The long-awaited scaling up of Tesla's robo-taxi service might be close.

The Nevada Transportation Authority has approved autonomous vehicle applications for Tesla, Alphabet's Waymo, and Aviari, an Uber platform.

Tesla will be allowed to deploy up to 5,000 robo-taxis over the coming 12 months. Waymo and Aviari are authorized for 1,000 fully autonomous vehicles each.

It's a big move for Tesla, which launched an artificial-intelligence-trained robo-taxi service in Austin, Texas, in June 2025. Expansion of the service has been slow. Today, it operates a handful of taxis in a few cities, including Dallas and Houston.

In midmorning trading, shares were down 2.5% at $353.54. The S&P 500 was off 0.4% and the Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 0.2%.

The move down might seem odd, but the stock jumped 5.1% on Friday-word of Nevada's OK came in the afternoon.

Tesla is down 19% this year, up only a few dollars since the Austin launch. Investors are waiting to see the business scale up.

Large numbers of robo-taxis on roads would certainly be a positive for shares. Still, Nevada is only a permit. Tesla now has to put the vehicles into service.

Exactly how the robo-taxi market will develop is still being debated on Wall Street.

Will Tesla be just one of many with robo-taxi technology, or will it be a player? To be sure, with a valuation of about $1.4 trillion, according to FactSet, Tesla investors believe it will be a player.

Tesla has its advantages. It also has had its self-driving technology running on hundreds of thousands of Tesla vehicles for years-and it is an auto maker.

Elon Musk's EV company can make thousands of robo-taxis quickly, and probably at a lower cost than other companies can acquire them.