Alphabet-owned Waymo in talks to raise $15 billion in funding
Waymo co-CEOs (L-R): Tekedra Mawakana and Dmitri Dolgov
Waymo
Self-driving car company Waymo is in talks to raise $15 billion in funding in the new year.
The robotaxi company plans to raise billions from Alphabet, its parent company, as well as outside investors at a valuation as high as $110 billion, according to a person familiar with the discussions.
The latest funding discussions are indicative of Waymo’s status as the leader of the pack in the U.S. robotaxi market. The company has been spending heavily to ramp up its fleet and continue expanding to more regions. Waymo is now either operating its robotaxis, planning to launch service or starting to test its vehicles in 26 markets, in the U.S. and abroad.
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said Waymo will “meaningfully” contribute to Alphabet’s financials as soon as 2027, CNBC reported Tuesday.
If the Google sister company winds up raising as much as $15 billion, that would represent more than double the amount of its last funding round. That was a series C round of $5.6 billion at a $45 billion valuation, which closed in October 2024. Alphabet had committed $5 billion in a multiyear investment to Waymo at the time.
That round was led by Alphabet alongside previous backers, including Andreessen Horowitz, Fidelity, Perry Creek, Silver Lake, Tiger Global and T. Rowe Price. At the time, Waymo co-CEOs Tekedra Mawakana and Dmitri Dolgov said the funding would go toward expanding its robotaxi service.
Waymo currently serves paid rides to the public in the Austin, San Francisco Bay Area, Phoenix, Atlanta and Los Angeles markets.
Earlier this month, CNBC reported that Waymo crossed an estimated 450,000 weekly paid rides, and the company in December said it had served 14 million trips in 2025, putting it on pace to end the year at more than 20 million trips total since launching in 2020.
The company plans to open service next year in Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Las Vegas, Miami, Nashville, Orlando, San Antonio, San Diego and Washington, D.C. Waymo also announced plans to launch its service in London in 2026, which will mark the company’s first overseas service region.
Amazon’s Zoox this year began offering free driverless rides to the public around the Las Vegas Strip and certain San Francisco neighborhoods. Tesla launched a Robotaxi-branded service in Austin and the San Francisco Bay Area, but those cars still had human drivers or safety supervisors on board as of mid-December.
Fundraising plans were first reported by The Information.
WATCH: 2025: The year that the robotaxi went mainstream with Waymo leading the pack
Firefly’s CEO Jason Kim reacts during the company’s IPO at the Nasdaq MarketSite in New York City, U.S., August 7, 2025.
Jeenah Moon | Reuters
Last week’s liftoff also coincided with President Donald Trump‘s “space superiority” executive order, signed on Friday, that aims to create a permanent U.S. base on the moon.
Investors have also gained more clarity on the future of NASA following a whirlwind drama since Trump won the election.
Last week, the Senate confirmed Jared Isaacman as NASA administrator more than a year after he was first nominated to the position.
Trump withdrew the nomination from the Elon Musk ally earlier this year amid a public fallout, but renominated Isaacman in November.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy was tapped to temporarily run the space agency in the interim.
Google parent Alphabet on Monday announced it will acquire Intersect, a data center and energy infrastructure company, for $4.75 billion in cash in addition to the assumption of debt.
Alphabet said Intersect’s operations will remain independent, but that the acquisition will help bring more data center and generation capacity online faster.
In recent years, Google has been embroiled in a fierce competition with artificial intelligence rivals, namely OpenAI, which kick-started the generative AI boom with the launch of its ChatGPT chatbot in 2022. OpenAI has made more than $1.4 trillion of infrastructure commitments to build out the data centers it needs to meet growing demand for its technology.
With its acquisition of Intersect, Google is looking to keep up.
“Intersect will help us expand capacity, operate more nimbly in building new power generation in lockstep with new data center load, and reimagine energy solutions to drive US innovation and leadership,” Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet, said in a statement.
Google already had a minority stake in Intersect from a funding round that was announced last December. In a release at the time, Intersect said its strategic partnership with Google and TPG Rise Climate aimed to develop gigawatts of data center capacity across the U.S., including a $20 billion investment in renewable power infrastructure by the end of the decade.
Alphabet said Monday that Intersect will work closely with Google’s technical infrastructure team, including on the companies’ co-located power site and data center in Haskell County, Texas. Google previously announced a $40 billion investment in Texas through 2027, which includes new data center campuses in the state’s Haskell and Armstrong counties.
Intersect’s operating and in-development assets in California and its existing operating assets in Texas are not part of the acquisition, Alphabet said. Intersect’s existing investors including TPG Rise Climate, Climate Adaptive Infrastructure and Greenbelt Capital Partners will support those assets, and they will continue to operate as an independent company.
Alphabet’s acquisition of Intersect is expected to close in the first half of 2026, but it is still subject to customary closing conditions.
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