NVIDIA Charts Course for Autonomous Future at CES, Announces Key Partnerships

At CES 2026, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang outlined the company's accelerating push into autonomous systems, announcing a new open-source AI model family and confirming a major automotive partnership. The keynote served as a focused update on NVIDIA's strategic direction rather than a showcase of unexpected new products.

The primary announcement was Alpamayo, a series of open-source reasoning models engineered for self-driving vehicles. The flagship, Alpamayo 1, is a 10-billion parameter system designed to process complex driving scenarios with a human-like chain of thought. It deconstructs unexpected situations into smaller problems, determines the safest action, and can explain its rationale at each step. A companion model, AlpaSim, is intended for simulating rare driving events for training. Huang confirmed the 2025 Mercedes-Benz CLA will be the first car equipped with NVIDIA's full autonomous driving stack, including Alpamayo. "Our vision is that someday, every single car, every single truck, will be autonomous," Huang stated.

Huang also provided a production update on the Vera Rubin GPU architecture, first revealed in 2024. The company has begun building supercomputers utilizing the technology. Each system pairs a Vera CPU, with 88 custom cores, and a Rubin GPU, together comprising over half a trillion transistors.

Noticeably absent were any announcements regarding consumer graphics cards for PC gaming, leaving that segment's updates for possible later CES events. The presentation reinforced NVIDIA's continued pivot toward AI and industrial computing as its central business pillars.

Source: Engadget