Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang delivered a keynote address on Tuesday at the company’s GTC 2025 conference, which featured a series of announcements and a brief historical overview. During the portion of his presentation focusing on automotive technology, Huang highlighted AlexNet, a neural network architecture that gained prominence in 2012 after winning a computer image recognition contest. AlexNet was created by computer scientist Alex Krizhevsky in collaboration with Ilya Sutskever, who later co-founded OpenAI, and AI researcher Geoffrey Hinton. The neural network achieved an accuracy rate of 84.7% in the ImageNET academic competition.
This significant achievement reignited interest in deep learning, a machine learning subset that utilizes neural networks. According to Huang, AlexNet was the catalyst for Nvidia’s firm commitment to autonomous vehicles. He recounted that upon encountering AlexNet, the technological potential and excitement inspired Nvidia to devote significant resources to developing self-driving cars. The company has been active in this field for over a decade and has developed technology used by nearly every self-driving car company.
Nvidia has forged partnerships with numerous automakers, automotive suppliers, and tech companies focused on autonomous vehicles. The latest announcement included an expanded collaboration with General Motors. Tesla, along with autonomous vehicle developers Wayve and Waymo, utilizes Nvidia GPUs for data centers. Other companies leverage Nvidia’s Omniverse product to create “digital twins” of factories for virtual testing of production processes and vehicle design. Additionally, companies such as Mercedes, Volvo, Toyota, and Zoox have adopted Nvidia’s Drive Orin computer system-on-chip, based on the Nvidia Ampere supercomputing architecture. Toyota and other companies are also using Nvidia’s safety-focused operating system, DriveOS.
The integration of Nvidia’s technology into the automotive industry, particularly in the realm of automated driving, is evident, highlighting the company’s significant contributions to the field.
