Volvo is expanding its automated driving ambitions through a broadened partnership with Nvidia, the two companies announced Thursday. The automaker will equip future vehicles with three pieces of Nvidia hardware and software intended to let cars handle both city streets and highways on their own. The arrangement extends a relationship between the two companies that stretches back nearly a decade.
The expanded deal combines Volvo's vehicle safety systems and engineering with Nvidia's Hyperion sensor and compute architecture, its Alpamayo driving software stack, and its Halos safety evaluation layer. Ali Kani, who leads Nvidia's automotive division, said the Alpamayo stack is built to be redundant and diverse. It pairs Alpamayo, a family of AI models, datasets, and simulation and development tools for building autonomous-driving software, with classical software that relies on machine learning and camera and radar perception.
Kani said the two stacks run simultaneously, and that Nvidia's approach includes multimodal sensors because that produces a safer product. He also said the open source Alpamayo software has been downloaded by more than 650,000 developers.
Volvo did not disclose the value of the partnership or identify which model will be first to carry the new Nvidia technology. Alwin Bakkenes, Volvo's head of software development, suggested the deal's scale and described how the automaker has shifted toward building a full technology stack for its electric vehicles along with its plug-in hybrids and gas-powered vehicles. He said automakers once developed along car lines and worked with various suppliers, and that Volvo has migrated away from that model.
Bakkenes said the partnership will begin with a brand new vehicle arriving in the not-too-near future. That first vehicle will debut within the decade, he said, and the technology can extend beyond that point. The push reflects Volvo's intent to bring the latest automated driving software to its entire lineup, not only its EVs.
Nvidia hardware is already familiar territory for Volvo. All of the automaker's battery-electric vehicles use Nvidia's Orin computer chip, which processes input from cameras, radar, and other sensors so a vehicle can interpret its surroundings and make driving decisions. Bakkenes said Volvo plans to standardize more on Hyperion in the future, including from a sensor set perspective, to open the stack further for the broader Nvidia partnership.
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