Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang Rolls Out New AI Tools For Driverless Cars, Robots

Nvidia, aiming to extend the reach of its technology, announced a group of AI models and tools designed to speed the development of autonomous vehicles and power a new generation of robots.

The company unveiled a vehicle platform called Alpamayo that allows cars to “reason” in the real world, Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang said Monday during a presentation at the CES trade show in Las Vegas.

Potential users can take the Alpamayo model and retrain it themselves, Nvidia said. The free offering is aimed at creating vehicles that can think their way out of unexpected situations, such as a traffic-light outage.

An onboard computer in a car will analyze inputs – from cameras and other sensors — break them down into steps and come up with solutions. Nvidia is building on its work with Mercedes-Benz to develop vehicles capable of hands-free driving on the highway that can also find their way through cities.

The first Nvidia-powered car will be on the road in the first quarter in the US, Huang said. Europe will follow in the second quarter, with an Asia introduction coming in the second half, he said.

Nvidia Corp. Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang said that the company’s highly anticipated Rubin data center processors are in production and customers will soon be able to try out the technology.

All six of the chips for a new generation of computing equipment — named after astronomer Vera Rubin — are back from manufacturing partners and on track for deployment by customers in the second half of the year, Huang said at the CES trade show in Las Vegas Monday.

“Demand is really high,” he said. The growing complexity and uptake of artificial intelligence software is placing a strain on existing computer resources, creating the need for much more, Huang said.

Shares rose 2% to $191.86 in New York on Tuesday. They have risen about 28% over the past year.

Nvidia, based in Santa Clara, California, is seeking to maintain its edge as the leading maker of artificial intelligence accelerators, the chips used by data center operators to develop and run AI models.

Some on Wall Street have expressed concern that competition is mounting for Nvidia — and that AI spending can’t continue at its current pace. Data center operators also are developing their own AI accelerators. But Nvidia has maintained bullish long-term forecasts that point to a total market in the trillions of dollars.

Rubin is Nvidia’s latest accelerator and is 3.5 times better at training and five times better at running AI software than its predecessor, Blackwell, the company said. A new central processing unit has 88 cores — the key data-crunching elements — and provides twice the performance of the component that it’s replacing.

The company is giving details of its new products earlier in the year than it typically does — part of a push to keep the industry hooked on its hardware, which has underpinned an explosion in AI use. Nvidia usually dives into product details at its spring GTC event in San Jose, California.

Even while talking up new offerings, Nvidia said previous generations of products are still performing well. The company also has seen strong demand from customers in China for the H200 chip that the Trump administration has said it will consider letting the chipmaker ship to that country.

License applications have been submitted, and the US government is deciding what it wants to do with them, Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress told analysts. Regardless of the level of license approval, Kress said, Nvidia has enough supply to serve customers in the Asian nation without affecting the company’s ability to ship to customers elsewhere in the world.

For Huang, CES is yet another stop on his marathon run of appearances at events, where he’s announced products, tie-ups and investments all aimed at adding momentum to the deployment of AI systems. His counterpart at Nvidia’s closest rival, Advanced Micro Devices Inc.’s Lisa Su, was slated to give a keynote presentation at the show later Monday.

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