Uber & Rivian's $1.25bn Deal to Deploy 50,000 Robotaxis

Rivian has announced a partnership with Uber to accelerate its autonomous vehicle plans. 

Uber plans to invest US$1.25bn in Rivian through 2031, subject to the achievement of milestones. 

The companies expect to initially deploy 10,000 autonomous robotaxis, which are scheduled to begin in San Francisco and Miami in 2028. 

Rivian’s autonomous vehicle technology

Rivian’s third generation autonomy platform includes a multi-modal sensor suite including 11 cameras, 5 radars and 1 LiDAR. 

The consumer platform is driven by two of Rivian’s in-house RAP1 chips, capable of 1600 TOPS of AI compute performance.

Rivian cars have on-board compute modules capable of more than 200 trillion operations per second. 

This platform, including advanced connectivity and onboard intelligent data collection, utilises data from onboard sensors to power Rivian’s data flywheel, with real world data from the customer fleet. 

This includes the critical 3D LiDAR point clouds essential to the rapid progression of advanced end-to-end Physical AI. 

RJ Scaringe, Founder and CEO of Rivian, says: “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. 

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

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Partnership with Uber

The robotaxis will be available exclusively through Uber. 

An initial US$300m investment has been committed to following signing, subject to regulatory approval.

Dara Khosrowshahi, CEO of Uber, says: “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 US.

“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.”

Should all milestones set for Rivian be achieved, the companies will have deployed thousands of unsupervised Rivian R2 robotaxis across 25 cities in the US, Canada and Europe by the end of 2031.

The companies also have the option to negotiate the purchase of up to 40,000 more autonomous Rivian R2 vehicles beginning in 2030.