Nvidia (NVDA) Stock Rises As BYD, Nissan and Hyundai Sign On to Robotaxi Platform

TLDR

• Nvidia announced new autonomous vehicle partnerships with BYD, Geely, Hyundai, Nissan, and Isuzu at its GTC conference
• All new partners will build on Nvidia’s DRIVE Hyperion platform, targeting Level 4 autonomy
• Nvidia and Uber expanded their deal to launch robotaxi fleets across 28 cities and four continents by 2028
• The rollout starts in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area in the first half of 2027
• Nvidia also unveiled Alpamayo 1.5, an upgraded open AI model for autonomous driving, already downloaded by over 100,000 developers

Nvidia’s GTC conference on Monday delivered a string of new autonomous vehicle deals, putting the chipmaker deeper into the self-driving industry. CEO Jensen Huang used the stage in San Jose to announce BYD, Geely, Hyundai, Nissan, and Isuzu as new partners for its DRIVE Hyperion platform.

DRIVE Hyperion is Nvidia’s end-to-end AV platform. It bundles data center training, large-scale simulation, and in-vehicle computing into a single reference architecture that automakers can use to build Level 4-capable vehicles — cars that can drive themselves without human input in defined conditions.

The Uber partnership drew particular attention. Nvidia and Uber announced an expanded deal to deploy a fleet of fully autonomous vehicles across 28 cities and four continents by 2028. The rollout begins in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area in the first half of 2027.

NVIDIA Corporation, NVDA

That fleet will run on Nvidia’s full AV software stack, including the DRIVE Hyperion compute architecture and the newly announced Halos OS safety system.

Bolt, Grab, and Lyft also joined the list of mobility providers building on DRIVE Hyperion, broadening the reach of Nvidia’s AV platform beyond just automakers.

Alpamayo 1.5 Raises the Bar for AV AI

Nvidia also rolled out Alpamayo 1.5 on Monday, a major update to its open portfolio of AI models for autonomous driving. The new version takes driving video, motion history, navigation guidance, and natural language prompts as inputs, then outputs driving trajectories with reasoning traces.

Put simply, developers can now tell the car what to do and how to behave using text prompts. That’s a step up from earlier systems where adjusting driving behavior required retraining the model.

The original Alpamayo model has already been downloaded by more than 100,000 automotive developers since its launch earlier this year. The 1.5 upgrade adds flexible multi-camera support and configurable camera parameters, making it easier to reuse the same AI stack across different vehicle lines.

New Safety Architecture and Simulation Tools

Alongside the new partners and model update, Nvidia introduced NVIDIA Halos OS — a unified safety architecture built on ASIL D-certified foundations. It is designed to give AV developers a production-ready safety layer for Level 4 vehicles.

Ten companies, including AEye, Hesai, Valeo, and Flex, joined the Nvidia Halos AI Systems Inspection Lab, which is set up to test and validate AV safety systems.

Nvidia also made NVIDIA Omniverse NuRec generally available. NuRec uses 3D Gaussian Splatting to reconstruct real-world environments for simulation, letting developers stress-test AV behavior without building test tracks from scratch.

Isuzu and TIER IV are using DRIVE Hyperion to develop Level 4 autonomous buses. Nissan’s L4 program is being built with Wayve software running on the platform.

Nvidia stock was up 0.26% in after-hours trading on Monday, adding to gains from the regular session.

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