Nvidia (NVDA) announced on Monday that Uber (UBER) will begin rolling out a fleet of Level 4 autonomous vehicles in Los Angeles and San Francisco in 2027 as part of both companies’ broader self-driving efforts.
The firms previously announced their intent to deploy 100,000 vehicles running on Nvidia’s Drive Hyperion self-driving platform during Nvidia’s GTC event in Washington, D.C., in October.
But the latest news, unveiled at GTC in San Jose, Calif., provides a timeline for when and where vehicles will eventually hit the road.
According to Nvidia, the service will eventually move beyond California to include 28 cities across four continents.
In addition to Uber, Nvidia said Lyft (LYFT), Estonia-based Bolt, and Singapore’s Grab are also using its systems to power their own self-driving capabilities.
Nvidia’s Hyperion is a reference production computer and collection of sensors designed to enable Level 4 autonomy. Autonomous vehicles are measured in levels ranging from 0, which amounts to a standard car, to Level 5 for fully self-driving cars.
Level 4 cars can operate on their own in certain settings, but drivers can still take over.
In addition to the Uber announcement, Nvidia said it is releasing the latest version of its Alpamayo self-driving AI models.
Alpamayo 1.5, the company explained, adds an “interactive, steerable reasoning model to the mix, that “takes driving video, ego-motion history, navigation guidance and natural language prompts as inputs. Then, it outputs driving trajectories with reasoning traces.”
All of that is to say developers will be able to create specific driving scenarios using language prompts to help teach their driving systems how to respond to various unique driving situations.
“The autonomous vehicle revolution is here — the first multitrillion-dollar robotics industry,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in a statement.
“Everything that moves will eventually be autonomous,” he said. “The Nvidia Hyperion platform and our Alpamayo open reasoning models give vehicles the ability to perceive their surroundings, reason through complex situations and act safely — making scalable, level 4 autonomy possible.”
Nvidia and Uber aren’t the only companies angling to capture the self-driving vehicle market.
In November, Google-backed (GOOG, GOOGL) Waymo announced that it can take drivers down freeways around San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Phoenix, and last month said it will begin offering rides in Dallas, Orlando, Houston, and San Antonio. The company is also expanding to London this year.
Last week, Amazon-backed (AMZN) Zoox said it is expanding to Phoenix and Dallas, bringing its total to 10 cities. It currently offers free rides in parts of San Francisco and Las Vegas.