Uber partners with 30 companies to build autonomous vehicle empire

Uber has quietly assembled one of the most ambitious autonomous vehicle coalitions in tech history. Over the past two years, the company has partnered with, and in some cases directly invested in, roughly 30 autonomous vehicle companies, positioning itself not as a car maker or even a self-driving software developer, but as the platform layer that sits on top of all of them. The $10 billion bet Uber’s total commitment to autonomous vehicle initiatives now exceeds $10 billion. That figure includes more than $2.5 billion in equity stakes across companies like WeRide, Lucid, Nuro, Rivian, and Wayve. The centerpiece of the strategy is a plan to deploy at least 20,000 autonomous robotaxis based on the Lucid Gravity platform, powered by Nuro’s autonomy stack, starting in 2026. Uber reportedly invested around $300 million in Lucid to make that happen. On the infrastructure side, the company has earmarked $100 million specifically for building out fast-charging networks across ten targeted autonomous-vehicle cities by the end of 2026. In February 2026, Uber formalized all of this under a dedicated business unit called “Uber Autonomous Solutions.” The unit provides infrastructure, data, map...