Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang delivered his usual stream of major announcements during his GTC 2025 keynote—but he also paused to share a little history. While discussing Nvidia’s growing role in the automotive industry, Huang reflected on the 2012 breakthrough moment that shifted the company’s trajectory toward self-driving cars : the rise of AlexNet, the neural network that revolutionized computer vision.
Back in 2012, Alex Krizhevsky, alongside Ilya Sutskever (who later co-founded OpenAI) and AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton, designed AlexNet. The model stunned the AI world by winning the ImageNet competition with an 84.7% accuracy rate, triggering a wave of renewed interest in deep learning and neural networks.
For Huang, AlexNet wasn’t just an academic success—it was a wake-up call.
“The moment I saw AlexNet — and we’d already been working on computer vision for years — it was incredibly inspiring,” Huang told the GTC audience. “That was the moment we decided to go all in on building self-driving car technology.”
Since then, Nvidia has spent more than a decade developing a range of AI-powered automotive solutions, becoming a core technology partner for much of the industry. “Today, nearly every major autonomous vehicle company uses Nvidia technology,” Huang added.
Nvidia’s presence spans nearly every corner of the autonomous vehicle ecosystem. Its powerful GPUs fuel data centers for companies like Tesla, Wayve, and Waymo, supporting the intense computing needs of AI training and simulation.
Meanwhile, major automakers and suppliers rely on Nvidia’s Omniverse platform to build digital twins of factories, enabling virtual testing of production processes and vehicle designs before hitting the assembly line.
Nvidia’s Drive Orin system-on-chip, based on its Ampere supercomputing architecture, has become a go-to hardware choice for autonomous driving systems. Automakers such as Mercedes, Volvo, Toyota, and Zoox have integrated Drive Orin into their vehicles to power advanced driver-assistance features and self-driving capabilities.
On the software side, Nvidia’s DriveOS, a safety-focused operating system, is also finding adoption—most notably with Toyota’s next-generation vehicles.
Further solidifying its role in the industry, Nvidia announced an expanded partnership with General Motors (GM) during the event. The collaboration covers everything from AI-powered factory simulations to next-gen driver assistance systems, reflecting just how deeply Nvidia’s technology is woven into the future of transportation.
A decade after that pivotal AlexNet moment, Nvidia’s DNA is now inseparable from the autonomous vehicle sector. Its technology powers the software, chips, and simulations behind self-driving cars, smart factories, and AI-assisted design—proving that a well-timed bet on deep learning reshaped Nvidia’s future and the automotive industry along with it.
