Rivian Scores $1.25 Billion Uber Deal to Deploy Autonomous R2 Robotaxis Across 25 Cities

Rivian and Uber are teaming up to deploy a fleet of fully autonomous R2 robotaxis, and the scale of this deal is hard to overstate. Uber is committing up to $1.25 billion in Rivian through 2031, with an initial $300 million locked in right after signing. In return, Rivian will build autonomous R2s that deploy exclusively through the Uber platform, starting with 10,000 vehicles. We can expect to see most of those in San Francisco and Miami by 2028 and expanding to 25 cities by 2031.

This wasn’t on anyone’s bingo card. Rivian has been talking up its autonomy stack for a while, but a fully autonomous robotaxi partnership at this scale feels like a significant leap from where the company was even six months ago.

Dara Khosrowshahi’s comments on the deal are telling. He specifically called out Rivian’s vertical integration as the reason Uber has conviction here. Designing the vehicle, the compute platform, and the software stack together, while controlling manufacturing in-house, is exactly the kind of end-to-end control that makes scaling a robotaxi fleet more predictable. Uber has tried partnerships with third-party AV companies before. This one feels structurally different.

There’s also a financial angle worth noting. Uber’s investment is milestone-based, which means Rivian has to actually hit autonomous deployment targets to unlock the full $1.25 billion. That structure keeps both sides accountable and gives Rivian a meaningful funding runway tied directly to proving out the technology.

The deal also includes an option to negotiate an additional 40,000 autonomous R2s starting in 2030, which signals just how seriously both companies are treating the long-term scale of this thing.

For Rivian fans, this is a legitimately exciting development. It validates the autonomy platform, adds a significant capital partner, and gives the R2 a commercial deployment path that no one was expecting. The consumer R2 and the robotaxi R2 are going to share the same hardware DNA, which means every mile driven by an Uber robotaxi is feeding the same system that will eventually improve the experience for regular R2 owners too.

2028 is still two years away and a lot can change, but Rivian just made its autonomy ambitions a lot more concrete.