Nvidia signs largest car maker, Toyota, to use its self-driving chips

Chip giant Nvidia has inked a deal for Toyota, the world’s largest car manufacturer, to use the company’s autonomous driving chips and software in multiple different models of car, the company’s co-founder and CEO, Jensen Huang, announced during the opening keynote of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Monday.

“The AV revolution has arrived,” said Huang, meaning “autonomous vehicles.” 

“Today, Toyota and Nvidia are going to partner together to create their next-generation AVs.” Self-driving cars will be the “first trillion-dollar robotics market,” Huang predicted.

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Huang announced the Toyota deal as a highlight of the company’s unveiling of what it calls “Cosmos,” a set of AI technologies. Cosmos includes “state-of-the-art generative world foundation models,” AI models attuned to devices that have to move in the physical world, including robots and automobiles.

(An “AI model” is the part of an AI program that contains numerous neural net parameters and activation functions that are the key elements for how an AI program functions.)

Cosmos works in conjunction with Nvidia’s physics simulation tool, Omniverse. Omniverse generates simulations and Cosmos then turns that into photo-realistic video imagery to train robots and automobiles. “Take thousands of drives and turn them into billions of miles,” is how Huang characterized the interplay between Omniverse and Cosmos.

Huang called Cosmos “The world’s first world foundation model,” noting it is trained on 20 million hours of video. “It’s really about teaching the AI to understand the physical world.” 

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Huang compared the Cosmos project to Meta Platforms’s wildly popular Llama large language model, saying, “We really hope will do for the world of robotics and AI what Llama has done for enterprise AI.”

Cosmos with Omniverse can be used for such applications as to train a robot for a warehouse by having the robot perform hours of training in a simulation of the warehouse environment. 

The Cosmos code is available under an open-source license on GitHub, said Huang.

Nvidia has had a relationship with Toyota for several years now. The company’s DGX computers have been used by Toyota for training artificial intelligence models for self-driving vehicles. Monday’s announcement is an expansion of that relationship, said Nvidia’s head of automotive products, Ali Kani, in a briefing with reporters, where the car maker will also use the company’s “AGX” onboard AI computer. The latest version of that chip, Huang announced, is called the “Thor AGX.” It is twenty times more powerful than its predecessor Orin model. 

For robots, Huang proposed humans will perform demonstration of tasks while wearing Apple’s Vision Pro headset. The Vision Pro headset captures video of the person’s movements, and that is then sent to Cosmos and Omniverse and turned into hours of synthetic training data for the robot.

“The ChatGPT moment for robotics is just around the corner, said Huang.

Huang also unveiled additions to its suite of AI software. The updates include a group of AI models based on Meta Platforms’s Llama model, called Llama Nemotron. Huang told the audience that Llama is “the reason every organization has been activated to work on AI.” The Nvidia versions are meant to “fine-tune” Llama for enterprise use. 

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Huang also talked at length about the rising prominence of “agentic AI,” where large language models, or multi-modal AI models, can call upon outside programs to carry out tasks. 

“There’s this whole world of agentic AI, all these amazing new startups building frameworks like LangGraph, Llama Index, and Crew AI,” said Justin Boitano, president of enterprise AI software products at Nvidia, in a briefing we had. 

Those startups are “changing the programming model of how do you write applications: you write an AI, you give it a role, which is like a persona, you give it a goal, you can create it with just a prompt.” Nvidia works extensively with the startups, said Boitano.

Huang said that agentic Ai, combined with self-driving cars and robots, are “three types of robots we are working on.”

Other announcements in th keynote included GEFORCE “Blackwell,” the latest version of the company’s gaming GPU, which is slashed in price from its predecessor 4090 to $549 from $1,599, available starting this month, with laptop versions coming in March; and Project DIGITS, a compact personal computer optimized for AI development, running a new version of the Grace-Blackwell combined CPU and GPU chip, called GB10.