NVIDIA’s Autonomy Ambitions Become Clearer as Waymo and Uber Head for Divorce

This week on Autonomy Markets, Grayson Brulte and Walter Piecyk discuss NVIDIA’s ever expanding autonomy ambitions and the fracturing relationship between Waymo and Uber, which may signal the end of one of the industry’s most-watched partnerships.

Jensen Huang’s latest GTC announcements further signaled that NVIDIA is moving beyond supplying compute to potentially building their own full autonomy stack and licensing it. Grayson and Walt trace this shift back to the early days NVIDIA’s automotive division and the evolution of its Hyperion platform, which is now positioned not only to power OEMs but also to compete directly with the very companies that rely on its GPUs to enable autonomous driving systems.

While NVIDIA appears poised to compete with its customers, Waymo and Uber’s partnership is showing signs of unraveling after Uber announced plans to deploy Lucid/Nuro autonomous vehicles in San Francisco next year, directly challenging Waymo on in their home market.

Grayson likens the move to “divorce court,” raising questions about how the companies will divide the Austin and Atlanta markets, where Waymo currently operates exclusively on Uber’s platform. The episode closes with updates on Aurora’s strategic pivot and the Foreign Autonomy Desk, covering Baidu’s expansion in Hong Kong, Uber’s European ambitions, and continued progress in Tesla’s FSD rollout.

Read the Full Episode Transcript

Episode Chapters

• 0:00 NVIDIA’s Autonomy Ambitions
• 7:13 Waymo & Uber’s Fracturing Relationship
• 9:35 Nuro’s Upcoming Launch on Uber in San Francisco
• 11:51 Gemini is Coming to Waymo
• 14:05 Boston’s Autonomous Vehicle Blunder
• 15:43 Seattle’s Challenging Political Environment
• 17:34 Political Coalitions
• 19:36 Aurora’s Pivot
• 25:32 Tesla Robotaxi / FSD 14 Updates
• 30:04 Foreign Autonomy Desk
• 33:08 Next Week

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