Waymo is dominant in the US and expanding internationally, but remains insignificant in terms of parent company revenue alphabetis pumping cash into growth.
In Alphabet’s third-quarter earnings report Wednesday, the company said its Other Betting division, which includes Waymo, generated $372 million in revenue, an 8% increase from a year ago, and accounted for just 0.3% of total sales.
That return comes at a steep price. Other Betting’s operating loss widened to $2.05 billion in the quarter from $1.43 billion in the year-ago period. The division also includes Isomorphic, a drug discovery research business that uses Google’s Gemini 4 Argon AI model.
CEO Sundar Pichai touted Waymo’s expansion toward the end of his opening remarks on the earnings call. The company holds a commanding lead in the U.S. robotaxis market, where it faces new competition. Amazon’s with zoox tesla. Waymo announced in August that it plans to roll out robotaxis rides in Germany in 2027, its third international market and the first in the EU.
“Waymo currently operates in 15 major U.S. cities, recently launching to the public in San Antonio, San Diego, and Tampa, with expansion planned to Canada, Germany, Singapore, and Spain,” Pichai said by phone.
Waymo’s fiercest competition on the world stage is Baidu’s Apollo is based in China.
For years, Alphabet was able to run Waymo as a side project while its core online advertising business racked up tens of billions of dollars in annual profits and coughed up huge amounts of cash. But the company is currently investing heavily in artificial intelligence, and free cash flow is turning negative, prompting signs of concern on Wall Street.
Alphabet reported disappointing earnings and revenue guidance on Wednesday, sending its shares down nearly 10% in after-hours trading. The company maintained its full-year capital spending expectations between $195 billion and $205 billion, with spending primarily on AI infrastructure, and reported negative free cash flow of more than $9 billion in the quarter.
Earlier this month, Waymo announced it had closed on a $5 billion term loan, its first debt financing. In February, the robotaxi business announced it had raised $16 billion at a $126 billion valuation in an Alphabet-led funding round that included backing from Andreessen Horowitz, Fidelity, T. Rowe Price, Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins and others.
Waymo began offering driverless transportation to and from Las Vegas airport last week, after previously announcing airport service in five other cities, including San Francisco and Phoenix.
“Waymo is on a great trajectory,” Pichai said Wednesday. “We have now driven more than 300 million miles fully autonomously.”
Tesla said on its website that driverless vehicles in its robotaxi network have traveled about 3.8 million miles “unsupervised,” or without a human driver. CEO Elon Musk said on an earnings call last week that the robotaxi business should become a “meaningful” revenue contributor by the second half of 2027.
WATCH: Waymo and Zoox announce major expansion of robotaxis
