Alphabet's Waymo plans to launch a fully autonomous robotaxi service in Tokyo in 2027, partnering with Japanese taxi firms Go and Nihon Kotsu. The service will start with a small fleet and expand to 100 vehicles, marking the first autonomous service on Japanese public roads and part of Waymo's global expansion that also includes London.
Edge AI applications in autonomous driving and robotics are showing genuine interest in HBM memory as a solution to DRAM bandwidth bottlenecks. SK hynix has already supplied HBM2E to Waymo's autonomous driving platform with automotive qualification, though these segments remain early-stage with limited near-term demand contribution.
Tesla's robotaxi business poses a competitive threat to Uber by controlling the entire transportation stack—vehicles, autonomous driving software, charging infrastructure, and customer relationships—allowing it to capture nearly the entire fare rather than just platform fees. JPMorgan projects Tesla's robotaxi revenue could reach $319 billion by 2035, with the majority coming from Tesla-owned vehicles. Tesla's integrated model and expanding autonomous driving data give it structural advantages over Uber, which depends on external partners and risks becoming a low-margin distributor.
A developer demonstrated that Astra can serve as a high-level planner for autonomous driving in the CARLA simulator, generating waypoints and target speeds from camera images while a local controller handles steering and braking. The system successfully navigated various obstacles by replanning every 0.05 seconds, though performance varied with scenario difficulty and computational cost.