Nvidia-Boss Jensen Huang (62) has cars at the CES in Las Vegas artificial intelligence
promised to be able to analyze traffic situations and make decisions like a human behind the wheel. Between 2028 and 2030, Nvidia also wants to bring the technology into private vehicles.
Nvidia demonstrated the current state of the art together with Mercedes-Benz a few weeks before the technology fair. A production vehicle from the new Mercedes CLA model navigated through the traffic in San Francisco, observing right-of-way rules, traffic lights, traffic signs and pedestrians. On a route lasting around 45 minutes, the safety driver had to intervene in a few situations.
Cameras and laser radars
In the city, the software must, among other things, interpret whether people want to cross the street or are just standing on the sidewalk. The CLA records its surroundings with ten cameras and five radars.
With Robotaxi, Nvidia also wants to use laser radars that scan the area surrounding the vehicle. TeslaCEO Elon Musk is still alone with his plan to only use cameras for self-driving cars. Nvidia is betting on bringing its technology and software to vehicles from various manufacturers in the coming years.
As a leader in autonomous driving currently applies Google-Sister company Waymo, which operates 2,500 driverless robot cars in several US cities.
Uber and Lucid present Robotaxi
Other competition also presented itself at the technology trade fair in Las Vegas. The ride-hailing agent Uber showed Electric cars from Tesla challenger Lucid, which will be used as robotaxis near San Francisco later this year. The cars with a distinctive structure on the roof are controlled by software from the developer company Nuro. Self-driving vehicles without steering wheels and pedals from the Amazon subsidiary Zoox are already on the streets in Las Vegas.
Huang also used CES to announce the start of production of Nvidia’s next chip system, called Vera Rubin. According to the company, it is ten times more efficient than the previous generation Blackwell. In recent years, Nvidia chips have become a key technology for artificial intelligence applications.
The cloud provider CoreWeave is said to be one of the first buyers of the new “Vera Rubin” systems. Nvidia also expects Microsoft, Oracle, Amazon and Google to also use the technology.
AMD shows AI chips for cloud and small data centers
Nvidia’s rival AMD also presented a series of new products at CES. The new top product is the “MI455”. This will be used in AI data centers from partners such as the ChatGPT developer OpenAI. With the “MI440X”, AMD boss Lisa Su (56) is targeting a different customer group. This processor is designed for use in data centers that are not used exclusively for artificial intelligence (AI). It could serve as a supplement to company servers.
In Las Vegas, Su also provided an outlook on the next generation of AI chips, the “MI500”. This calculates 1000 times faster than previous models. This processor should come onto the market in 2027.