Rivian Automotive, Inc. (NASDAQ: RIVN) and Uber Technologies, Inc. (NYSE: UBER) have announced a partnership to accelerate their autonomous vehicle plans. Uber is set to invest up to $1.25 billion in Rivian through 2031, conditional on the accomplishment of specific autonomous performance milestones.
The partnership aims to deploy up to 50,000 fully autonomous R2 robotaxis, with Uber or its fleet partners expected to purchase 10,000 such vehicles, and the option to acquire an additional 40,000 by 2030. Initial commercial deployments are projected to commence in San Francisco and Miami in 2028, and expand to 25 cities by 2031.
Rivian's founder and CEO, RJ Scaringe, expressed excitement about the partnership, highlighting how it will expedite the company's path to level 4 autonomy. He emphasized the scale of Rivian's growing data flywheel, along with their state-of-the-art in-house inference platform and multi-modal perception platform, as key elements driving the rapid advancement of Rivian autonomy in the coming years.
Dara Khosrowshahi, CEO of Uber, echoed this sentiment, emphasizing their confidence in Rivian's approach and vertical integration, which includes designing the vehicle, compute platform, and software stack together, while maintaining end-to-end control of scaled manufacturing and supply in the U.S.
In December 2025, Rivian announced its third-generation autonomy platform, featuring a multi-modal sensor suite including 11 cameras, 5 radars, and 1 lidar. The platform is driven by two of Rivian’s in-house rap1 chips, capable of 1600 tops of AI compute performance. This advanced platform is expected to be integrated into the R2 robotaxis in late 2026. Following these announcements, the company's shares moved -2.29%, and are now trading at a price of $16.67. For more information, read the company's full 8-K submission here.
