After defeating Uber in China’s brutal ride-hailing war in 2016, Didi Chuxing had an even more ambitious goal: Win the global race to develop robotaxis.
A year later, Didi quietly struck a $1 billion deal to acquire Aurora Innovation, the high-profile self-driving-car firm led by Chris Urmson, a pioneer in the field who started Google’s autonomous car program, now called Waymo. Didi’s previously unreported blockbuster agreement in 2017 to buy Aurora—which is now worth $10 billion on paper but back then was a brand-new startup—would have redrawn the map of a nascent key industry. But after U.S. government officials expressed concerns about national security risks, the two sides abandoned the deal, according to two people with knowledge of it.
