Wall Street remains hyper-focused on whether the hyperscalers' AI-driven data center buildout, now approaching $700 billion and roughly 10 times 2020 levels, will ultimately generate enough returns to justify the massive spending boom.
Goldman analysts, led by Mark Delaney, focused on the "impact of AI on profit pools" and, more specifically, on the incremental profit AI-enabled initiatives in the transportation space could ultimately generate.
The good news is that nearly a year after Delaney's June 2025 note to clients, his team found that the "pace of autonomous technology commercialization has accelerateProfits of Autonomous Mobility," driven largely by expanding vehicle deployments in the U.S. and China, as well as rollouts in Europe.
"These deployments are enabled by both captive technology development (e.g. at Waymo, Tesla, Pony AI, etc.) and a growing set of merchant Physical AI tools, including from companies such as Nvidia (e.g. Alpamayo)," Delaney said.
Potential global autonomy ecosystem market size in 2035
Delaney's new estimate for the U.S. robotaxi market is set to top $19 billion by 2030, up from a prior $7 billion forecast, and continue rising to $48 billion by 2035.
How the analyst's forecast shifted in just one year:
His team expects the global robotaxi market could reach $415 billion by 2035, with vertically integrated operators potentially generating gross margins of 30% to 50% and approximately $150 billion in gross profit by 20235.
Even though the rollout of AVs will unfold over a decade rather than all at once, the analyst still warned that the proliferation of these robotaxis will be highly disruptive to "existing markets in the long term."
Delaney offered color on the incoming disruption, and it is something Uber and Lyft drivers should be paying close attention to, because over the coming years, their livelihoods could increasingly come under pressure as consumers gravitate toward cheaper rides from robotaxis.
Source: ZeroHedge News
