On October 8, Waymo announced it had closed a $5 billion term loan, the first time the Alphabet-owned autonomous driving company has borrowed money. Goldman Sachs served as sole lead bookrunner, with PIMCO, Blackstone and Sixth Street as lead lenders. Capital Group, Loomis Sayles and T. Rowe Price took larger allocations, and Apollo, Blue Owl, Diameter Capital Partners, Franklin Templeton, Fidelity, HPS and Oaktree are also on the lender list.
The company spelled out the intended use in its announcement:
"This capital will accelerate the continued expansion of our fully autonomous ride-hailing service across the United States and internationally."
From $3 billion to $5 billion
According to reports, the loan initially targeted "more than $3 billion" before being upsized to $5 billion. It carries no credit rating, so lenders had to assess repayment capacity on their own. Several outlets cited pricing of 5.25 percentage points over the benchmark rate. Waymo's announcement did not disclose the interest rate or the term, so those terms rest on media reports.
Until now, all of Waymo's money has come from equity. In February the company closed a $16 billion raise at a post-money valuation of $126 billion. The announcement calls the loan "an important step in its evolution into a scaled commercial enterprise," which is a different framing from the one used in earlier equity rounds.
Blackstone, Apollo, Blue Owl, HPS, Sixth Street and Oaktree on the lender list are all private credit managers. The money did not go through the public bond market and carries no rating; it is direct lending from private credit. Large private credit deals of this kind have mostly been seen in data center construction, and a single $5 billion loan to a ride-hailing operator has few public precedents.
Where the money goes
The announcement points to expansion in the US and abroad. Press reports add two items: fleet growth, and rising AI and compute costs.
On operations, Waymo opened its 15th US city last month and now serves more than 500,000 paid rides a week. The company's target for this year is 1 million rides a week across 20 cities worldwide by year-end. Its international plans include London, Tokyo and Munich. Munich is slated for the end of 2027 and would be its first EU market; testing in London and Tokyo had been announced earlier, but this announcement gives no commercial launch timetable for either. When this site last reported Waymo's 500,000 weekly rides, it was operating in 11 cities. Four cities have been added in a little over two months, while the way weekly rides are counted has not changed.
Media reports put the fleet at more than 4,000 vehicles, a figure Waymo's announcement does not state. At 4,000 vehicles and 500,000 rides a week, that works out to roughly 125 rides per vehicle per week, or about 18 a day, on the assumption that every vehicle is in service; the company has not disclosed what share of the fleet is actually in operation. For comparison, Tesla's Robotaxi is still rolling out city by city. When this site reported its entry into Dallas and Houston, it had put just one vehicle into each.
A rough look at the interest
The loan is $5 billion, with a spread of 5.25 percentage points. A rough calculation: the spread above the benchmark alone comes to about $260 million a year once the loan is fully drawn. The benchmark portion is on top of that, and every additional percentage point in the base rate costs another $50 million a year. This interest is due whether or not ride volume hits its targets, which is not how equity financing works. Against the $16 billion in equity raised in February, the debt is about one third of that size; measured against a $126 billion valuation, leverage is still very low, which is part of why an unrated loan could be upsized from $3 billion to $5 billion.
Some reports say Waymo's EBITDA is currently negative. The company has not published financial results, so this cannot be verified. Alphabet reports Waymo within "Other Bets" and has never broken out its revenue and losses separately, so the materials lenders saw are not available to outsiders.
The loan's term, repayment schedule and any financial covenants have not been made public by Waymo or its lenders. Alphabet is not on the lender list, and the announcement does not say whether the parent provided a guarantee. By year-end, two numbers will be the most direct test of where the money went: whether the city count can go from 15 to 20, and whether weekly rides can double.
Sources: Waymo official announcement, CocoLoop, Crypto Briefing, Transport Topics; Waymo's announcement was used to verify the loan size and lender list, and media reports to verify the original target, the spread and weekly ride counts.