Nvidia to Partner With Hyundai, Kia on Autonomous Driving; Announces New Drive Hyperion Customers

Nvidia, currently the world’s most valuable company thanks to its AI offerings, has just made a slew of announcements at its annual GPU Technology Conference. Most notably, it is expanding its partnership with sister companies Hyundai Motor Company and Kia Corp to develop autonomous driving systems. The deal leverages Hyundai Motor Group’s experience with software-defined vehicles along with Nvidia’s AI and compute capabilities.

The companies will work on deploying ADAS features and L2+ autonomous driving on certain Hyundai and Kia models, as well as L4 robotaxis and future-ready autonomous mobility services with Motional, a joint venture between Hyundai Motor Group and Aptiv.

Using Nvidia’s Drive Hyperion autonomous vehicle development platform and AI infrastructure, the Hyundai Motor Group companies will create a scalable unified common framework. The collaboration will also benefit from real-world data gathered by Hyundai’s global vehicle fleet, to improve safety and intelligence features as well as train and refine future AI models for simulation and validation.

In a statement, Heung-Soo Kim, EVP and Head - Global Strategy Office at Hyundai Motor Group said, “The expanded partnership with Nvidia marks an important milestone in realizing Hyundai Motor Group’s vision for safe and reliable autonomous driving technology.” He added, “Based on a unified, Group‑wide collaborative framework, we will strengthen our differentiated technological competitiveness — from level 2 and above autonomous driving technology to level 4 robotaxi services."

Also at GTC, Nvidia announced that BYD, Geely, Isuzu and Nissan are among the companies adopting the Drive Hyperion platform and Nvidia Halos safety architecture for their own self-driving vehicle development programmes, aiming for L4 autonomy and robotaxi applications. Nvidia says this will allow partner companies to speed up development, testing and validation across global markets. This also moves towards establishing a common baseline for compute capabilities, sensors, and safety.

“The autonomous vehicle revolution is here — the first multitrillion-dollar robotics industry,” said Jensen Huang, Nvidia founder and CEO. “Everything that moves will eventually be autonomous. The Nvidia Hyperion platform and our Alpamayo open reasoning models give vehicles the ability to perceive their surroundings, reason through complex situations and act safely — making scalable, level 4 autonomy possible.”

In addition, Nvidia is working with Amazon to integrate its Alexa Custom Assistant with multimodal edge AI capabilities into vehicles, for secure and responsive ambient in-cabin intelligence features. Uber will also harness Nvidia technology to roll out its robotaxi fleet, starting in Los Angeles and San Francisco next year, and targeting 28 cities across four continents by 2028.