Amazon’s Zoox is further growing its real estate to boost the rollout of its robotaxi vehicles in California and beyond.
The company signed a deal for a logistics facility near a factory it opened last summer in the San Francisco Bay Area to build the self-driving cars that aim to compete with Google's Waymo.
The Silicon Valley self-driving car company will operate a transshipment facility at a 10-acre industrial property at 25555 Clawiter Road in the East Bay city of Hayward, California. The approximately 34,000-square-foot facility is a stone's throw from the sprawling production facility down the street at 25810 Clawiter Road.
Landlord Terreno Realty, a San Francisco-based industrial real estate investor, confirmed that it had leased one of its Hayward logistics properties to an autonomous ride-hailing company, though it did not name the firm.
Hayward has in recent years become a hotbed of industrial and logistics uses that go hand in hand with Silicon Valley’s innovation engine. Terreno owns nearly a half-dozen industrial properties there, according to its website, as well as several other logistics parcels in neighboring San Leandro and Union City.
Zoox did not respond to a request for comment from CoStar News about the new facility. But CoStar data shows the company leased the facility starting in mid-March. The lease is set to expire in 2031.
The road ahead
The firm's expansion of its industrial facilities in the Bay Area comes as Zoox announced in March that it would significantly add to the area served by its toaster-like robotaxis, as it seeks to get ahead of competition from companies like Waymo and Tesla, which launched robotaxi services in Austin last year.
Amazon's self-driving car unit is preparing to launch service in Austin and Miami later this year. It's also expanding service to new neighborhoods in Las Vegas and San Francisco, where it quadrupled its service area in San Francisco starting this spring, expanding rides to the eastern half of the city, including the Marina, North Beach, Chinatown and Pacific Heights neighborhoods. The company has been offering free rides to select members of the public in San Francisco since November.
The e-commerce giant acquired Zoox for $1.3 billion in 2020. In 2023, the startup leased a 220,000-square-foot property owned by Hines in Hayward to manufacture its buggy-like, bidirectional vehicles, which have no steering wheels or pedals, eventually turning out some 10,000 robotaxis per year.
Zoox is vying to be the first company to manufacture robotaxis in-house for commercial use, and it said the plant would create hundreds of jobs in the San Francisco Bay Area, as it hires for logistics personnel, operators and assembly specialists.
In Las Vegas, riders will soon be able to take a Zoox vehicle to the Sphere, the Las Vegas Convention Center and T-Mobile Arena. Zoox launched in Las Vegas last year, offering free rides to limited destinations along the strip.
The company announced a partnership with Uber last month that will make Zoox vehicles available through the Uber app in Las Vegas this summer and in Los Angeles starting in mid-2027, ahead of the 2028 Olympics.
“This expansion marks a significant step forward for Zoox,” company Chief Executive Aicha Evans said in a previous statement. “We are actively implementing learnings to confidently and safely scale our robotaxi service across the country.”
Google's Waymo is currently in the lead in the robotaxi race for dominance, with more than 1,500 super-retrofitted Jaguars currently creeping the streets of San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Austin.