Waymo, an autonomous driving technology company, runs a driverless ride-hailing service across Metro Phoenix that it says anyone can use through its app. On August 13, 2026 it added 55 square miles in the East Valley, and KJZZ put the total footprint at roughly 350 square miles. Waymo's Phoenix page, read in October 2026, describes the territory as Downtown Phoenix, Scottsdale, and parts of Tempe, Mesa and Chandler. As of August 23, 2026, all riders in metro Phoenix can hail Waymo's new Ojai vehicle, which KJZZ says is equipped with the sixth-generation Waymo Driver [not independently verified]. Waymo also builds vehicles at a Waymo Driver integration plant in Mesa that it announced it had opened with its partner Magna in May 2025, and it says DoorDash users in Phoenix can receive deliveries by Waymo vehicles. The company started as the Google Self-Driving Car Project in 2009, was spun off from Google in 2016, and develops the Waymo Driver, the self-driving system behind its Waymo One ride-hailing service. Alphabet reports Waymo in its Other Bets segment as a consolidated variable interest entity.
Waymo's place in AI is the driving software itself. The company says its Driver, its Simulator and its Critic all run on the same underlying AI, the Waymo Foundation Model, and that the model's driving vision-language component uses rich camera data, is fine-tuned on Waymo's driving data and is trained using Google's Gemini. On the hardware side, Intel said in 2017 that Waymo's self-driving Chrysler Pacifica hybrid minivans used Intel-based technologies for sensor processing, general compute and connectivity; the Pacifica was the vehicle Waymo used for its Metro Phoenix early rider program that year. Intel's announcement does not mention Arizona, and the research for this profile found no source tying Waymo to Intel's Arizona fabs or to TSMC Arizona [not independently verified].
Waymo's Arizona history starts in Chandler. The City of Chandler says Waymo first brought its autonomous vehicles to the area in 2016, and Waymo says it began its early rider program in Metro Phoenix in 2017. In May 2018 the Chandler City Council approved zoning code changes, which the city says made Chandler the first city in the country to write autonomous vehicles into its zoning code; the changes let developments with pick-up and drop-off areas for these vehicles reduce required parking by up to 40 percent [not independently verified]. Also in 2018, Waymo launched Waymo One in Metro Phoenix, which it calls the world's first commercial autonomous ride-hailing service. In March 2019 KJZZ reported that Waymo was opening a second service facility in Mesa that was expected to create hundreds of jobs, though no source confirmed when or whether it opened, and in 2019 the City of Chandler described Waymo as operating out of a 39,000-square-foot warehouse in Chandler used for testing, the early rider program and the move toward commercial service; its current status was not confirmed. On October 8, 2020, Waymo opened its fully driverless service to Waymo One riders.
The service then grew outward. In December 2022 Waymo opened rides between Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport and Downtown Phoenix to the public, and the airport says it became the first airport in the world to offer Waymo autonomous rides. In May 2023 Waymo connected its Downtown Phoenix and East Valley territories and added Scottsdale, reaching 180 square miles, which Waymo called the largest fully autonomous, paid ride-hailing service area in the world. In June 2024 it expanded to 315 square miles, reaching as far as Desert Ridge in North Phoenix. In September 2025 Waymo and Via announced that Chandler would be the first city to integrate Waymo rides into its public microtransit service, Chandler Flex; a launch date was not confirmed from a city source, and no later update was found. In November 2025 Waymo began offering rides on freeways in and around Phoenix; it paused them in May 2026, and in July 2026 Waymo said it was gradually adding back freeway routes in Phoenix, with more cities to follow. On August 13, 2026, Waymo added 55 square miles in the East Valley, and KJZZ put the total footprint at roughly 350 square miles. As of August 23, 2026, all riders in metro Phoenix can hail Waymo's new Ojai vehicle. KJZZ says the Ojai is built on Zeekr's CM1e vehicle and equipped with the sixth-generation Waymo Driver, and that riders are matched with an Ojai if one is nearby and cannot yet choose a vehicle [not independently verified].
In May 2025 Waymo announced that it had opened a 239,000-square-foot Waymo Driver integration plant in Mesa with its partner Magna. Waymo describes the plant as a multi-million dollar investment that has created hundreds of jobs in Mesa, but it has not published the investment amount or a job count, and it does not say how many of those jobs are Waymo employees rather than Magna employees. Waymo says the plant will build thousands of Jaguar I-PACEs equipped with its fully autonomous technology, and projects that at full capacity it will be able to build tens of thousands of autonomous vehicles per year; no source states the plant's actual output, and no update on it after May 2025 was found. The company says the plant's design also lets it integrate the sixth-generation Waymo Driver on new vehicle platforms, beginning with the Zeekr RT in 2025, though no later source confirming that integration was found, and that vehicles built for the Phoenix fleet can pick up their first passengers less than 30 minutes after leaving the factory. It is not known whether this plant is the same building as the Mesa service facility announced in 2019.
Waymo does not publish ride counts or fleet size for Phoenix alone. In May 2025 it said Waymo One provided more than 250,000 paid trips each week across Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Austin combined. Its own safety analysis covers over 270 million miles of fully autonomous driving through the end of June 2026 across five metro areas, Atlanta, Austin, Los Angeles, Phoenix and San Francisco, without a Phoenix-only figure. In that analysis Waymo reports an 82 percent reduction in injury-causing crashes compared with human drivers [not independently verified]. These are the company's own figures and have not been independently audited.
The record also includes setbacks. On January 7, 2026, a Valley Metro employee saw a Waymo on the northbound light rail tracks near Central and Southern avenues in south Phoenix; the passenger left the car, trains exchanged passengers, and the scene cleared by 9:15 a.m. In May 2026 KJZZ reported that Waymo was suspending freeway trips across the United States, including in Phoenix, for a software update. On June 12, 2026, Waymo filed federal safety recall 26E035 with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration covering 3,871 units of its fifth-generation automated driving system, a figure the recall does not break down by state. NHTSA states the software may allow a vehicle to enter a closed freeway construction zone and keep driving at speed [not independently verified]. On July 30, 2026, KJZZ reported that Waymo says it is gradually adding back freeway routes in Phoenix, with more cities to follow; a Waymo spokesperson said riders were welcomed on freeways again after software updates for highway construction zones [not independently verified].
Waymo is listed by the Arizona Department of Transportation among the companies that have submitted to test autonomous vehicles in the state. In February 2026 Waymo announced a $16.0 billion investment round, the significant majority of which was funded by Alphabet. That round is company-wide, and no Arizona share is stated, so Arizona AI does not count it as investment in Arizona; no later statement of an Arizona share was found. Taken together, the facts show Arizona serving as both an early testing ground and an ongoing base for Waymo: a ride-hailing territory that has grown since 2018 and a Mesa plant where Waymo's vehicles are built.