Nvidia Wants to Take Tesla’s Self-Driving Business

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Jan 6, 9:15AM EST

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Nvidia Corp. (NASDAQ: NVDA) has launched its Alpamayo AI platform for autonomous vehicles.
It is more accessible to other car manufacturers than the Tesla Inc. (NASDAQ: TSLA) self-driving system is.

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Nvidia Wants to Take Tesla’s Self-Driving Business — © Tesla Model S Interior (CC BY-SA 4.0) by Peteratkins

Nvidia Corp. (NASDAQ: NVDA | NVDA Price Prediction) CEO Jensen Huang plans to jump into the self-driving car business with his “Alpamayo” AI platform. The world’s most valuable company commented at the launch of the system: “NVIDIA Alpamayo is an open portfolio of AI models, simulation frameworks, and physical AI datasets designed to accelerate the development of safe, transparent, and reasoning-based autonomous vehicles.”

Nvidia is already working with Mercedes to bring the technology to market. However, the way it is configured, it theoretically could work on cars from other manufacturers. The Tesla Inc. (NASDAQ: TSLA) Full Self-Driving (Supervised) system only works on its vehicles. This will also be true of its fully autonomous product, which Tesla is testing now.

Nvidia and Tesla have different goals, but that does not mean they will not collide. Tesla wants to sell vehicles. Nvidia wants to sell chips. When it comes to its self-driving car product, it wants to sell chips to car companies and other companies creating self-driving models. The New York Times pointed out that “This year, Mercedes-Benz will begin shipping cars equipped with Nvidia self-driving technology comparable to Tesla’s Autopilot.”

Tesla is getting flanked. Google’s Waymo appears to be ahead of Tesla in the self-driving business, at least as far as the number of cities where it is testing these vehicles. Companies like GM and Ford have their own products, although they may not be as sophisticated as those of Google or Nvidia. Still, the more competition, the harder it is to conquer a market.

Huang has proven one thing over and over. He will sell his chips no matter where it takes him, either geographically or in terms of competitors.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.