NVIDIA maps out its robotaxi stack and names adopters

On its blog, NVIDIA presents robotaxi development as a linked chain of three computing jobs rather than a set of separate purchases. The company places DGX systems on the training side, Omniverse and Cosmos on RTX PRO servers for simulation and validation, and DRIVE Hyperion with DRIVE AGX Thor inside the vehicle. In effect, NVIDIA is selling a workflow as much as a box.

The vehicle reference design is specific. NVIDIA says DRIVE Hyperion 10 combines dual DRIVE AGX Thor systems-on-a-chip with 14 cameras, nine radars, three lidars and 12 ultrasonics. The company says that redundancy is meant to support fail-operational driving if a sensor or compute component stops working.

NVIDIA also supplies a long list of companies it says are using parts of the stack. Those named include Uber, May Mobility, Bolt, Lyft, WeRide, Waymo, Wayve, Nissan, Zoox, Pony.ai, Waabi, TIER IV, Isuzu, Mercedes-Benz, Stellantis, Lucid, Nuro, Hyundai Motor, Kia and Geely, among others. The uses described range from cloud training and simulation to reference architectures and in-vehicle computing.

That breadth needs careful reading. Being listed does not show that every company has standardised on the full NVIDIA package, because the post groups together quite different kinds of relationship. NVIDIA also cites an internal result on an autonomous-driving evaluation, saying added reasoning data reduced minimum average displacement error from 2.08 to 1.18. Useful, perhaps, but still a vendor-reported measure rather than an external ruling on who drives best.