Waymo's fleet hits 4,000 as recalls and edge cases mount
Robotaxis are scaling faster than the edge cases that trip them up — and OpenAI is working overtime to stay on the good side of the state that just slammed the brakes on its data centers.
Waymo has grown its fleet from roughly 700 robotaxis in 2025 to nearly 4,000 today — and the recalls are growing with it. New York Times reporting, carried by Techmeme, catalogs the failures that come with scale: a flooded-roadway recall filed in late April covered 3,791 fifth- and sixth-generation vehicles after an unoccupied robotaxi drove into water in San Antonio, and three weeks later another Waymo entered standing water in Atlanta. During a San Francisco power outage, 1,593 vehicles paused mid-service. The company suspended operations in Dallas, Houston, San Antonio and Atlanta in May over heavy rain and flood handling, and new state rules now require fleets to clear roads within two minutes of an emergency while reporting every system failure, immobilization and hard-braking event.
The uncomfortable math: more vehicles means more exposure to the long tail of conditions no simulator fully captures — and the fixes don't always stick, since the flood recall was declared addressed before Atlanta happened. Waymo has since reopened Dallas to everyone and returned to freeways, so this reads less like a safety crisis than a scaling tax. But with the fleet headed toward five figures, regulators and riders alike will be watching whether the recall rate falls as fast as the vehicle count rises.
OpenAI has written to Texas Governor Greg Abbott pledging its data centers will "pay their own way" — a direct bid to stay in the state's good graces after Abbott ordered a moratorium on new grid connections. The letter, dated August 7 and signed by CTO of Compute Uday Ruddarraju, commits OpenAI to fully funding project-driven infrastructure costs without shifting them onto residential or small-business customers, supporting new power generation with ERCOT, minimizing water use with closed-loop cooling, and disclosing electricity and water consumption to the state. It lands days after Abbott directed ERCOT to verify data center loads before advancing them through interconnection — the sharpest escalation of a nationwide revolt we've tracked all week, with more than 500 US jurisdictions now pausing or banning data centers (we covered the pushback reaching New York and Texas — US data center bans top 500 as New York, Texas push back).
It's a savvy piece of positioning: OpenAI is volunteering for the exact standards Texas is writing, casting itself as the responsible operator the rules were designed for. The commitments are also notably concrete — closed-loop cooling and no cost-shifting are the two demands that have drawn the most community anger. Whether the letter survives contact with actual construction is the test, but as a playbook for labs navigating the data-center backlash, it's the sharpest one we've seen.
What to watch: Abbott's ERCOT verification results in the coming weeks — they'll show whether the moratorium slows real projects or just speculative ones.
As robotaxi fleets scale toward five figures, what's an acceptable recall rate for a driverless car? Tell us in the comments.
Sources: New York Times (via Techmeme) · Yahoo Autos · TechCrunch · AV Market Strategist · OpenAI · OpenAI letter (PDF) · CBS Austin
