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Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai told employees that Waymo, the company's autonomous taxi service, could meaningfully contribute to Alphabet's financials by 2027. Since the internal update, Waymo has launched in Sacramento, Chicago, and Dallas whilst expanding service in other cities, with more locations planned before the end of 2026. The service was providing over 500,000 rides weekly by mid-2024. Waymo's results aren't separately reported in Alphabet's quarterly earnings; they're included in the "other bets" segment, which generated $382 million revenue in the quarter ending June. In an earlier fundraising presentation, Alphabet indicated Waymo is worth $126 billion. Goldman Sachs projects the US robotaxi market will reach $19 billion by 2030 and $48 billion by 2035, whilst the worldwide autonomous taxi industry could exceed $400 billion by 2035.

Waymo now runs paid robotaxis in 14 cities, chasing 1 million rides a week. Waymo opened paid driverless rides to the public in Denver, San Diego and Tampa on September 1, 2026, bringing its US footprint to 14 cities. The Alphabet-owned company now runs over 4,000 vehicles and completes more than 500,000 paid rides a week, chasing a stated goal of 1 million weekly rides by year's end. Waymo is now letting public riders into Denver, then San Diego, then Tampa, and the real test is no longer whether robotaxis can work. It is whether Waymo can turn 500,000 paid weekly rides into 1 million before the year is out. You can now hail a Waymo in three more American cities, though access still comes through the company's usual slow opening rather than a full floodgate. The Alphabet-owned robotaxi company said so on September 1. It had begun welcoming public riders in Denver, San Diego and Tampa, taking its fully autonomous ride service to 14 cities. Tens of thousands of people in each city had already signed up, according to Waymo's own blog post. No human is behind the wheel. That is the part you should sit with. Waymo is no longer talking about a handful of test streets and carefully staged demos. In Denver, Axios reported that the first service area covers about 60 square miles: downtown, RiNo, Capitol Hill, Cherry Creek. Tampa's starting map runs about 50 square miles, from Hyde Park and Westshore across to parts of East Tampa. San Diego took longer. It followed more than a year of testing and internal rides before the California Public Utilities Commission cleared the company to charge passengers. Riders in Denver and San Diego get one vehicle to start: Ojai, the Zeekr-built minivan running Waymo's sixth-generation self-driving system. Tampa gets Ojai too, plus the Jaguar I-Pace SUVs that have carried Waymo passengers there for years. Each new city starts with dozens of vehicles, not hundreds, TechCrunch reported. That is how Waymo does this: map, test, remove the safety driver, invite small groups, then widen access as the data and local rules allow. Waymo Germany GmbH appeared in Munich's commercial register on June 15, 2026, with job postings for test drivers already surfacing in Berlin and Munich. The move positions Waymo ahead of its confirmed London launch and puts it in direct competition with BMW, Mercedes, VW's CARIAD, Mobileye, and Chinese rivals on European roads. - Waymo German expansion plans hiring - autonomous vehicle jobs Berlin Munich The scale is now the story. Waymo's fleet has grown past 4,000 vehicles, according to TechCrunch, and the company now completes more than 500,000 paid trips a week across the US. That is roughly ten times where it stood in May 2024, when weekly rides sat around 50,000. It crossed 250,000 a week last April. Then it doubled again. The target is blunt. Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana told Bloomberg Television in February that the company expects to do more than 1 million paid trips a week by the end of 2026. Bloomberg's report also said Waymo was at about 400,000 weekly paid trips then, across six US cities. You don't need a self-driving model to see the pressure in that math. Denver helps. So does San Diego. So does Tampa. But the bigger lever is depth. Waymo already operates in Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin, Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, Miami, Nashville, Orlando and San Antonio. Adding a city gets headlines. Adding enough cars, hours and repeat riders inside a city is what gets you to 1 million trips a week. Frankly, that is the real business test. A robotaxi service with a few invitation-only rides is interesting. A robotaxi service doing half a million paid trips every week starts to look like transport infrastructure, with all the ugly operational work that comes with it: depots, charging, cleaning, rider support, blocked-lane complaints, airport rules and city politics. The field is catching up slowly. Waymo is not expanding into an empty market. Amazon's Zoox said this week that it will begin supervised testing in Houston and San Diego, Reuters reported, using retrofitted vehicles with human safety operators before it puts its purpose-built robotaxis there. Zoox began charging for rides in Las Vegas on August 10 after getting a federal exemption for vehicles without steering wheels or pedals, and TechCrunch reported this week that it has now added rides to and from Harry Reid International Airport. That airport piece matters. Ride-hailing is not just downtown nightlife and novelty trips. Airports are where real volume lives, and where regulators, taxi groups and incumbent ride-hailing companies tend to fight hardest. Tesla is pressing from the other side. TechCrunch reported that Tesla now charges for robotaxi rides in Austin, Dallas, Houston, Miami, Orlando and Tampa, though some of those services remain limited. The Wall Street Journal reported on September 4 that Tesla has also put Cybercabs on Austin streets, with vehicles that use cameras and neural networks rather than the lidar and radar Waymo relies on. Elon Musk has long argued that this cheaper sensor approach can scale faster. So far, Waymo has the ride count Tesla does not. Waymo launched Waymo Premier today, an invite-only $29.99/month membership offering 10% cash back, priority pickups, and early city access. The program is less a loyalty gimmick and more a deliberate pivot toward recurring revenue, as Alphabet's robotaxi unit layers subscription economics onto its fast-growing autonomous fleet. - how to get priority pickups on Waymo rides - Waymo Premier membership cost and benefits explained For Alphabet, that gap carries weight beyond Waymo's own books. A unit running more than 4,000 vehicles and clearing 500,000 paid weekly rides is harder to dismiss as another expensive Other Bets experiment. It gives investors a number they can watch every week, not a promise buried inside a slide deck. The risk is that the easy story gets ahead of the hard one. Public riders in 14 cities sounds clean. Real service never is. Waymo still has to prove it can grow through winter roads in Denver, California permitting in San Diego, Florida storms in Tampa and the day-to-day mess of city driving everywhere else. Hitting 1 million paid weekly rides by December would be a milestone. Missing it would not kill the company. It would show you how hard the last half-million rides really are. Join the discussion. No replies yet. Start the discussion. Ron Patel tracks and reports on the fast-moving world of agentic platforms and artificial intelligence for SF. He covers how AI systems and autonomous agents are changing the way businesses build and operate, following the tools and platforms reshaping the space. He also keeps an eye on crypto and blockchain, covering the market moves and projects worth watching.