Uber’s $1 Trillion Moonshot

Uber isn’t just about getting you from point A to point B anymore. It’s stealthily becoming one of the most powerful tech platforms of the next decade, and the lynchpin in that transformation is autonomy.

While most investors still think of Uber as a ride-hailing and food delivery app, under the hood, the company is evolving fast.

With 170 million monthly users and 8.5 million drivers and couriers globally, Uber’s footprint is massive, but it’s also expensive. Paying humans is its single largest cost, and that’s exactly where its strategy gets interesting.

Key Points

• Replacing drivers with self-driving vehicles is likely to save Uber up to $18.6B per quarter, massively boosting profit margins.

• Uber now runs 1.5M autonomous rides annually, led by Waymo, with expansion accelerating across major U.S. cities.

• With Nvidia’s AI infrastructure and billions of trip data points, Uber is fast-tracking autonomy, paving the way for a potential 5x stock gain by 2035.

The End of Human Drivers?

Uber is making a big bet on a future where cars drive themselves and has already teamed up with almost twenty companies working on autonomous tech.

The goal? Replace human drivers and dramatically cut operating costs. According to CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, the prize could be worth more than $1 trillion in the U.S. alone. That might sound like science fiction, but the numbers say otherwise.

In Q1 2025, Uber booked nearly $43 billion worth of trips, food orders, and freight deliveries. Drivers and couriers collected just north of $18 billion, nearly half the total.

Subtract the ballpark $13 billion paid to restaurants and merchants, and Uber was left with around $11 billion in revenue. Net income? $1.7 billion. In other words, for every $100 spent on the platform, Uber keeps just $4 in profit.

Now imagine what happens if autonomous vehicles cut out the $18.6 billion in driver payments. Even if Uber splits the savings with its self-driving partners, the margin expansion is massive. In a 24/7, driverless world, Uber is suddenly keep a much larger chunk of every ride, order, or shipment.

This Isn’t Theoretical, It’s Already Happening

Now the real story is Uber isn’t just planning for autonomy. It’s already executing.

Thanks largely to its deepening partnership with Alphabet’s Waymo, Uber now facilitates around 1.5 million autonomous rides a year.

In Austin, Waymo’s driverless vehicles are reportedly outperforming 99% of Uber’s human drivers in terms of utilization. The two companies are planning to roll out hundreds more vehicles across Texas and into Atlanta.

Waymo’s fleet alone is already handling over 250,000 paid autonomous rides per week. And that’s just one partner. With 17 other self-driving companies eager to plug into Uber’s unrivaled user base, the platform is becoming the go-to distribution channel for autonomy.

What That Means for Investors

Uber currently trades at a price-to-sales ratio of around 4, slightly below its historical average. To deliver a 5x return, the company would need to grow annual revenue from $45 billion today to about $226 billion. Is that realistic?

Between 2017 and 2024, Uber grew revenue at a blistering 27.7% annual clip. While Wall Street expects that pace to moderate to around 14% over the next two years, these forecasts do not fully price in the upside from autonomy. That’s the edge.

If the transition to autonomous mobility accelerates, revenue is likely to re-accelerate just as the market least expects it.

Uber isn’t trying to own the autonomous vehicle stack but is trying to own the rails that every AV must run on. If it becomes the Amazon Web Services of mobility, it won’t matter which company builds the best self-driving car. They’ll all need Uber’s platform to reach riders.

Final Take

Uber is no longer just a ride-hailing business. It’s morphing into a next-gen logistics and mobility platform built for an autonomous future. It has already proven it can grow quickly. Now it’s laying the groundwork to scale margins in a way that was impossible with human labor.

If Uber successfully makes the leap, and the early signs are promising, it may well unlock a profit engine Wall Street hasn’t fully priced in. That’s how a $200,000 investment in Uber today might be worth $1 million by 2035.

This isn’t just about getting a ride but about catching the next big wave in automation.