Nvidia chips to power Toyota’s next-gen self-driving cars

Nvidia, a US technology company, says its chips will power Toyota’s next-generation self-driving vehicles in a new partnership deal.

According to Reuters, Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s chief executive officer (CEO), announced the collaboration in his keynote address at the consumer electronics show (CES) in Las Vegas on Monday.

Huang described the collaboration as a milestone in the evolution of autonomous vehicles.

“The Autonomous Vehicles (AV) revolution has arrived,” he said.

“Today, Toyota and Nvidia are partnering to create their next-generation AVs.”

As part of the partnership, Nvidia unveiled its new Cosmos foundation models at the event.

The models were said to have been designed to generate realistic, photorealistic video simulations for training robots and self-driving cars.

Huang also said the models create synthetic data, allowing companies to train autonomous vehicles at a fraction of the cost of traditional methods, which typically involve using fleets of vehicles or human operators.

He said Cosmos uses text-based descriptions to generate video environments that mirror the real world, helping self-driving cars better understand and navigate their surroundings.

While the technology is still in development and requires more data to reach its full potential, Nvidia is expected to release Cosmos under an open license — similar to Meta’s Llama3 language models.

“We hope Cosmos will do for robotics and industrial AI what Llama3 has done for enterprise AI,” Huang added.

The CEO further said collaboration also includes the use of Nvidia’s Orin chips and automotive operating system to enhance advanced driver assistance systems in Toyota’s upcoming models.

Although specific vehicle details were not disclosed, Huang projected Nvidia’s automotive hardware and software revenue to rise from $4 billion in fiscal 2025 to $5 billion in 2026.

Toyota is not the only automaker leveraging Nvidia’s technology. Aurora Innovation and Continental also announced a partnership to deploy driverless trucks at scale using Nvidia’s system-on-a-chip.