BYD & Other Chinese EV Makers Expand Ties With NVIDIA to Drive AI Development

BYD, the world’s largest electric vehicle maker, is expanding its ongoing collaboration with NVIDIA from the car to the cloud. The Chinese company plans to use NVIDIA’s AI infrastructure for cloud-based AI development and training technologies, along with the NVIDIA Isaac and NVIDIA Omniverse platforms to develop tools and applications for virtual factory planning and retail configurators.

The announcement was made at NVIDIA's  annual GTC conference in San Jose, California.

NVIDIA announced that leading companies across the transportation sector have adopted the NVIDIA DRIVE Thor centralised car computer to power their next-generation consumer and commercial fleets.

DRIVE Thor is an in-vehicle computing platform built for generative AI applications.

The system, the successor to DRIVE Orin, can deliver feature-rich cockpit capabilities, plus safe and secure highly automated and autonomous driving, all on a centralised platform.

Other Chinese companies, such as ZEEKR, Xpeng and Li Auto, have announced they’re building their future vehicle roadmap on DRIVE Thor.

Xinzhou Wu, vice president of automotive at NVIDIA., says: “Accelerated compute has led to transformative breakthroughs, including generative AI, which is redefining autonomy and the global transportation industry at large. DRIVE Orin continues to be the AI car computer of choice for today’s intelligent fleets, but now we’re seeing mobility leaders looking ahead to bring NVIDIA DRIVE Thor into their next-generation, AI-enabled vehicle roadmaps.”

Since its founding in 1993, NVIDIA has been a pioneer in accelerated computing.