Nvidia announces Alpamayo ‘reasoning’ AI platform for self-driving cars

Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang on Monday introduced Alpamayo, a new artificial intelligence platform designed to give self-driving cars human-like reasoning abilities, as the company deepens its push into autonomous and “physical AI” systems.

Speaking at the annual CES technology conference in Las Vegas, Huang said Alpamayo enables autonomous vehicles to reason through rare and complex driving scenarios, operate safely in challenging environments, and explain their driving decisions in real time.

“Alpamayo brings reasoning to autonomous vehicles,” Huang said. “It allows them to think through edge cases, drive naturally, and tell you what they’re about to do and why.”

Huang also revealed that Nvidia has begun producing a driverless version of the Mercedes-Benz CLA, developed in partnership with the German automaker. The vehicle is expected to launch in the United States in the coming months, followed by rollouts in Europe and Asia.

Wearing his trademark black leather jacket, Huang told the audience that the project has helped Nvidia gain deep insights into building robotic and autonomous systems for partners across industries.

Industry analysts said the announcement reinforces Nvidia’s growing role beyond chipmaking.

“Nvidia’s shift toward AI systems and platforms will keep it well ahead of rivals,” said Paolo Pescatore, an analyst at PP Foresight. “Alpamayo marks a move from pure compute to enabling full physical AI ecosystems.”

Following the presentation, Nvidia shares edged up slightly in after-hours trading.

Nvidia demonstrated the technology with a video showing an AI-powered Mercedes-Benz navigating the streets of San Francisco, while a passenger sat behind the wheel with hands off the controls. Huang said the system was trained directly on human driving behavior, allowing it to operate more naturally than rule-based systems.

Alpamayo is being released as an open-source AI model, with its code available on the machine-learning platform Hugging Face. Nvidia said researchers and automakers can freely access and retrain the model.

“Our vision is that someday every car and every truck will be autonomous,” Huang said.

The move could intensify competition with companies such as Tesla, which offers its own driver-assistance system, Autopilot. Responding on social media, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the hardest challenge remains solving rare, long-tail driving scenarios, calling it “super hard” to move beyond 99% reliability.

Like Tesla, Nvidia also plans to launch a robotaxi service next year with an unnamed partner, though it has not disclosed where the service will operate.

Nvidia is currently the world’s most valuable publicly traded company, with a market capitalisation exceeding $4.5 trillion (£3.3 trillion). While it briefly crossed the $5 trillion mark in October, its shares have since faced pressure amid concerns that demand for AI technology may be overhyped.