologies. Click here if you’d like a chance to be featured.

How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in tech?

The best way to describe what I do is that I help bring a CEO’s vision to life—whether that’s implementing a strategy to help grow the business or launching a new product into the market, I’m overseeing execution and making sure our two very technical co-founders are supported with top-notch business functions.

Transcend is the first-ever data governance infrastructure company (the platform empowers individuals to reclaim control over their data and helps companies comply with global data governance laws), so my job also involves ensuring that we’re effectively explaining to the world the problem we solve (navigating data governance across privacy and AI is a big undertaking!) and that we’re successfully solving it.

What's the most compelling tech project you've worked on, and why?

While I was at Uber on the Trust and Safety team, we rolled out a number of features designed to make the platform and riding experience safer for riders and drivers, especially women and marginalized communities—from cross-street pickups and a better taxonomy for reporting safety issues to location-sharing features.

These features weren’t just “nice to have”—they were vitally important to creating trust and ensuring physical safety. There are a lot of parallels to what we’re doing in the data governance world; the consequences of bad privacy practices can be severe for everyone, including vulnerable groups, where personal information can be used to drive tremendous harm. Working to launch products and features that help make the internet a safer place for these groups (and for everyone) feels both meaningful and interesting.

Keep reading here.—AS

Stat: 5 terabytes. That’s now the per-user cap for Dropbox’s highest tier. The company nixed its unlimited offering, “saying a small handful of customers were using massive amounts of resources that had the potential to degrade the cloud service for the rest of its clients,” Bloomberg reported.

Quote: “It should not be this difficult to make sure that children’s data isn’t inappropriately collected and used.”—Arielle Garcia, the chief privacy officer of ad agency UM Worldwide, to the New York Times in a story about how ads on YouTube may have led to children being tracked

Read: Elon Musk’s shadow rule (the New Yorker)