NVIDIA's Autonomous Vehicle Investment: A Decade-Old AI Model

Nvidia's GTC 2025 Keynote and a Look Back at AlexNet

Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, delivered his keynote address at the GTC 2025 conference on Tuesday, continuing the company’s tradition of numerous product announcements. Alongside these forward-looking statements, a historical perspective was also shared.

The Significance of AlexNet

During the segment focused on automotive technology, Huang highlighted AlexNet, a neural network architecture that achieved prominence in 2012. It distinguished itself by winning a significant computer image-recognition competition.

AlexNet was created by Alex Krizhevsky, a computer scientist, working alongside Ilya Sutskever – later a founder of OpenAI – and Geoffrey Hinton, a leading AI researcher. The network demonstrated an accuracy rate of 84.7% within the ImageNET academic challenge.

A Catalyst for Deep Learning and Autonomous Vehicles

This groundbreaking outcome reignited interest in deep learning, a specialized field within machine learning that utilizes neural networks.

Huang explained that AlexNet was instrumental in Nvidia’s decision to fully commit to the development of autonomous vehicles. He stated that witnessing AlexNet’s capabilities was a profoundly inspiring and exciting experience.

“It prompted us to dedicate ourselves to creating self-driving cars,” Huang announced. “Consequently, we have been engaged in self-driving car technology for over ten years, providing the technology utilized by nearly every company in this sector.”

Nvidia's Automotive Partnerships

Nvidia has established collaborations with a wide range of entities in the automotive industry, including automakers, suppliers, and technology companies focused on autonomous driving. An expanded partnership with GM was recently unveiled.

Companies such as Tesla and autonomous vehicle developers like Wayve and Waymo leverage Nvidia GPUs within their data centers. Furthermore, Nvidia’s Omniverse platform is utilized to construct “digital twins” of manufacturing facilities for virtual testing of production workflows and vehicle design.

Drive Orin and DriveOS Adoption

Several automakers, including Mercedes, Volvo, Toyota, and Zoox, have integrated Nvidia’s Drive Orin computer system-on-chip into their vehicles. This system is built upon Nvidia’s Ampere supercomputing architecture.

Toyota and other manufacturers are also implementing Nvidia’s DriveOS, a safety-oriented operating system.

Nvidia's Pervasive Influence

Ultimately, Nvidia’s technology is deeply integrated into the automotive industry, and specifically, the advancement of automated driving capabilities.