Uber Makes Billion-Dollar Bet on Rivian Robotaxis

Uber has teamed with carmaker Rivian to boost both companies’ autonomous vehicle efforts.

The two companies expect to deploy 10,000 fully autonomous R2 robotaxis in the first phase of that effort, Rivian said in its announcement Thursday (March 19). The initial deployments are set to begin in Miami and San Francisco in 2028 and expand to 25 cities by 2031.

As part of the arrangement, Uber will invest up to $1.25 billion in Rivian through 2031, assuming certain autonomous milestones are reached by specific dates. An initial $300 million investment in the electric vehicle (EV) company has been committed, pending regulatory approval.

“We’re big believers in Rivian’s approach — designing the vehicle, compute platform, and software stack together, while maintaining end-to-end control of scaled manufacturing and supply in the U.S.,” said Dara Khosrowshahi, Uber’s CEO.

“That vertical integration, combined with data from their growing consumer vehicle base and experience managing the complexities of commercial fleets, gives us conviction to set these ambitious but achievable targets.”

Assuming all milestones are achieved, the companies say they’ll have deployed thousands of “unsupervised” Rivian R2 robotaxis across 25 cities in the U.S., Canada, and Europe by the end of 2031. The two firms also have the option to negotiate the purchase of up to 40,000 more autonomous Rivian R2 vehicles starting in 2030. 

“We couldn’t be more excited about this partnership with Uber — it will help accelerate our path to level 4 autonomy to create one of the safest and most convenient autonomous platforms in the world,” said RJ Scaringe, founder and CEO of Rivian.

“The scale of Rivian’s growing data flywheel coupled with RAP1, our state of the art in-house inference platform, and our multimodal perception platform make us incredibly excited for the rapid advancement of Rivian autonomy over the next couple of years.” 

Rivian recently unveiled a custom artificial intelligence chip and a comprehensive autonomy platform that was designed and built in-house. As covered here at the time, this marks a departure from depending on third-party computing solutions like Nvidia’s processors.

“Rivian’s announcement highlights a broader shift in the EV industry toward vertical integration of hardware and software,” PYMNTS wrote. “The company described the custom chip as engineered specifically to meet the demands of autonomous driving systems, where coordination between sensors, neural networks and compute is critical.”

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