Hyundai Motor Co. (005380) and Kia Corp. (000270) are expanding strategic collaboration with Nvidia in future mobility sectors including autonomous driving and software-defined vehicles (SDV).
The companies announced on the 16th that they will begin joint development of next-generation autonomous driving solutions by combining Hyundai and Kia's in-house SDV capabilities with Nvidia's autonomous driving technology.
Hyundai and Kia will apply Nvidia's Level 2 and above autonomous driving technology to select vehicle models first. Over the medium to long term, they plan to establish an autonomous driving cooperation framework extending to Level 4 robotaxis. Full-scale discussions for advancing Level 4 robotaxi technology will center on Motional, the U.S.-based autonomous driving joint venture.
The expanded collaboration with Nvidia represents a strategic decision at the Hyundai Motor Group level to accelerate the internalization of autonomous driving technology. Hyundai Motor Group will adopt "Nvidia Drive Hyperion" to build a new integrated architecture scalable from autonomous driving Level 2 to Level 4.
Hyperion is a reference architecture that bundles essential autonomous driving hardware including high-performance central processing units (CPUs), graphics processing units (GPUs), sensors, and cameras. With the adoption of Hyperion, Hyundai Motor Group plans to develop its own optimized SDV architecture and establish a virtuous data cycle encompassing data collection across video, language, and behavior, AI training and performance improvement, real vehicle application, and data quality enhancement.
Additionally, the group will actively leverage Nvidia's extensive data and AI technology to integrate data obtained across the group into a single learning pipeline. The goal is to enhance autonomous driving competitiveness through a processing structure that enables high-performance AI to autonomously collect, learn, and structure road data.
"The expanded partnership with Nvidia will be an important momentum for realizing the 'safe and reliable' autonomous driving technology that Hyundai Motor Group pursues," said Kim Heung-soo, Head of Global Strategy Organization (GSO) at Hyundai Motor Group. Rishi Dhall, Vice President of Automotive at Nvidia, said, "We will continue collaboration from advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) at Level 2 and above to robotaxis."