Nvidia Adds BYD, Hyundai, Nissan, and Geely to Autonomous Vehicle Platform
Four new automaker partnerships announced at GTC 2026 bring Nvidia's Drive Hyperion autonomous vehicle development platform to some of the world's largest car manufacturers.
Nvidia on Monday announced new partnerships with BYD, Hyundai Motor, Nissan, Geely, and Isuzu for its Drive Hyperion autonomous vehicle development platform, significantly expanding the global automaker roster building self-driving systems on Nvidia's infrastructure. The announcements came during CEO Jensen Huang's GTC 2026 keynote in San Jose and follow existing deals with General Motors, Mercedes-Benz, Toyota, and others.
Drive Hyperion is Nvidia's end-to-end autonomous vehicle platform that spans data center training, large-scale simulation in the Nvidia Omniverse environment, and in-vehicle inference computing. The platform targets Level 4 autonomy — vehicles that can operate without any human oversight within designated conditions or geographic areas.
Huang told the GTC audience that he believes the pivotal moment for autonomous vehicles has arrived, citing the combination of maturing AI software capabilities and growing hardware infrastructure as enabling factors.
BYD, the world's largest electric vehicle manufacturer by sales volume, is among the most consequential additions. The partnership signals that China's dominant EV maker intends to integrate Nvidia's compute infrastructure into its next generation of autonomous and semi-autonomous vehicles.
Hyundai Motor and Kia will use Drive Hyperion across their next-generation autonomous driving program in an expanded strategic partnership that builds on prior collaboration. Isuzu, working with Japanese autonomous driving startup Tier IV, is applying Nvidia's AGX Thor robotic system chip to develop autonomous buses.
Nvidia's growing web of automaker agreements positions it as the preferred compute supplier for the autonomous vehicle industry globally. The company does not manufacture or sell vehicles itself, but rather provides the chips, software, simulation tools, and reference architectures that allow automakers and their AV software partners to develop, test, and deploy self-driving systems at scale.
Together, Nvidia's confirmed automotive partners now account for roughly 20 percent of annual global vehicle production, according to figures cited by Huang during the keynote.
Read the original reporting at CNBC.
