Nvidia has introduced a new AI system aimed at transforming self-driving cars, signalling a shift from powering software to enabling physical products.
Unveiled at CES in Las Vegas, the technology promises safer autonomous driving and greater transparency in decision-making, as Nvidia deepens partnerships and expands its influence in the rapidly evolving AI-driven mobility sector.
Speaking on at the annual CES technology conference in Las Vegas, Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang introduced the system, known as Alpamayo, saying it would bring reasoning to self-driving cars.
The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is one of the world’s largest and most important technology conferences, held annually in Las Vegas.
It serves as a major platform where global tech firms unveil new products, set industry trends and signal future directions in innovation.
CES brings together manufacturers, developers, investors and policymakers, making it a critical event for shaping conversations around emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, automation and smart devices.
The CEO said the technology would allow vehicles to think through rare scenarios, drive safely in complex environments, and explain their driving decisions.
Huang said Nvidia was working with Mercedes to produce a driverless car powered by the system, with a rollout expected in the United States in the coming months before expansion into Europe and Asia.
Nvidia is a US-based technology company best known for designing high-performance graphics processing units (GPUs) that power gaming, data centres, artificial intelligence, and advanced computing systems.
Over time, the company has expanded beyond graphics to become a key player in AI, supplying chips and platforms used in machine learning, autonomous vehicles, robotics and scientific research.
Its technology underpins many modern AI applications, making Nvidia one of the most influential companies in the global tech ecosystem.
Nvidia’s chips have played a central role in the global AI boom, largely by powering software such as ChatGPT.
However, attention is increasingly shifting toward hardware, physical products like cars, where AI could be applied in real-world environments.
Wearing his trademark black leather jacket, Huang told the audience that the project had taught Nvidia an enormous amount about helping partners build robotic systems. He said, “The ChatGPT moment for physical AI is almost here.”
A video demonstration during the presentation showed an AI-powered Mercedes-Benz driving through San Francisco, with a passenger seated behind the steering wheel and their hands resting in their lap.
Huang said, “It drives so naturally because it learned directly from human demonstrators,” adding that “in every single scenario, it tells you what it’s going to do, and it reasons about what it’s about to do.”
Alpamayo is being released as an open-source AI model, with its underlying code made available on the machine learning platform Hugging Face. Huang said this would allow autonomous vehicle researchers to access it freely and retrain the model.
“Our vision is that someday, every single car, every single truck, will be autonomous,” he told the audience.
Industry analysts said the move represented a significant shift in Nvidia’s strategy. Paolo Pescatore of PP Foresight said, “NVIDIA's pivot toward AI at scale and AI systems as differentiators will help keep it way ahead of rivals.”
He added that Alpamayo represents a profound shift for NVIDIA, moving from being primarily a compute to a platform provider for physical AI ecosystems.
Shares of Nvidia rose slightly in after-hours trading following the announcement.
The development could pose a challenge to companies such as Tesla, which already offers driver-assistance software through its Autopilot system.
Responding to the announcement, Elon Musk wrote on social media, “What they will find is that it's easy to get to 99 percent and then super hard to solve the long tail of the distribution.”
Like Tesla, Nvidia has also said it plans to launch a robotaxi service next year in collaboration with a partner, though it has not disclosed who that partner will be or where the service will operate.
Nvidia remains the world’s most valuable publicly traded company, with a market capitalisation of more than Sh580 trillion, based on its valuation of over Sh580.5 trillion.
The company briefly became the first to hit $5 trillion in October, equivalent to about Sh645 trillion, before losing some value amid concerns about whether demand for AI is being overhyped.
The firm also revealed that its next-generation Rubin AI chips are already in production and are expected to be released later this year.
The new chips are designed to deliver high-performance computing while using less energy than Nvidia’s current products, potentially reducing the overall cost of developing and deploying AI technologies.
As Nvidia pushes deeper into autonomous systems and physical AI, the company is positioning itself not just as a chipmaker, but as a foundational platform for the next wave of intelligent machines.
