Alphabet’s Waymo unit plans on bringing its robotaxi service to Dallas next year, adding to a growing list of prospective U.S. markets for 2026, including Miami and Washington, D.C.

Rental car company Avis Budget Group will be managing the Waymo fleet in Dallas, via a new partnership the companies announced Monday.

Avis CEO Brian Choi said in a statement that the agreement marks a “milestone” for the company, which is now also working to become “a leading provider of fleet management, infrastructure and operations to the broader mobility ecosystem.”

Waymo robotaxi testing is already underway in downtown Dallas involving the company’s Jaguar I-PACE electric vehicles with the Waymo Driver system. That combines automated driving software, sensors and other hardware that power the vehicles’ “level 4,” driverless operations.

Passengers will be able to hail a driverless ride using the Waymo app in Dallas. In some other markets, Waymo only makes its services available through ride-hailing platform Uber.

Waymo has surged ahead in the robotaxi market while other autonomous vehicle developers, including Tesla, Amazon-owned Zoox, and venture-backed startups such as Nuro, May Mobility and Wayve, are working to make autonomous transportation a commercial reality in the U.S.

Waymo says it conducts more than 250,000 paid weekly trips in the markets where it operates commercially, including Atlanta, Austin, Los Angeles, Phoenix and San Francisco.

Waymo’s steepest competition internationally comes from Baidu’s robotaxi venture Apollo Go in China, which is eyeing expansion in Europe.

On Alphabet’s second-quarter earnings call, execs boasted that, “The Waymo Driver has now autonomously driven over 100 million miles on public roads, and the team is testing across more than 10 cities this year, including New York and Philadelphia.”

The business has become significant enough that Alphabet even added a category to its Other Bets revenue description in its latest quarterly filing.

“Revenues from Other Bets are generated primarily from the sale of autonomous transportation services, healthcare-related services and internet services,” the filing said.

The Other Bets segment remains relatively small, however, with revenue coming in at $373 million in the quarter, up from $365 million a year ago. The division still reported a loss of $1.25 billion, widening from $1.13 billion in the second quarter of 2024.

WATCH: Waymo co-CEO on 10 million driverless rides and Tesla’s coming robtaxi challenge

Revenue from sales of Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses more than tripled year over year, EssilorLuxottica revealed Monday as part of the company’s most recent earnings report.

EssilorLuxottica said the success of the Ray-Ban Meta glasses, built via a partnership with the Facebook parent stemming back to 2019, contributed to its first-half overall sales of 14.02 billion euro (US$16.25 billion), which represents a 7.3% year-over-year jump.

“We are leading the transformation of glasses as the next computing platform, one where AI, sensory tech and a data-rich healthcare infrastructure will converge to empower humans and unlock our full potential,” EssilorLuxottica CEO Francesco Milleri and deputy CEO Paul du Saillant said in a joint-statement. “The success of Ray-Ban Meta, the launch of Oakley Meta Performance AI glasses and the positive response to Nuance Audio are major milestones for us in this new frontier.”

In the earnings report, the company said that its new Oakley Meta smart glasses, unveiled in June, represents the latest product line to come from its partnership with the social media company. CNBC reported in June that Meta and Luxottica plan to debut a Prada-branded version of its smart glasses in the future.

Luxottica owns several well-known brands including Ray-Ban, Oakley, Vogue Eyewear and Persol.

In September, Meta renewed a long-term partnership agreement with Luxottica to “collaborate into the next decade to develop multi-generational smart eyewear products,” according to the announcement.

WATCH: Meta’s ambitious AI plans.

The crypto market’s bullishness may be tipping into speculative frenzy, if the latest MicroStrategy-style copycat is any indication.

On Monday, a little-known Canadian vape company saw its stock surge on plans to enter the crypto treasury game – but this time with Binance Coin (BNB), the fourth largest cryptocurrency by market cap, excluding the dollar-pegged stablecoin Tether (USDT), according to CoinGecko.

Shares of CEA Industries, which trades on the Nasdaq under the ticker VAPE, rocketed more than 800% at one point after the company announced its plans. CEA, along with investment firm 10X Capital and YZi Labs, said it would offer a $500 million private placement to raise proceeds to buy Binance Coin for its corporate treasury. Shares ended the session up nearly 550%, giving the company a market cap of about $48 million.

Given the more crypto-friendly regulatory environment this year, more public companies have adopted the MicroStrategy playbook of using debt financing and equity sales to buy bitcoin to hold on their balance sheet to try to increase shareholder returns, pushing bitcoin to new records.

Now, with the S&P 500 trading at new records, the resurgence of meme mania and a pro-crypto White House supporting the crypto industry, investors are looking further out on the risk spectrum of crypto hoping for bigger gains.

In recent months, investors have rotated out of bitcoin and into ether, which led to a burst of companies seeking a similar treasury strategy around ether. SharpLink Gaming, whose board is chaired by Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin, was one of the first to make the move. Other companies like DeFi Development Corp, renamed from Janover, are making similar moves around Solana.