Nvidia To Partner With Volkswagen, Uber For Self-Driving Car Technology

NVIDIA Corporation NVDA is partnering with Volkswagen AG (ADR) VLKAY and Uber to embed its artificial intelligence technology into their respective fleets, according to announcements made Monday at the CES conference.

Volkswagen will infuse NVIDIA’s Drive IX platform in its future vehicles to enable “intelligent co-pilot” capabilities and set the stage for autonomous driving, while Uber will enhance its self-driving vehicles with high-resolution perception for environment detection and collision prevention.

"Developing safe, reliable autonomous vehicles requires sophisticated AI software and a high-performance GPU computing engine in the vehicle," Eric Meyhofer, head of Uber Advanced Technologies Group, said in a press release. "NVIDIA is a key technology provider to Uber as we bring scalable self-driving cars and trucks to market."

Uber already uses Nvidia processors to run deep neural networks in its autonomous vehicles, and it embedded GPU technology in its first test fleet of Volvo XC90 SUVs in 2016.

The expanded partnership anchors Nvidia more deeply in the automaking community, which sees 320 companies reliant on Nvidia Drive, according to Reuters.

Other Partnerships

Also at the conference, Nvidia announced a collaboration with startup Aurora to develop a Level 4 and Level 5 autonomous-vehicle hardware platform using the Drive Xavier processor. An additional partnership with Baidu and ZF Friedrichshafen AG will bring an autonomous vehicle platform to the Chinese market, which accounts for 30 percent of global passenger vehicles.

"NVIDIA's AI supercomputing architecture is ideal for our autonomous driving applications, as it can process huge amounts of data from sensors in real time, and localize the vehicle on our high-definition digital maps," Zhenyu Li, vice president and general manager of the Intelligent Driving Group at Baidu, said in a press release. "We've been working with NVIDIA on developing on-vehicle chips for autonomous driving, which aims to accelerate the pace of mass production of autonomous vehicles."

Nvidai was trading up about 2.5 percent at $220.85 in MOnday's pre-market session.

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