Asger Risom
Nvidia believes this shift could bring autonomous vehicles closer to everyday use on public roads.
At CES 2026 in Las Vegas, Nvidia laid out its latest vision for autonomous driving, arguing that the next leap forward will not come from more sensors alone, but from artificial intelligence that can reason through uncertainty. The company says its new platform is designed to tackle the rare, unpredictable scenarios that still trip up self-driving systems.
Nvidia believes this shift could bring autonomous vehicles closer to everyday use on public roads.
Beyond perception
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang used his CES keynote to introduce Alpamayo, a new AI platform built to add what the company calls “reasoning” to autonomous vehicles. Rather than simply reacting to inputs, the system is designed to analyse unusual situations, anticipate outcomes, and justify its decisions.
“Alpamayo brings reasoning capabilities to autonomous vehicles,” Huang said. “It allows them to analyse rare and unusual situations, navigate safely in complex environments, and explain their decisions.”
According to Nvidia, the model learns from human drivers and can communicate its intentions to passengers, including why it chooses a particular manoeuvre.
From demo to road
During the presentation, Nvidia showed video of an autonomous Mercedes-Benz driving through San Francisco traffic, with the passenger seated hands-free. Huang also revealed that production has begun on a Mercedes-Benz CLA model powered by the Alpamayo system.
The vehicle is expected to launch first in the United States, before rolling out to Europe and Asia. Huang said the collaboration has been a major test case for deploying AI in real-world robotic systems rather than controlled environments.
A strategic shift
Industry analysts see Alpamayo as further evidence of Nvidia’s transition from a chipmaker to a provider of full AI platforms for what it calls “physical AI”.
“This is a move that could keep Nvidia far ahead of the competition,” said Paolo Pescatore of PP Foresight. “Alpamayo marks a shift from pure computing power to AI ecosystems.”
Nvidia’s share price edged up slightly in after-hours trading following the announcement.
Open code, open questions
Nvidia has released Alpamayo as open source, publishing the code on Hugging Face so researchers and companies can download it, train it on their own data, and adapt it to their systems.
The announcement prompted a response from Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who argued that handling rare edge cases remains the central challenge. “It’s easy to get to 99%, but incredibly difficult to deal with the long tail of rare cases,” Musk wrote on social media.
Alongside Alpamayo, Nvidia also highlighted progress on its next-generation Rubin AI chips, which are already in production and promise lower energy consumption. For Nvidia, the message at CES was clear: the future of self-driving cars depends less on seeing the road, and more on understanding it.
Sources: Nvidia CES 2026 keynote
