How AlexNet Inspired Nvidia’s Decade-Long Journey into Autonomous Vehicles
At Nvidia’s GTC 2025 conference, CEO Jensen Huang revealed how the breakthrough AI model AlexNet sparked the company’s deep dive into self-driving car technology. Discover how Nvidia’s innovations, from Drive Orin to Omniverse, are powering the future of autonomous vehicles and shaping partnerships with industry giants like Tesla, GM, and Waymo. Explore the story behind Nvidia’s transformative impact on the automotive world.
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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang delivered a keynote at the company’s GTC 2025 conference, packed with announcements and a nod to history. During the automotive segment of his presentation, Huang highlighted AlexNet, a groundbreaking neural network architecture from 2012 that revolutionized deep learning. Developed by Alex Krizhevsky, Ilya Sutskever (later a co-founder of OpenAI), and Geoffrey Hinton, AlexNet achieved an impressive 84.7% accuracy in the ImageNet competition, sparking a resurgence in deep learning and neural network research.
Huang credited AlexNet as a pivotal moment for Nvidia, inspiring the company to fully commit to autonomous vehicle technology. “When I saw AlexNet, it was such an inspiring and exciting moment,” he said. “It motivated us to go all in on self-driving cars. We’ve been working on this for over a decade, and today, nearly every self-driving car company relies on our technology.”
Nvidia has since forged partnerships with major automakers, automotive suppliers, and tech companies in the autonomous vehicle space. The company recently announced an expanded collaboration with GM, adding to its growing list of alliances. Tesla, Waymo, and Wayve use Nvidia GPUs for their data centers, while others leverage Nvidia’s Omniverse platform to create “digital twins” of factories for virtual testing and vehicle design. Additionally, automakers like Mercedes, Volvo, Toyota, and Zoox have adopted Nvidia’s Drive Orin system-on-chip, built on the Nvidia Ampere architecture, and its safety-focused DriveOS.
In essence, Nvidia’s technology has become deeply embedded in the automotive industry, particularly in the development of automated driving systems. Its innovations continue to drive the industry forward, solidifying its role as a key player in the future of autonomous vehicles.