Rivian stock surges 10% on Uber robotaxi deal
Rivian Automotive (NASDAQ:RIVN) shares rose as much as 10% Thursday morning before paring gains to 4% following an announcement that Uber Technologies (NYSE:UBER) will invest up to $1.25 billion in the electric vehicle maker through 2031 as part of a robotaxi partnership.
Under the agreement, Uber or its fleet partners are expected to purchase 10,000 fully autonomous R2 robotaxis, with the option to acquire up to 40,000 additional vehicles beginning in 2030. The investment is contingent on Rivian achieving specific autonomous performance milestones by designated dates, News.Az reports, citing CNBC.
The companies plan to begin initial commercial deployments in San Francisco and Miami in 2028, expanding to approximately 25 cities across the United States, Canada, and Europe by 2031. An initial $300 million investment has been committed following signing, subject to regulatory approval.
The autonomous R2 robotaxis will be available exclusively through the Uber platform. Should all milestones be achieved, the partnership aims to deploy thousands of unsupervised Rivian R2 robotaxis across approximately 25 cities by the end of 2031.
Uber is expected to pay Rivian certain software licensing fees in connection with the use of Rivian’s Level 4 autonomous driving software system.
"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, commented. "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 includes 11 cameras, 5 radars, and 1 LiDAR sensor. The platform is powered by two of Rivian’s in-house RAP1 chips, capable of 1600 TOPS of AI compute performance, and is expected to launch in the R2 vehicle in late 2026.
Stifel analyst Stephen Gengaro wrote, "We view RIVN’s partnership with Uber as a meaningful positive for Rivian’s autonomous capabilities and the expansion of its R2 platform."
By Faig Mahmudov
Similar news
