Self-Driving Cars UK Startup in Talks for $500M Investment From Nvidia

Fresh off announcing a surprising $5B investment in Intel, Nvidia is in talks to invest $500 million in Wayve, a London-based maker of autonomous driving systems.

On Sept. 18, Wayve and Nvidia representatives signed a letter of intent to evaluate the potential strategic investment. 

Why does Nvidia support Wayve?

Wayve develops AI software and foundation models in its autonomous driving systems. As a major provider of the GPUs that power advanced AI, Nvidia views autonomous driving as a potential growth sector. Wayve’s hardware-agnostic approach makes its AI-based products applicable across a broad range of OEMs. 

Founded in 2017, Wayve has drawn investment from high-profile backers, including SoftBank and Microsoft. In May 2024, Nvidia joined investors in a $1.05 billion Series C funding led by SoftBank.

“Wayve is pioneering new AI applications for their next-generation AV2.0 approach, built on Nvidia DRIVE Orin and DRIVE Thor, which uses the new Nvidia Blackwell architecture designed for transformer, LLM, and Generative AI workloads,” said Rishi Dhall, vice president of automotive business at Nvidia, in a May press release. “Together, we can help enable self-driving vehicles that deliver the intelligence, dependability, and skill of the best human drivers.”

AV2.0 is Wayve’s initiative for autonomous driving based on “end-to-end AI” — a singular neural network that manages all of the car’s sensors, movement, and safety considerations. As of June, Wayve had partnered with Uber in the UK to trial autonomous rides. 

The current investment aligns with Nvidia’s broader plan to invest £2 billion ($2.7B) in UK startups.  

Nvidia technology enables many of Wayve’s products 

Nvidia products are core to many of Wayve’s capabilities: 

• The Wayve Gen 3 platform: The upcoming platform that will allow “eyes-free” driving will be built on Nvidia DRIVE AGX Thor.
• Thor: The chip is based on Blackwell GPUs and the Nvidia DriveOS.
• DriveOS: The operating system includes the Nvidia Halos safety system.

Wayve intends to increase the capabilities of its systems, targeting eyes-free (Level 3) and fully driverless (Level 4) operations on city streets and highways. 

“Continued support from a global technology leader like Nvidia underscores confidence in our AV2.0 approach to building embodied AI and its potential to transform the future of mobility,” said Alex Kendall, co-founder and chief executive officer of Wayve, in a Sept 18 press release. 

Security researchers discovered an attack vector known as OneFlip that could be used to hijack AI-driven vehicles.