Uber is building an autonomous vehicle empire

Uber has lined up about 30 autonomous vehicle partners over the last two years — some through partnerships, some through direct investment. The list includes Waymo, which has been its biggest AV play, though as of July 2026 Waymo is considering ending its partnership with Uber. And now Uber is launching a separate AV partnership in Phoenix, so the company is not putting all its eggs in one robotaxi basket.

The scale of this is the story. Thirty companies is a network, not a bet on one vendor. It means Uber is positioning itself as the layer that matters — the app, the dispatch, the customer — while the machines underneath are diversified. The Phoenix partnership is a good read on how Uber wants to play: a new AV deal, separate from Waymo, in a city that actually works for robotaxis.

Why this matters for us: AV fleets are a real market for AI literacy. When Uber's thirty partners are all running on different stacks, the people who can train their operators, maintainers, and dispatch staff — in English and Spanish, across the communities that actually run these cities — are the ones the fleets will hire.