Jensen Huang meets Mercedes, Hyundai chiefs as Nvidia launches Alpamayo AI for self-driving cars

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Jensen Huang meets Mercedes, Hyundai chiefs as Nvidia launches Alpamayo AI for self-driving cars

Published: 07 Jan. 2026, 12:27 Updated: 07 Jan. 2026, 17:27

SARAH CHEA
[email protected]

Audio report: written by reporters, read by AI

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, right, and Mercedes-Benz Chairman Ola Kallenius pose for a photo with the Mercedes CLA after the two hold a private meeting at the CES 2026 in Las Vegas on Jan. 6. [SARAH CHEA]

LAS VEGAS — Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang held private meetings with Mercedes-Benz Chairman Ola Kallenius and Hyundai Motor Group Executive Chair Euisun Chung at CES 2026 on Tuesday as the tech giant launched Alpamayo, its very first AI for self-driving cars.

Chung’s meeting with Huang came just a day after the surprise announcement, fueling speculation over whether Hyundai may adopt Alpamayo for its own autonomous driving cars.

Despite years of massive investments, Hyundai has yet to produce clear breakthroughs in autonomous driving and is often viewed as lagging behind competitors such as Tesla. The Korean automaker has yet to fully develop Level 2+ autonomous driving technology, a level Tesla has already reached. It has set a goal of deploying Level 2+ capabilities in mass-produced vehicles by the end of 2027.

Hyundai has already signaled closer cooperation with Nvidia, previously announcing plans to source 50,000 of Nvidia’s Blackwell graphics processing units (GPUs) as part of its self-driving and robotics development.

Mercedes-Benz, by contrast, has taken a more aggressive approach in the field and has become the first automaker to adopt Nvidia’s Alpamayo AI. The first Nvidia AI-powered self-driving vehicle will be Mercedes-Benz’s upcoming CLA, which is scheduled to hit U.S. roads in the first quarter, followed by Europe in the second quarter and Asia in the third quarter.

Hyundai Motor Group Executive Chair Euisun Chung, second from left, tours the Nvidia booth for the CES 2026 in Las Vegas on Jan. 6. [SARAH CHEA]

Alpamayo, a family of open-source AI models that serves as the world's first “thinking and reasoning” autonomous vehicle AI, will introduce vision-language-action, or VLA, models, enabling self-driving systems to interpret visual inputs, reason through complex driving situations and perform precise driving maneuvers. The platform will additionally include large reasoning models, simulation tools for testing rare or dangerous scenarios and open datasets to train AI programs and validate information.

“We open source to everyone, so if a customer would like to use our model that we train, they're welcome to do that,” Huang said during a question-and-answer session with the press and analysts Tuesday morning in Las Vegas.

“We just want to enable the world's autonomous industry. Everything that moves should be autonomous,” he said.

When asked about potential memory shortages, Huang said he is not concerned, as Nvidia is the “first and only consumer of HBM4,” referring to the high bandwidth memory technology.

“We’re not expecting anybody else to be using HBM4 for some time. So we have the benefit of being the primary and the only consumer of HBM4,” Huang said.

“Our demand is so high, every factory, every HBM supplier is gearing up and we're all doing great.”

Samsung Electronics and SK hynix are the two dominant HBM suppliers to Nvidia.

Major Korean shipbuilder HD Hyundai was highlighted as a key case study during an onstage conversation between Siemens CEO Roland Busch and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. The digitalization of HD Hyundai’s shipyards was achieved through the integration of Siemens’ digital twin technology with Nvidia’s Omniverse platform.

"This is quite a perfect example of the type of the work we do together," Huang said on the stage, referring to digital twin replicas of HD Hyundai ships. "This realization of the digital twin idea, that you would design every aspect of engineering, it’s not just the CAD, but the computing, the electronics, all of it would be integrated and built into a digital twin. It would of course run all of the software in the digital twin, and in the future, I hope the digital twin of the ship, we'll actually put it in the ocean, a virtual simulation of the ocean, and see it completely operate."

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang mentions HD Hyundai as an example to highlight technology cooperation between Siemens and Nvidia at the on-stage conversation held between the two CEOs, held a sideline event for CES 2026 in Las Vegas on Jan. 6. [HD HYUNDAI]

BY SARAH CHEA, LEE JAE-LIM [[email protected]]