Robotaxi arms race gunfire! Uber (UBER.US) plans to lay off 10% of employees to free up space for the $10 billion autonomous driving gamble

The Zhitong Finance App learned that Uber Technology (UBER.US), a global leader in online car-hailing and delivery services, announced plans to cut employees by about 10% on Wednesday EST to streamline management levels and cut costs, paving the way for Uber's recently planned “fully unmanned AI automation system (represented by Robotaxi and drone delivery) +global delivery service platform”.

In an internal email to employees, Uber CEO Dara Carthrosasi wrote, “The adjustments we are making today aim to achieve two things: make Uber leaner, faster, and create more space to invest in our future.” This includes some of the important plans previously proposed by the company, which is to invest more than $10 billion in the fully autonomous taxi (Robotaxi) sector and automated delivery over the next few years.

The ride-hailing company's stock price rose nearly 2% after revealing plans to lay off workers. Uber declined to comment on the exact number of layoffs. As of the end of 2025, the company had approximately 34,000 employees, according to an annual filing.

Strive to become “more streamlined and the decision-making process faster”

Uber is the latest company to speed up decision-making and improve efficiency by reducing management hierarchies or flattening management models. Tech giants such as Google have also taken similar austerity layoffs in recent years.

Kaslo Sassi did not attribute this layoff to artificial intelligence, and the accelerated penetration of cutting-edge artificial intelligence technology has always been one of the reasons behind the recent wave of layoffs in the technology industry.

The adjustments include cutting the number of small teams with only one to two direct reports by nearly half, and cutting the number of employees seven levels apart from the CEO by 20%. Kaslo Sassi said that at Uber's current size, the company is no longer suited to adopt many of these redundant organizational structures.

Uber will also merge more management teams and concentrate more employees at hub locations such as New York and San Francisco. Kaslo Sassi said the company will allow about 1% of employees to continue to work remotely.

“A leaner organization means clearer ownership, faster decision-making, and more time spent building products rather than coordinating communication,” he said.

Transforming from an online car-hailing giant to an “AI automation empire”?

Combined with Uber's ambition of a “fully unmanned automated system (represented by Robotaxi and drone delivery) +global delivery service platform” launched some time ago, Uber's current layoffs are closer to an organizational and capital restructuring for the Robotaxi era, rather than a worsening contraction in demand in the traditional sense.

Autonomous taxis solve personnel travel, and automatic delivery solves product movement; the bottom layer of both relies on high-frequency order scheduling, route planning, supply/demand matching, pricing systems, fleet/robot operations, city-level supervisory interfaces, and local fulfillment networks. In recent years, Uber has re-accelerated the autonomous driving ecosystem, launched an autonomous driving solution business, and promoted driverless taxi and autonomous vehicle fleet operation and delivery scenarios with partners such as Nuro, Lucid, Rivian, MOIA, and Hertz; Uber also clearly sees autonomous vehicles, sidewalk delivery robots, and drones as the core way for Uber Eats to reduce delivery costs and unmanned transportation models in the future.

The company plans to invest more than $10 billion in autonomous vehicles over the next few years, so it needs to reduce redundant management, shorten decision-making chains, and increase the strategic carrying capacity of free cash flow; the stock price rose by nearly 2%, indicating that the market initially approved this resource reallocation logic of “reducing organizational costs and increasing future technology investment.”

In the context of Tesla's accelerated commercialization of autonomous driving and Robotaxi, Uber's core competition has expanded from traditional online car-hailing to the speed of access, operation efficiency, and cost per mileage of autonomous driving fleets. Unlike Tesla's model of vertical integration of software and hardware, Uber is more likely to rely on user traffic, order scheduling, payment systems, and a global operation network to become a Robotaxi hyperconvergence platform connecting the needs of multiple Robotaxi autonomous vehicle providers and passengers.

This round of layoffs is not Kaslo Sassi directly attributing staff cuts to artificial intelligence, but rather Uber actively unleashes investment capacity for autonomous driving competition. In the short term, flattening is beneficial to reducing costs and improving operating leverage; whether it can be converted into an upward valuation in the long term depends on whether the investment of more than 10 billion US dollars can bring about the supply of large-scale Robotaxis, automated delivery robots, drones, etc., and create sustainable platform profits for Uber while reducing drivers' costs.

There are multiple signs that the pace of Uber's deployment in the Robotaxi field has recently accelerated across the board. Earlier this year, European luxury car leader Mercedes-Benz (Mercedes-Benz), Nvidia (NVDA.US), and Uber Technology announced a major tripartite cooperation project.

In this tripartite project, Nvidia will join hands with Mercedes-Benz and Uber to build a Robotaxi ecosystem, which means that the global lineup of Robotaxi (fully autonomous taxi) participants can be described as being further expanded. According to information, the three parties will cooperate to build a large-scale Robotaxi platform covering the world. The platform will use Mercedes-Benz's new S-Class models, Nvidia's AI computing power system's autonomous driving hardware and software stack, and Uber's large-scale online car-hailing network to provide driverless travel services in major markets around the world.