An AI model from over a decade ago sparked Nvidia’s investment in autonomous vehicles

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang delivered a keynote at the GTC 2025 conference that was packed with exciting announcements. But amidst all the new tech talk, he also took a moment to delve into a bit of history.

During the automotive segment of his speech, Huang brought up AlexNet, a neural network architecture that became famous back in 2012 after winning a computer image-recognition competition. AlexNet, designed by computer scientist Alex Krizhevsky along with Ilya Sutskever, who later co-founded OpenAI, and AI researcher Geoffrey Hinton, scored an impressive 84.7% accuracy in the ImageNET academic competition.

This achievement sparked a renewed interest in deep learning, a specialized area of machine learning that utilizes neural networks.

The Impact of AlexNet on Nvidia

Huang shared that seeing AlexNet was a pivotal moment for Nvidia. "The moment I saw AlexNet — and we’ve been working on computer vision for a long time — the moment I saw AlexNet was such an inspiring moment, such an exciting moment," he remarked during his speech. This revelation prompted Nvidia to fully commit to the development of self-driving cars. "It caused us to decide to go all in on building self-driving cars. So we’ve been working on self-driving cars now for over a decade. We build technology that almost every single self-driving car company uses."

Nvidia's Automotive Partnerships

Nvidia has since forged numerous partnerships with automakers, automotive suppliers, and tech companies focused on autonomous vehicles. The latest of these is an expanded collaboration with GM, announced just today.

Companies like Tesla, Wayve, and Waymo rely on Nvidia GPUs for their data centers. Others are using Nvidia’s Omniverse product to create "digital twins" of factories, allowing them to test production processes and design vehicles in a virtual environment. Meanwhile, automakers such as Mercedes, Volvo, Toyota, and Zoox are utilizing Nvidia’s Drive Orin system-on-chip, which is built on the Nvidia Ampere supercomputing architecture. Additionally, Toyota and others are implementing Nvidia’s safety-focused operating system, DriveOS.

Nvidia's Influence in the Automotive Industry

In essence, Nvidia's technology has become deeply integrated into the automotive sector, particularly in the realm of automated driving.