Uber And VW Are NVidia’s Next Self-Driving Customers

NVidia has been trying to carve a place for itself in the budding self-driving industry and it seems it just snagged two major customers for the technology it is developing. These customers are Uber and VW, and with the former currently stalled in creating its own autonomous fleet, it makes sense to turn to another company that can make its dreams a reality.

Uber has been trying to create a fleet of self-driving cabs for years, but its momentum was hindered by Waymo, which it is currently in a legal battle with. Now, it seems the cab-hailing giant is at least trying to move forward by choosing NVidia’s chips to power its autonomous vehicles in the future, CNET reports.

As of now, there is still no clear picture of when the world will start seeing proper driverless Ubers picking up customers all over the country. However, during the 2018 Consumer Electronics Show, the company, alongside NVidia announced its partnership.

Apparently, Uber has already been using NVidia’s chips on some of its vehicles, including the pickup trucks that the company already has on the roads. Much of the fuss surrounding these chips is the neural networks that they are involved in, which is responsible for gathering and processing data.

This is incredibly important for self-driving technology since data is what allows the artificial intelligence in the vehicles to actually drive the cars. Without enough data to base its processes on, computers won’t be able to do the simplest driving activities. NVidia’s Drive PX platform is perfect for this kind of work.

Along with Uber, Volkswagen also announced that it would be using the same platform as Uber, The Verge reports. Among the earliest vehicles to have the platform installed will apparently be the I.D. Buzz electric minibus that VW introduced a while back.