Uber Technologies (NYSE:UBER) shares gained around 2% in premarket trading Tuesday after the company revealed a new collaboration with Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) to launch robotaxis powered by the chipmaker’s autonomous driving technology, with initial deployments planned for Los Angeles and San Francisco in 2027.
The two companies said the autonomous ride-hailing service is expected to expand to 28 cities worldwide by 2028, representing a significant step in Uber’s strategy to scale driverless mobility.
The robotaxis will operate using Nvidia’s DRIVE Hyperion platform together with Alpamayo, a reasoning-based artificial intelligence model designed to handle complex driving scenarios.
The rollout will begin with vehicles collecting real-world driving data to train the system for city-specific conditions. This will be followed by deployments overseen by operators before eventually transitioning to fully autonomous Level 4 driverless services.
Uber said the collaboration forms part of its broader plan to develop a “multi-player” autonomous ecosystem on its platform, enabling multiple technology developers and automakers to provide robotaxi services instead of relying solely on Uber’s internal technology.
The agreement comes as competition intensifies in the autonomous ride-hailing market, with companies racing to bring driverless transport services to commercial scale. Alphabet’s Waymo remains the most advanced operator, already offering fully driverless rides in cities such as Phoenix, San Francisco and Los Angeles.
Tesla, meanwhile, is pursuing a camera-based approach to self-driving technology and aims to introduce its own robotaxi network while leveraging its large-scale manufacturing capabilities.
Uber has also recently partnered with Lucid Group and autonomous driving startup Nuro to introduce robotaxis on its platform, using Lucid vehicles equipped with Nuro’s autonomous driving systems.
Lucid said it expects to begin commercial deployment of a robotaxi built on its Gravity SUV later this year as part of that collaboration. While developing autonomous technology remains expensive, companies view robotaxis as a potentially high-margin business once operations can be scaled successfully.