Nvidia's autonomous car business is rising. Here's how it could make every car self-driving.

• Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang used CES 2025 as an opportunity to highlight autonomous vehicle tech.
• Nvidia's Orin chips will power Toyota's driver-assist features, in a new partnership.
• The chip designer offers a "shot in the arm" for a floundering industry.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says true self-driving cars require three advanced computers.

There's a computer to train the models to understand the world, the computer running simulations that allow these models to practice encountering important but unlikely scenarios, and a computer inside the car itself.

Nvidia has strategically embedded itself in all three key steps that could make every car a self-driving car.

While segment leaders like Waymo and Tesla launch robotaxi fleets and enable drivers to scroll on X while their cars drive them to work, Nvidia approaches the market as an enabler — not a consumer brand.

The chip-design company is building upon a suite of functionalities that already power your car's advanced driver-assist systems, such as automatic lane keeping and adaptive cruise control.

With its long list of heavy-hitting automotive clients, including Toyota, Uber, and Hyundai among others, Nvidia is positioning itself to be the self-driving tech supplier to the automotive industry. To Huang, all these players are headed in the same direction.

"Every single car company will have to be autonomous, or you're not going to be a car company," Huang said at a fireside chat for financial analysts at this year's Consumer Electronic Show.

Huang made autonomous vehicle technology a centerpiece of his CES keynote speech, announcing confidently that self-driving cars aren't coming — they're already here.

"With Waymo's success and Tesla's success, it is very, very clear autonomous vehicles have finally arrived," said Huang onstage.

Self-driving stops and starts

Despite the recent preponderance of driverless Waymo rides, self-driving technology has been in limbo across the auto industry as carmakers cut costs and focus investments on more near-term technology like electric vehicles.

Many traditional carmakers are rethinking expensive autonomous technology development after decades of piecemeal progress and no clear path to profitability — ceding ground to tech-first players.

Who will win the chip war that lives inside the dashboards of most cars remains an open question. But after CES, analysts are much closer to calling the race.

Today's cars are chock-full of chips. Most are far less complicated than the kind needed to offload driving tasks to the computer. Nvidia's competition includes other automotive chip giants like Qualcomm and Israel's Mobileye, which develops microchips and other technologies for the automotive industry.

As AI converges with increased adoption of self-driving technology, Nvidia now appears to be taking the lead, according to Martin French, managing director at automotive consultancy Berylls.

Toyota, the world's largest automaker, will use Nvidia's Orin chips and automotive operating system to power its next generation of driver-assist features, Huang announced.

Orin is Nvidia's solution for putting the computing power and intelligence of AI inside a car. The system debuted in 2019 and has developed into a more all-encompassing solution over time.

Mercedez Benz, China's BYD, and many luxury EV makers have also adopted Orin.

Most of these are not fully self-driving, but the long road between cruise control and realizing the dream of sleeping in the back seat while a car drives itself will have many stops along the way.

Winning Toyota's business is a big deal. McKinsey estimates that the assisted and autonomous driving market could be worth $400 billion by 2035. Nvidia forecasts a $5 billion run rate for its automotive business in fiscal year 2025, a five-fold increase in the company's automotive business from 2023.

Nvidia is also joining forces with trucking startup Aurora Innovation and automotive supplier Continental to deploy self-driving trucks — an announcement that sent Aurora's stock soaring 35% last week.

Beyond the data center

Tesla's self-driving technology, which Huang frequently lauds, is trained on Nvidia GPUs. However, the chips that make Tesla's full-self-driving run are designed in-house and manufactured by Samsung.

As far back as 2019, Tesla and Nvidia shared an understanding of the importance of accelerated computing. But they've been on-and-off partners. Today the partnership is very much on, with Huang and Musk regularly trading praise.

Cementing relationships with Toyota, Tesla, and Aurora puts Nvidia in a good position to be the primary supplier of self-driving technology to the automotive industry.

Few companies can provide chips for cars and also the chips to train the AI needed for self-driving capabilities.

Despite a two-hour CES keynote presentation spanning humanoid robots to AI laptops, Philips Capital analysts called Nvidia's automotive offering the "most significant" revelation at the tentpole event. Averaging less than 2% of total revenue in the first three quarters of 2024, Nvidia's automotive business still pales in comparison to its data center business.

On the company's February 2024 earnings call, CFO Colette Kress said $1 billion of the firm's data center revenue, which is reported separately from the automotive chip business, was attributable to automotive customers.

"They are absolutely positioning themselves as the leader for autonomous technologies, period," French said.

'A shot in the arm' for self-driving

In recent years, major car companies have abandoned their expensive self-driving car projects to focus on electric vehicles.

Ford and Volkswagen pulled funding from now-defunct self-driving startup ArgoAI in 2022, while GM said at the end of 2024 it would end its Cruise division's robotaxi development.

"We've had a lot of bad news around self-driving tech in the past few years — it's been quite downbeat," said French. "Nvidia has reversed that and just gave autonomous driving an absolute shot in the arm."

Investors were growing impatient with the drag on car companies' profits and lacked faith in legacy automakers' ability to develop software, French said. What it took to get investors back on board with self-driving tech was to hear it from a tech company.

"For Jensen — one of the leading people in tech — to get up onstage and tell everyone autonomous driving is here and robotics are just around the corner holds a lot of weight with investors," French said.

Huang is well-known for having an appetite for market-making — frequently saying he looks for "zero-billion-dollar markets" to simultaneously create and conquer. The AV market could still yet be won by one company, according to French.

In a complex regulatory environment, the automotive industry often strives to find a single standard to follow on new tech. That usually creates a period of stiff competition as companies vie to develop the winning technology.

Take electric vehicle charging, for example.

For years, the industry couldn't agree on a single charger type, leading to mismatched plugs and ports for EV drivers searching for juice. But in 2023, the industry finally coalesced around the North American Charging Standard chargers used by Tesla.

Since AI has closed the technological space between self-driving cars and robotics the entire auto industry is about to find out what it's like to be part of Nvidia's next zero-billion dollar market.