Dec. 26 at 12:19 PM
$GOOGL $GOOG
From Bloomberg:
WAYMO - A future commute?
If 2025 was the year Wall Street began doubting whether Big Tech’s pricey artificial intelligence bets would pay off, 2026 is shaping up to be the year when at least one real-world application of AI will prove its business case at meaningful scale here in the US.
I’m talking about autonomous vehicles, which — led by Alphabet Inc.’s self-driving unit Waymo — have been roaming around some US cities including San Francisco and Los Angeles in the past year. Waymo is aiming to serve more than 1 million rides every week by the end of next year, it said earlier this month, a milestone it has hit monthly since the spring.
Investors are willing to bet on the future of the service: Bloomberg News reported recently that Waymo is in talks to raise funds at a near
$100 billion valuation, which would about double its valuation from a year ago. The company has achieved an annual revenue run rate of more than
$350 million, Bloomberg also reported.
As of the time of writing, Waymo is either permitted to or is already testing its technology in 26 of the top 30 metro areas defined by the US Census Bureau, according to a tally of Waymo’s public announcements.
The company gained access to freeways in some areas and expanded into Austin and Atlanta in 2025 with its partner Uber Technologies Inc. — bringing its commercial markets to five. The coming year will be even busier: Waymo plans to launch in 12 more cites, including London and others in the US.
As with its prior launches, initial service areas and fleet sizes would be limited (so far it has 2,500 cars in the fleet across five cities). But having early insights into a variety of geographies, partnership models and operational details such as securing real estate with reliable power grids to park or charge its cars may help give Waymo an advantage over competitors like Tesla Inc. or Amazon Inc.’s Zoox, which have also made their services public but at a smaller scale.
Waymo has said it wants to pursue a partnership approach to delegate some of the more labor-intensive work like vehicle cleaning, charging and maintenance. It has worked with two Uber-backed fleet management companies so far, and some of its upcoming launches will bring new collaborators like Lyft Inc. in Nashville and Avis Budget Group Inc. in Dallas.
A diversified approach will be critical as Waymo looks to increase its earnings by improving its ability to keep cars occupied. Alphabet Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai told employees at a November all-hands meeting that the business won’t be “meaningful” to the parent company’s financials until 2027–28, CNBC reported.
Other driverless car developers are also gearing up to bring their technology to customers in 2026. Lucid Group Inc. and Nuro said they plan to offer self-driving cars for Uber customers in San Francisco next year, among more than 10 markets globally where the rideshare company plans to offer such services in 2026.
As Waymo scaled up this year, it navigated more unusual circumstances that revealed what it called “edge cases” where the software wasn’t particularly trained well enough to respond and required updates. That has included problems with stopped school buses, driving into a police standoff and making illegal turns. The company also suspended service last weekend when its vehicles — confused by a lack of traffic signals — froze and blocked other cars during a major power failure in San Francisco.
Waymo said that it’s improving road safety in communities where it operates, citing statistics that show it achieves 12 times fewer injury crashes involving pedestrians than human drivers.
“Safety is fundamental to everything that we do,” Waymo spokesperson Ethan Teicher said. “We are committed to continuously strengthening our industry-leading performance on public roads, and working with the communities we serve.”
It’ll be key to monitor the various robotaxi launches in 2026 as there’s still a lot unknown about the technology, not least its ability turn a profit for these companies.
