The rapid increase in AI is not limited to online services or products, as it is also playing a pivotal role in the development of self-driving technology. A recent example of this is the partnership announced at CES 2025 between Uber and Nvidia. Under this collaboration, the ride-hailing giant will use Nvidia’s cutting-edge Cosmos tool for generative world model simulation, as well as the DGX Cloud platform, which provides cloud-based AI supercomputing capabilities.
Interestingly, announced at CES 2025 itself, Nvidia’s Cosmos platform is specifically developed for physical AI applications like autonomous vehicles and robotics. Cosmos features generative world foundation models (WFMs), advanced tokenizers, and other data processing tools, including accelerated video processing capabilities. By eliminating cost and resource barriers, the platform offers democratized access to tools for developing physical AI.
In addition, Nvidia DGX Cloud is a high-performance, fully managed AI platform preconfigured with the latest NVIDIA architecture and software. It provides cutting-edge AI infrastructure for training, fine-tuning and deploying autonomous driving models.
“Generative AI will power the future of mobility, requiring both rich data and very powerful compute. By working with NVIDIA, we are confident that we can help supercharge the timeline for safe and scalable autonomous driving solutions for the industry,” said Dara Khosrowshahi, Chief Executive of Uber in a press release.
After selling its autonomous vehicle division to Aurora Innovation in late 2020, Uber has positioned itself as a partner for autonomous vehicle (AV) developers. Through this new partnership with Nvidia, Uber now aims to help its AV partners in developing more powerful AI models. For this, Uber is planning to combine its vast trip data with the NVIDIA Cosmos platform and NVIDIA DGX Cloud platforms.
Currently, the list of Uber’s autonomous vehicle partners includes some prominent names from the industry like Alphabet-owned Waymo, Aurora Innovation, and Serve Robotics. In fact, Uber is already offering Waymo vehicles in Phoenix. The company is now planning to expand this to Austin and Atlanta as well. The company also recently introduced robotaxis on its app in Abu Dhabi, partnering with the China-based company WeRide.
The importance of these efforts grows as the global autonomous vehicle market is expected to reach $13,632.4 billion by 2030. In the meantime, Uber Technologies’ shares increased by 3.5% in premarket trading on Tuesday following the Nvidia partnership announcement.
