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

The Nevada Transportation Authority on Friday approved autonomous vehicle applications for Tesla, Alphabet’s Waymo, and Aviari. 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.

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.

Tesla shares were down 0.2% at $362.07 in premarket trading, while S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average futures were down 0.2% and 0.1%, respectively. Tesla stock jumped 5.1% on Friday. Nevada might have helped. The news came in the afternoon. Still, Tesla shares were on the move before then.

Coming into Monday, Tesla stock has fallen 19% this year, up only a few dollars since the Austin launch of Tesla’s robo-taxi service. Investors have been waiting to see the business scale up.

Large numbers of robo-taxis starting to populate U.S. roads would certainly be a positive catalyst 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 debated by investors. Will Tesla be just one of many with robo-taxi technology, or will it be the dominant player? To be sure, with a valuation of about $1.4 trillion, according to FactSet, Tesla investors beleive it will be one of the larger players.

Tesla has its advantages. For starters, it also has had its self-driving technology running on hundreds of thousands of Tesla vehicles for years. And it is an auto maker. Tesla can make thousands of robo-taxis quickly, and likely at a lower cost than other companies can acquire them.