Nvidia invests in autonomous vehicles after AlexNet's success

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang spoke at the GTC 2025 conference on Tuesday, sharing significant updates and a bit of company history. He highlighted an important moment from 2012 when a neural network called AlexNet gained attention by winning a major competition in computer image recognition. AlexNet was created by Alex Krizhevsky, Ilya Sutskever, and Geoffrey Hinton. This breakthrough led to a renewed interest in deep learning, which uses neural networks for complex tasks. Huang explained that seeing AlexNet inspired Nvidia to fully invest in self-driving cars. Since then, Nvidia has been deeply involved in developing technology for autonomous vehicles. Huang noted that their influence can be seen in almost every self-driving car company. Nvidia has formed partnerships with many automakers and tech firms. Recently, Nvidia announced an expanded collaboration with General Motors. Companies like Tesla and Waymo use Nvidia's powerful GPUs for their data processing needs. Additionally, many automakers utilize Nvidia's Drive Orin chips and the safety-focused DriveOS operating system in their vehicles. In summary, Nvidia's technology is a key part of the automotive industry, especially in the realm of automated driving.