Nvidia evaluates $500M investment in UK self-driving AI startup Wayve (not Waymo)

Nvidia is evaluating a $500 million investment in Wayve, a UK-based developer of embodied artificial intelligence for autonomous vehicles. The potential investment underscores growing confidence in Wayve’s AV2.0 approach to self-driving technology, which learns to drive through experience rather than explicit programming, and could accelerate the development of production-ready autonomous driving solutions for automakers.

What you should know: Wayve has signed a letter of intent with Nvidia to evaluate the investment ahead of its next funding round, building on a collaboration that began in 2018.

• Nvidia previously participated in Wayve’s $1.05 billion Series C funding round in May 2024, which was led by SoftBank Group, a Japanese investment firm, with contributions from Microsoft.
• The companies aim to provide automakers with production-ready autonomous driving technology that combines Wayve’s foundation model with Nvidia’s automotive-grade accelerated computing platforms.
• Wayve’s next platform, Wayve Gen 3, will be built on Nvidia Drive AGX Thor.

How AV2.0 works: Wayve’s self-driving technology represents a departure from traditional autonomous vehicle approaches by learning to drive in any environment through experience rather than relying on explicit programming.

• The AV2.0 platform enables vehicles to quickly and safely adapt their driving intelligence to new, unseen environments without requiring expensive sensors and high-definition maps.
• This end-to-end deep learning approach allows the system to generalize across different driving scenarios and locations, much like how human drivers can adapt their skills from city driving to highway driving.

The bigger picture: The potential investment reflects Nvidia’s broader push into embodied intelligence applications beyond traditional AI workloads.

• Nvidia unveiled more than 70 research papers in May showing how AI can perform in real-world settings beyond text and images, advancing embodied intelligence across manufacturing, biotechnology, and transportation.
• The collaboration leverages Nvidia’s Drive Orin and Drive Thor platforms, with Drive Thor utilizing the new Nvidia Blackwell architecture designed for transformer, large language model, and generative AI workloads.

What they’re saying: Industry leaders express confidence in the technology’s potential to transform mobility.

• “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, Wayve’s co-founder and CEO.
• Rishi Dhall, vice president of automotive business at Nvidia, noted that “together, we can help enable self-driving vehicles that deliver the intelligence, dependability and skill of the best human drivers.”