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Waymo is close to finalising a $16bn funding round that will more than double the value of Google’s self-driving car business to $110bn, bringing in several new investors as it prepares to expand globally and fend off competition from Elon Musk.

Google’s parent company Alphabet, which incubated the start-up in its X labs, will contribute more than three-quarters of the amount raised, according to four people familiar with the process.

New participants include Silicon Valley venture capital firm Dragoneer and Sequoia Capital, as well as Yuri Milner’s DST Global, the people said. Existing investor Andreessen Horowitz will put in more money and another existing investor, Abu Dhabi’s sovereign fund Mubadala, will contribute hundreds of millions more.

Waymo’s annual recurring revenue — a measure of expected revenue from subscriptions commonly used by start-ups — has grown to more than $350mn and the funding round was three times oversubscribed, the people added.

“While we don’t comment on private financial matters, our trajectory is clear: with over 20mn trips completed, we are focused on the safety-led operational excellence and technological leadership required to meet the vast demand for autonomous mobility,” Waymo said.

Andreessen, Dragoneer, DST, Mubadala and Sequoia declined to comment.

Waymo has established itself as the leader in the robotaxi market, having recorded more than 125mn fully autonomous miles on US roads with few related safety incidents. Waymo says it expects to host 1mn rides per week this year in cities including San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix and Miami.

While the main way to hail a ride is through its own app, it has also partnered with Uber in secondary markets such as Austin and Atlanta.

Alphabet is raising more cash to help fund its rollout across the US, including New York, and last year started testing in foreign cities such as London and Tokyo amid growing competition from Musk’s Tesla and China’s Baidu.

Waymo’s vehicles — which use a combination of cameras, laser-based Lidar sensors and detailed street maps — are classed as level four autonomous and require no driver or active supervision. It is preparing to expand from Jaguar I-Pace SUVs to Hyundai Ioniq 5 models and a larger van made by China’s Zeekr to cut costs.

Its main rival is Tesla, which last year started offering a “robotaxi” service in Austin, Texas, with the eventual aim of allowing the millions of vehicles it has sold to be rented out to the service when not in use. It is also developing a dedicated two-seat Cybercab without a steering wheel that it says will enter production this year.

However, Tesla vehicles rely only on cameras without Lidar, which has led to persistent questions about safety. The company lost a lawsuit in Florida and was ordered to pay $243mn in damages after a fatal accident involving its autopilot software.

Tesla’s “full self-driving” technology is only classed as level two autonomy — which requires the driver to pay attention at all times — and its robotaxi service in Austin still requires a safety observer in the car or a trailing vehicle.

The autonomous driving company started as a “moonshot” experiment in Google’s X lab in 2009, and was spun out in 2016.

Waymo last raised $5.6bn in a funding round in October 2024 that valued it at more than $45bn. Andreessen Horowitz, Silver Lake, Tiger Global and T Rowe Price were among the largest investors.

SpaceX filed a request with the FCC on Friday seeking approval to put a constellation of 1 million data center satellites into orbit. While the FCC is unlikely to approve a network that expansive, SpaceX’s strategy has been to request approval for unrealistically large numbers of satellites as a starting point for negotiations.

The filing proposes establishing a network of solar-powered data centers in low Earth orbit that communicate with one another via lasers. The filling speaks of the constellation in ambitious sci-fi terms, calling it a “first step towards becoming a Kardashev II-level civilization — one that can harness the Sun’s full power.”

Even if just a small fraction of those 1 million satellites wind up in orbit, it would mark a significant increase in the number of man-made objects in space. The European Space Agency estimates there are around 15,000 satellites orbiting the Earth at the moment, and the majority are Starlink. (Over 9,600 of them, according to Johnathan’s Space Report.)

When experts are already concerned about the abundance of space junk and potential for orbital collisions, such an explosion of objects in orbit would seem ill-advised. But SpaceX argues that the orbital data centers would be a cheaper and more environmentally friendly alternative to land-based centers that form the backbone of the growing AI industry. Instead of syphoning water from communities, polluting groundwater, and driving up electricity bills, orbital data centers would be able to radiate heat into the vacuum of space and rely almost exclusively on real-time solar power and limited batteries.

The backlash against data centers has been growing, and communities are increasingly winning their battles to block their construction. So it’s no surprise that the biggest names in AI are turning their attention to one of the few places where there isn’t a community to upset.

Correction January 31st: An earlier version of this article stated that there were over 11,000 Starlink satellites in orbit. That number was the total launched, including satellites that had been decommissioned. This has been corrected to reflect how many Starlink satellites are currently active in orbit.