Nvidia has announced a wave of partnerships with major automakers and ride-hailing companies as it seeks to establish its computing hardware as the dominant platform for self-driving vehicles.
BYD, Geely, Isuzu and Nissan are among the carmakers now building vehicles on Nvidia's DRIVE Hyperion platform, a computing architecture designed to support level 4 autonomy, meaning cars capable of driving themselves without human intervention under most conditions.
The most significant commercial partnership announced is with Uber, which plans to deploy a full robotaxi service built on Nvidia technology across 28 cities and four continents by 2028, beginning in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area in the first half of 2027.
Ride-hailing and mobility firms Bolt, Grab, Lyft and TIER IV are also expanding robotaxi programmes on the platform.
Isuzu, the Japanese commercial vehicle maker, is working with autonomous driving firm TIER IV to develop level 4 self-driving buses using Nvidia's DRIVE AGX Thor, a system-on-a-chip that handles the heavy computing demands of autonomous driving.
Nvidia also unveiled Alpamayo 1.5, an updated AI driving model that takes in video, movement history, navigation guidance and text prompts, and outputs planned driving trajectories alongside reasoning traces that explain the vehicle's decision-making.
The model has been downloaded by more than 100,000 automotive developers worldwide since its launch.
Alongside the model, Nvidia announced that Omniverse NuRec, a simulation tool that recreates real-world driving scenarios for testing purposes, will be made generally available through Nvidia's NGC software catalogue, lowering the cost and complexity of vehicle validation for developers.
The company also named ten companies including Valeo, Hesai and Gatik as participants in its Halos AI Systems Inspection Lab, a programme designed to audit and certify the safety of autonomous driving systems.
Amazon is separately working to bring its Alexa Custom Assistant voice and multimodal capabilities to Nvidia's DRIVE AGX computing hardware.
Nvidia framed the announcements as evidence of a structural shift in the automotive industry, with founder and chief executive Jensen Huang declaring that "the autonomous vehicle revolution is here," describing it as "the first multitrillion-dollar robotics industry."
Related reading
- NVIDIA launches AI factory reference design and digital twin blueprint
- Nvidia and Dassault Systèmes combine simulation software and AI physics tools to speed up industrial design
- NVIDIA to feature OpenClaw, 'build-a-claw' at its GTC 2026 conference
The breadth of the partnerships reflects Nvidia's strategy of offering a standardised software and hardware stack, covering chips, operating systems, AI models and simulation tools, that reduces the time and cost for manufacturers to bring autonomous vehicles to market.
Whether the 2028 targets for widespread robotaxi deployment prove realistic remains to be seen, as previous timelines across the industry have repeatedly slipped.
The recap
- BYD, Geely, Isuzu and Nissan adopt DRIVE Hyperion for L4
- Uber to launch full-stack robotaxi fleet in 28 cities
- Rollout starts in Los Angeles and San Francisco first half of 2027
