Uber to invest $1.25 billion in Rivian for 50,000 robotaxis

by · UPI

March 19 (UPI) -- Uber Technologies said it plans to invest $1.25 billion into Rivian Automotive to launch 50,000 autonomous robotaxis around the world, the company announced.

Uber or its fleet partners will buy 10,000 autonomous versions of the Rivian R2 electric vehicle with the option to buy 40,000 more starting in 2030, a press release said.

Rivian shares rose in premarket trading Thursday by about 10%, CNBC reported, before the stock went back to where it was. Uber's stock dropped 1%.

The companies will deploy thousands of Rivian R2 robotaxis across 25 cities in the United States, Canada and Europe by the end of 2031.

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An initial $300 million investment from Uber to Rivian is expected following the deal's signing, subject to regulatory approval, the release said. That investment is about 19.55 million shares of the automaker, a Rivian spokesperson confirmed to CNBC.

"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," RJ Scaringe, founder and CEO of Rivian, said in a statement. "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."

In December 2025, Rivian announced its third-generation autonomy platform, which the company expects to be one of the most powerful combinations of sensors and inference compute in a consumer vehicle in North America when launched in R2 in late 2026, the press release said.

Rivian's third-generation autonomy platform includes a multi-modal sensor suite including 11 cameras (65 megapixels), 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.

This platform, including advanced connectivity and onboard intelligent data collection, uses data from all onboard sensors to power Rivian's data flywheel with real-world data from the customer fleet, including the critical 3D LiDAR point clouds essential to the rapid progression of advanced end-to-end Physical AI, it said.

"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, CEO of Uber, in a statement. "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."