Industry officials said the expanded cooperation follows a recent meeting between Hyundai Motor Chairman Chung Euisun and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, and now extends to autonomous driving, a key future growth area for automakers.
According to the industry on March 17, the two sides began jointly developing next-generation autonomous driving solutions on March 16 (local time), combining Hyundai Motor and Kia’s in-house software-defined vehicle, or SDV, capabilities with Nvidia’s autonomous driving technology.
Hyundai Motor and Kia, which are developing SDVs based on their quality and safety philosophy, plan to apply some of Nvidia’s Level 2-plus autonomous driving technology first to select models.
Hyundai Motor said it will use Nvidia’s autonomous driving integrated architecture, “Drive Hyperion,” to build its own solution that can scale from Level 2 to Level 4.
Nvidia Hyperion is a reference architecture that bundles hardware essential for autonomous driving, including high-performance central processing units, graphics processing units, sensors and cameras. It is designed to integrate platforms across vehicle models.
Hyundai Motor plans to make active use of Nvidia’s broad data and AI technologies, while integrating data gathered across the group into a single training pipeline.
Hyundai Motor Group said adopting Hyperion will help it build a virtuous data cycle spanning data collection — including video, language and behavior — AI training and performance improvements, deployment in real vehicles, and upgrades in data quality.
The group also said it will step up wide-ranging talks centered on its U.S.-based autonomous driving joint venture, Motional, to advance Level 4 robotaxi technology, while strengthening competitiveness in technology and services.
The company said combining a standardized architecture with Hyundai Motor Group’s accumulated experience as a global top-three automaker would enable it to develop an optimized SDV architecture in-house.
Over the longer term, the group expects its autonomous driving competitiveness to improve as high-performance AI collects, learns from and structures high-quality real-world road data on its own.
The cooperation is also tied to the Chung-Huang meeting, the company said. Hyundai Motor plans to allocate some of the 50,000 Blackwell GPUs it is set to receive from Nvidia to Saemangeum in North Jeolla Province for use in developing autonomous vehicles and an AI data center.
Kim Heung-soo, vice president in charge of Hyundai Motor Group’s global strategy organization, said, “Expanding the partnership with Nvidia will be an important momentum for realizing the safe and reliable autonomous driving technology Hyundai Motor Group is pursuing.” He added, “Based on a one-team collaboration system across the group, we will secure differentiated technological competitiveness from Level 2-plus autonomous driving technology to Level 4 robotaxi services.”
Rishi Dhall, vice president of Nvidia’s automotive division, said, “By combining Hyundai Motor Group’s vehicle engineering capabilities with Nvidia’s computing and AI technology, we are building safe and intelligent autonomous driving systems.” He added, “We will continue collaboration between the two companies from Level 2-plus advanced driver assistance features to robotaxis.”
* This article has been translated by AI.
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