Uber autonomous vehicle partnerships now number more than 30, spanning sidewalk delivery robots, self-driving trucks, and full robotaxi services across four continents. The ride-hailing company that sold off its own AV division in 2020 has quietly rebuilt something larger: a web of equity stakes, commercial agreements, and technology licences that now shapes where autonomous mobility is headed next.
The Scale of Uber Autonomous Vehicle Partnerships
The timeline matters for context. Uber founded its in-house autonomous division in 2014, tested vehicles on public roads from 2016, and then watched the programme unravel through a Waymo trade-secrets lawsuit, the departure of chief executive Travis Kalanick in 2017, and a fatal crash in Tempe, Arizona, in 2018. By 2020, the company sold Uber ATG to Aurora Innovation, Elevate to Joby Aviation, and Jump to Lime, keeping equity stakes in each.
What followed was not a clean exit. Two years later, Uber began quietly re-entering the sector through partnerships. The deal flow accelerated sharply through 2024 and into 2026.
Aurora: A Stake That Has Moved in Both Directions
Uber’s longest-running AV relationship is with Aurora. The connection dates to the 2020 ATG sale, when Uber received Aurora equity in return. By early 2025, Uber’s holding company, Neben Holdings, held 325,973,411 Aurora Class A shares, representing approximately 23.0% of Aurora’s outstanding Class A common stock as of 1 May 2025, per a Schedule 13D/A filed with the SEC. The snippet’s April figure of 19.7% reflects a different share-count denominator at that date.
The stake has since fallen. On 2 June 2026, Neben Holdings sold 67,500,000 Aurora Class A shares at $7.10 per share in a block sale to a financial institution, according to an amended Schedule 13D/A filing. That reduced Uber’s beneficial ownership to 258,473,411 Class A shares, representing approximately 15.6% of Aurora’s shares outstanding as of 29 April 2026.
The commercial relationship has continued in parallel. Aurora’s self-driving trucks are completing roundtrip hauls between Dallas and Houston via the Uber Freight platform, and the two companies announced a multi-year logistics collaboration in June 2024.
Where Uber Has Placed Its Largest Capital Bets
The most capital-intensive relationship in Uber’s AV portfolio is with Lucid Motors. Uber’s initial $300 million investment in Lucid closed on 4 September 2025, per a Lucid press release, alongside a minimum order of 20,000 Lucid Gravity SUVs for robotaxi deployment. The vehicles will run Nuro’s self-driving system.
In April 2026, Uber expanded that commitment by a further $200 million and raised its minimum vehicle order to 35,000 units, including Lucid’s upcoming mid-sized platform. Uber now holds more than 11% of Lucid. What makes that April announcement more complex is the wider capital activity around it: the same day, Lucid received a $550 million convertible preferred stock investment from Ayar Third Investment Company, an affiliate of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, and launched a separate $300 million registered public offering of common stock, bringing the total capital raised around that announcement to approximately $1.05 billion, according to the Lucid Group investor relations release. Uber’s $200 million sits inside that figure, not on top of it.
Uber’s total commitment to Nuro, which covers its participation in Nuro’s Series E round and future milestone-based investments, is about $500 million. San Francisco will be the first market for the Nuro-Lucid premium robotaxi service, with Houston announced as the second in June 2026.
The Waabi relationship involves comparable ambition. In January 2026, the self-driving trucking company co-founded by former Uber ATG chief scientist Raquel Urtasun raised $1 billion in total: a $750 million Series C that was oversubscribed and described as the largest fundraise in Canadian history, plus about $250 million in milestone-based capital from Uber, according to the Waabi Series C announcement. The Series C included NVentures, Volvo Group Venture Capital, Porsche Automobil Holding, BlackRock, and BMO Global Asset Management, among others. The milestone-based tranche from Uber is tied to the deployment of 25,000 or more Waabi Driver-powered robotaxis exclusively on the Uber platform, per reporting on the deal. No timeline for reaching that scale has been stated by either company.
The Partnerships With the Most Uncertain Futures
Not every agreement has delivered. Cruise, the GM subsidiary that struck a robotaxi deal with Uber in August 2024, was wound down as a robotaxi business by December 2024 before any service launched. Waymo, Uber’s most commercially active AV partner in the United States, is now working to exit its Uber contract, which runs until May 2028, and the two companies ended their Phoenix arrangement last month.
On the other side of the ledger, Rivian is building up to 10,000 autonomous R2 SUVs for Uber with a potential deal value of $1.25 billion, targeting San Francisco and Miami in 2028 and 25 cities across the US, Canada, and Europe by the end of 2031. WeRide has already gone driverless in Abu Dhabi and has agreed to deploy at least 1,200 robotaxis across Abu Dhabi, Dubai, and Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, as soon as 2027.
The test of Uber’s strategy is whether commercial scale follows deal volume. The Waabi milestone trigger of 25,000 robotaxis, with no stated deadline, is the clearest statement of how much distance remains between announcement and reality.
