Nvidia Mulls Over Half-Billion-Dollar Investment in AI Firm Specializing in Autonomous Driving, Wayve
In a significant move for the autonomous driving industry, Nvidia and Wayve Technologies have announced plans to strengthen their partnership, with Nvidia negotiating a potential investment of $500 million in Wayve before its next funding round.
The collaboration, which began in 2018, aims to combine Wayve's foundation model with Nvidia's automotive-grade accelerated computing platforms. Nvidia's vice president of automotive business, Rishi Dhall, stated that Wayve's AV2.0 approach is built on Nvidia Drive Orin and Drive Thor, utilizing the new Nvidia Blackwell architecture designed for transformer, LLM, and generative AI workloads.
Wayve, described by Nvidia as "pioneering end-to-end deep learning for autonomous driving," unveiled its next-generation AV2.0 Platform in May. This platform allows vehicles to adapt driving intelligence to new, unseen environments without expensive sensors and high-definition maps.
The partnership between the two companies is expected to transform the future of mobility. Nvidia's goal is to advance embodied intelligence, or AI that can perceive, reason, and act in industries including manufacturing, biotechnology, and transportation, with the research papers they unveiled in May demonstrating AI performance in real-world settings beyond text and images.
In May 2024, Wayve's Series C funding round was led by SoftBank Group, with contributions from Nvidia and Microsoft. The specific details of the potential investment by Nvidia are yet to be disclosed. Wayve Co-founder and CEO Alex Kendall said that continued support from Nvidia underscores confidence in Wayve's AV2.0 approach.
The next Wayve platform, Wayve Gen 3, will be built on Nvidia Drive AGX Thor. Wayve's AV2.0 is a self-driving technology that learns to drive in any environment by experience, rather than explicit programming.
Stay tuned for more updates on this exciting partnership and the future of autonomous driving technology. For daily organization coverage, consider subscribing to The AI Newsletter.
