Uber invests $1.25 billion in Rivian to buy up to 50,000 R2 robotaxis

Today, Uber has announced a $1.25 billion investment in Rivian through 2031. Uber "or its fleet partners" is now expected to purchase 10,000 fully autonomous Rivian R2 robotaxis in the first phase, with the option to add 40,000 more in 2030.

Initial commercial robotaxi deployments using the Rivian R2 are now planned for San Francisco and Miami in 2028, then scaling to 25 cities throughout the US, Canada, and Europe through 2031.

The Rivian R2 robotaxis will be available exclusively through the Uber app. Rivian's third-gen autonomy platform, which will be used in these cars, includes a multi-modal sensor suite with 11 cameras, 5 radars, and 1 LiDAR. This is all driven by two of Rivian's in-house RAP1 chips, capable of 1,600 TOPS of AI compute performance.

The platform utilizes 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", the official press release states.

Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe said:

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.

Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi 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. 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.