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The partnership puts Rivian’s internal chip and fully autonomous stack to work as a robotaxi platform, with commercial deployments planned for San Francisco and Miami in 2028.
Uber has been signing robotaxi deals at a pace that can make any announcement seem routine. But this partnership with Rivian is structurally different from the rest. Unlike the company’s deals with Waymo, Avride or Zoox, where Uber is essentially a distribution platform for someone else’s self-driving vehicle stack, this one is banking on an automaker that has built its own silicon, its own autonomy software and its own manufacturing, from start to finish.
Rivian (NASDAQ: RIVN) and Uber (NYSE: UBER) announced Thursday that Uber will invest up to $1.25 billion in Rivian through 2031, contingent on Rivian reaching a series of autonomous performance milestones on specific dates.
Following the signing, an initial $300 million has been committed, subject to regulatory approval. In exchange, Uber, or its fleet partners, will purchase 10,000 fully autonomous Rivian R2 robotaxis in the first phase of deployment, with the option to negotiate the purchase of up to 40,000 more starting in 2030. The total figure of 50,000 is a ceiling, not a guarantee.
Commercial service is planned to begin in San Francisco and Miami in 2028 and expand to 25 cities in the US, Canada and Europe by 2031. Vehicles will be available exclusively through the Uber platform. All of these timelines are forward-looking and milestone dependent, and Rivian’s own securities disclosures caution that actual results may differ materially from the companies’ projections.
The logic of the deal is largely based on what Rivian unveiled at its inaugural Autonomy and AI Day in Palo Alto in December 2025. There, the company unveiled a full-stack autonomous driving architecture built around RAP1, its first in-house processor: a custom 5nm chip capable of 1,600 dispersed TOPS of AI computing, manufactured by TSMC.
Two RAP1s power the company’s Gen 3 autonomous computing module (ACM3), which can process 5 billion pixels of sensor data per second. The module uses RivLink, a proprietary low-latency interconnect, to allow chips to be daisy-chained for greater computing headroom.
Rivian also developed its own AI compiler and platform software to run on top of the chip, a degree of vertical integration that places it alongside Tesla as one of the only consumer EV makers to design proprietary silicon specifically for autonomy.
The Gen 3 platform, which comprises 11 cameras (65 megapixels total), five radars, and a LiDAR sensor, is currently undergoing validation and is expected to ship in R2 models starting in late 2026, according to Autonomy and AI Day coverage by WardsAuto, Edmunds, and Electrek.
Rivian confirmed at the time that initial production of R2, planned for early 2026, would launch without Gen 3 hardware. The robotaxi program announced Thursday is based on the Gen 3 platform, meaning commercial deployments follow successful hardware validation.
Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi specifically pointed to Rivian’s vertical integration as the foundation of the company’s conviction. ““We believe strongly in Rivian’s approach, designing the vehicle, computing platform, and software stack together, while maintaining end-to-end control of manufacturing and supply at scale in the US.” he said in the announcement.
The framework is notable: Unlike Uber’s deal with Lucid and Nuro, where Nuro provides the self-driving software and Lucid provides the vehicle, Rivian is building and owns the entire stack. Uber is licensing access to it, not integrating technologies from two separate companies into a single car.
For Rivian, the deal provides both capital and a high-risk use case for a platform it has spent years building from the ground up.
RJ Scaringe, founder and CEO of Rivian, described the partnership as accelerating the company’s path toward Level 4 autonomy. “The scale of Rivian’s growing data flywheel coupled with RAP1, our next-generation in-house inference platform, and our multimodal perception platform make us incredibly excited about Rivian’s rapid advancement of autonomy in the coming years.” said.
Rivian ended Q4 2025 with $6.59 billion in total liquidity, including nearly $6.1 billion in cash and equivalents, providing a runway to absorb the development costs involved in the milestone-based investment structure.
The moment falls within a broader burst of Uber robotaxi activity. Over the past six months, Uber has announced partnerships with Zoox (Las Vegas, this summer; Los Angeles, 2027), Wayve and Nissan (Tokyo, late 2026), NVIDIA and Stellantis (28 cities by 2028), and expanded its existing agreements with Waymo, Avride, WeRide and Lucid/Nuro.
The company has made it clear that it intends to operate as a multi-vendor platform rather than betting on the transition of autonomous mobility to a single provider. The deal with Rivian fits that pattern, but with Uber taking a significant equity stake, up to $1.25 billion, rather than simply including another company’s cars in its app.
What remains unresolved is whether Rivian’s autonomous software stack will actually reach Level 4 on the timeline both companies have publicly committed to. The company’s December 2025 roadmap laid out a progression from point-to-point autonomous driving in early 2026, through the ability to look away, to Personal Level 4, but did not specify firm dates for subsequent milestones.
