Nvidia, GM announce strategic business partnership

March 18 (UPI) — General Motors Corp. and Nvidia officials have agreed to a business partnership that will help GM more efficiently produce current and next-generation vehicles.

The business partnership provides GM with Nvidia artificial intelligence and other technologies while collaborating on next-generation vehicles, factories and robots that use AI, simulation and accelerated computers, GM and Nvidea officials announced Tuesday in a joint news release.

“AI not only optimizes modern manufacturing processes and accelerates virtual testing, but also helps us build smarter vehicles while empowering our workforce to focus on craftsmanship,” GM chair and Chief Executive Officer Mary Barra said.

“By merging technology with human ingenuity, we unlock new levels of innovation in vehicle manufacturing and beyond,” Barra said.

Nvidia founder and Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang said the tech firm will help GM build AI systems that are “tailored to their vision, craft and know-how.”

“The era of physical AI is here,” Huang said. “Together with GM, we’re transforming transportation, from vehicles to the factories where they’re made.”

GM will use Nvidia’s Omniverse, Blackwell and DriveOS technologies to train and improve manufacturing robotics platforms, build next-generation vehicles and develop and deploy autonomous vehicles.

The DriveOS technology delivers “up to 1,000 trillion operations per second of high-performance” computing using an in-vehicle computer that makes AVs safer for road use.

Nvidia officials also unveiled a new open physical AI dataset they say teaches “autonomous robots and vehicles how to interact with the physical world.”

“This dataset will grow over time to become the world’s largest unified an open dataset for physical AI development,” Nvidia officials said Tuesday in an online announcement.

Nvidia officials say the new dataset gives researchers and developers a “head start” on developing the “next generation of physical AI.”

“We can do a lot of things with this dataset, such as training predictive AI models that help autonomous vehicles better track the movements of vulnerable road users, like pedestrians, to improve safety,” said Henrik Christensen, the University of California-San Diego director of multiple robotics and autonomous vehicle labs.

“A dataset that provides a diverse set of environments and longer clips than existing open-source resources will be tremendously helpful to advance robotics and AV research,” Christensen said.

Nvidia officials unveiled the new technology and others during the global Nvidia GTC AI conference that runs through Friday in San Francisco.

GM officials did not say how much the automaker will pay Nvidia to use the new technological tools, CNBC reported.

GM has used Nvidia graphics processing units to train AI models in many areas of its manufacturing operations at least since 2022.