Apple's Secret Circuit Ends Up at Waymo: $220 Million for 22 Square Kilometers in Arizona
Waymo has acquired the testing field in Wittmann, Arizona, where Apple tested the Titan Project, for $220 million, approximately €190 million. The transaction involves a 22 square kilometer facility ceded by Route 14 Investment Partners LLC, a Delaware trust company tied to Apple. This change of hands highlights the distance between those who have abandoned the sector and those who are building an entire business infrastructure upon it.
The site is not generic land: it includes an urban circuit of over 465,000 square meters, a 14-hectare vehicle dynamics area, an oval approximately 6.4 kilometers long, and a highway track built specifically for testing autonomous driving. Apple purchased it in 2021 for $125 million, using it as an operational base for the Titan Project until its cancellation in February 2024, after over a decade of development and an estimated expenditure of more than $10 billion. Waymo is thus entering an infrastructure already conceived and designed for the same type of activities it intends to carry out there.
The site will be intended for tests with only passengers onboard, dynamic vehicle behavior testing, and operational training. This acquisition is consistent with the phase the company is in: the fleet is nearing 4,000 vehicles, the service is active in over 10 U.S. cities, and the stated goal is to reach 1 million rides per week by the end of 2026. Having a proprietary and dedicated testing center, away from public traffic, accelerates iteration on scenarios difficult to replicate on the road.
Arizona as a Strategic Hub
The geographical choice is not random. Waymo already has a 22,200 square meter factory in Mesa, Arizona, where Magna integrates Waymo components, namely cameras, radars, and LiDAR sensors, onto the Ojai (based on Zeekr) and Hyundai IONIQ 5 platforms. The testing field in Wittmann, about 50 kilometers from Phoenix, thus enters an already established production and logistics ecosystem in the state. It is not an isolated case: the area also hosts other testing fields of traditional manufacturers, and the terrain's configuration with dry roads, wide visibility, and stable climate is particularly suitable for testing autonomous driving systems.
On the financial front, Waymo has raised a total of $16 billion with a valuation that peaked at $126 billion. The purchase of the Arizona site follows the announcement of the service's expansion to new cities including Houston, San Antonio, Orlando, and, the first outside U.S. borders, London in 2026. The price of $220 million (almost double the $125 million paid by Apple five years earlier) speaks volumes about the state of the autonomous driving testing infrastructure market: specialized testing fields are scarce, expensive, and those who have built them are not keen on selling. Apple set them up for a project that never hit the road. Waymo buys them for a service that already transports passengers every day.