Robotaxi Welcomes Major Catalyst Again! Alphabet's Waymo Valuation Soars to $110 Billion, Commercial Fleet Set to Explode

Media reports quoting informed sources have revealed that Alphabet Inc. Class C's parent company Alphabet's global Robotaxi leader, Waymo, is planning to raise approximately $15 billion in a funding round. This latest funding will also raise Waymo's valuation to a staggering milestone of $110 billion, making it the largest unmanned autonomous taxi business unit under Alphabet. The global Robotaxi commercial fleet is on the verge of explosive deployment. In the globally regulated market, unlike Tesla, Inc., which is still in the grand narrative and "concept verification" stage of its Robotaxi business, Alphabet Inc. Class C's parent company Alphabet's Waymo represents the most mature landing mode and revenue model for Robotaxi currently. It is more like a "scaled-up business that has already generated revenue." Waymo's latest valuation of approximately $110 billion is arguably the highest disclosed valuation in the global Robotaxi field, making it the largest and most capital market-acknowledged autonomous driving company with the largest actual fleet size. Waymo's valuation reaching $110 billion under Alphabet Inc. Class C's parent company Alphabet, along with the recent announcement of a partnership between NVIDIA Corporation and leading luxury carmaker Mercedes-Benz, as well as ride-hailing leader Uber Technologies, Inc., to build a global Robotaxi platform. The platform will use Mercedes-Benz's new S-Class models, NVIDIA Corporation's AI computing system for autonomous driving hardware and software stack, and Uber Technologies, Inc.'s large ride-hailing network to provide unmanned driving services in major markets worldwide. This signals a succession of significant catalysts for the Robotaxi field. Earlier reports in December stated that Waymo plans to conduct a funding round led by its parent company Alphabet Inc. Class C Alphabet to raise over $15 billion with an industry-leading valuation of nearly $100 billion. According to the latest disclosures by the media, institutional investors are increasingly optimistic about Waymo's growth prospects and are willing to invest larger sums of money to drive Waymo's revenue and actual profits into a phase of accelerated expansion. Therefore, the final valuation obtained by Waymo is significantly higher than the previously disclosed valuation of about $100 billion. Sources say that this Robotaxi leader under Alphabet Inc. Class C's parent company Alphabet is expected to receive approximately $13 billion in funding from its parent company, and other major institutional investors, including Sequoia Capital, DST Global, and Dragoneer Investment Group, will provide the remaining funding support. Waymo's previous round of funding was also led by Alphabet Inc. Class C's parent company Alphabet (GOOGL.US), and in October 2024, the overall valuation of its autonomous driving business unit was set at over $45 billion. Waymo stated in a statement, "Although we do not comment on private financial matters, our trajectory is clear: building on over 20 million completely unmanned automatic taxi trips completed, we are focused on excellence and technological leadership guided by safety, to meet the enormous demand for autonomous taxi travel." Waymo - the undisputed leader in Robotaxi In terms of the actual landing and fleet scale of Robotaxi, Waymo disclosed that it had completed over 20 million total miles in 2025, achieving over one million fully unmanned driving trips per month in that year, with a clear expansion goal of reaching one million trips per week by the end of 2026. Combining its current status of "paid, driver-out (fully driverless), and scalable fleet," Waymo's "commercial Robotaxi fleet" dimension in the U.S. and even the global market is basically in the top tier, and one of the players closest to running without a safety driver in the same caliber. In the European and American regulated markets, Waymo can be said to be the benchmark for Robotaxi, representing the most mature revenue model for Robotaxi currently. In contrast, although Musk has cited AI, autonomous driving, and Siasun Robot & Automation as the core revenue engines for the company in the coming years, the "L4-level Robotaxi" claimed by Tesla, Inc. is currently being tested in a small number of areas in the United States and requires safety personnel inside the vehicle for its initial paid driverless taxi services (i.e., Robotaxi services), and is far from generating scaled revenue data and massive accumulated mileage like Waymo. In terms of specific technical paths, Waymo follows the L4 path of high-redundant sensors + high-precision maps/strict ODD geographical fences + operational system, which is easier to achieve "driver-out compliant charging" within limited areas but at a higher cost and operational complexity. Tesla, Inc.'s current public stance on FSD still requires driver supervision and is not autonomous, and its realization of a "Robotaxi network/large-scale unmanned operation" depends on whether it can truly push "end-to-end vision + large-scale fleet data" into a regulated, acceptable L4/L5 safety and liability framework (significantly higher technological and regulatory uncertainty at this step). Robotaxi development accelerating overall! NVIDIA Corporation collaborates with Mercedes-Benz, Uber Technologies, Inc. to jointly build a Robotaxi platform Also last week, the leading European luxury carmaker Mercedes-Benz, NVIDIA Corporation (NVDA.US), and technology company Uber Technologies, Inc. (UBER.US) announced a major three-party cooperation project, adding to the remarkable valuation of Waymo reaching a staggering $110 billion, marking a super heavyweight catalyst for the Robotaxi field. NVIDIA Corporation will collaborate with Mercedes-Benz, Uber Technologies, Inc. to build the Robotaxi ecosystem, expanding the lineup of participants in the global Robotaxi (fully autonomous unmanned taxi) market. The three parties will work together to create a global Robotaxi platform that will use Mercedes-Benz's new S-Class models, NVIDIA Corporation's AI computing system for autonomous driving hardware and software stack, and Uber Technologies, Inc.'s large ride-hailing network to provide unmanned driving services in major markets worldwide. This Robotaxi service will run on the MB.OS operating system developed by Mercedes-Benz, enabling NVIDIA Corporation and other autonomous driving technology partners to overlay advanced autonomous driving applications on top, while the German automaker will continue to control core vehicle software and integration systems. For NVIDIA Corporation, it will provide the DRIVE Hyperion architecture vehicle-end high-performance autonomous driving chip, Alpamayo AI autonomous driving model, and exclusive simulation and security tools to realize an autonomous driving system with L4 capabilities; this builds on the significant previous releases - its AV stack will hit the road with Mercedes and be incorporated into Uber Technologies, Inc.'s plan to deploy a large fleet of autonomous driving vehicles in the latter part of this decade. It is reported that the role of the giant American ride-hailing company Uber Technologies, Inc. will be to directly incorporate or integrate the trifecta's Robotaxi system into its existing ride-hailing platform, allowing human-driven vehicles and autonomous driving S-Class Robotaxis to operate in parallel. While the companies have not provided specific timelines for deployment, this collaboration is seen as a significant step towards achieving large-scale commercial deployment of Robotaxi in multiple global cities. According to the insights of NVIDIA Corporation's CEO, Jensen Huang, "physical AI" emphasizes enabling Siasun Robot & Automation/Autonomous operating systems to perceive, infer, and complete a full set of actions in the real world. Huang believes that an era in which "physical AI" assists human civilization is approaching. Applications of "physical AI," including fully autonomous driving technology, emphasize enabling Siasun Robot & Automation/self-operating systems to perceive, infer, and act in the real world, and these three capabilities are crucial links in transitioning models from "just conversing" to "having the ability to work in the physical world." During CES 2026, NVIDIA Corporation announced the release of the open-source autonomous driving AI large model Alpamayo family. Huang referred to Alpamayo as the "GPT moment for physical AI." The flagship autonomous driving large model product, Alpamayo 1, is a 100 billion-parameter visual-language-action (VLA) model. Unlike traditional autonomous driving systems that only detect objects and plan routes, Alpamayo uses a breakthrough approach of a "chained AI inference system" focused on processing video input and generating driving trajectories, but more importantly, it also outputs the logic behind the decisions.