It's a very capital intensive operation given the amount of vehicles that need to be carried on the balance sheet.

There are many reasons why a conglomerate like Alphabet doesn't want to hold all of that directly on the balance sheet, which is why Waymo is run as a subsidiary with its own sources of capital.

When I was at Uber 10 plus years ago and we were ideating autonomous vehicles. The general consensus was that we would run the technology platform and private equity would own fleets of cars built and operated to our specification.

Waymo has concluded either we are too early in the journey to decouple the tight vertical integration or they want to go very big and own all of the capital expenditure for what will presumably be a global rollout ultimately.

For anyone like me with a finance and technology crossover interest I actually think this is as interesting, maybe more interesting, than the private equity play around data centers at the moment because all of that is constrained against chip delivery and power constraints.