Volvo Cars Expands Collaboration with NVIDIA

Volvo EX90 uses NVIDIA’s DRIVE Orin system-on-a-chip for advanced driving assistance and safety features, and introduces generative AI-based capabilities and in-car experiences.

Sweden-Volvo Car AB, the luxury car manufacture has entered strategic partnership with NVIDIA for software-defined cars are a key part of this ambition, bringing next-generation safety, connectivity, data and software all together in one product.  The new Volvo EX90 is the first Volvo car to be truly software-defined – it’s built on centralized core compute architecture, made possible through our long-standing collaboration with NVIDIA.

The EX90’s industry-leading core computing system is powered by an NVIDIA DRIVE Orin system-on-a-chip (SoC) which is capable of over 250 trillions of operations per second (TOPS). This core compute system orchestrates everything in the car: from powering the deep learning capabilities underpinning our AI-based active safety and driving assistance systems; to helping introduce safe autonomous driving in the future and delivering best-in-class customer experience. 

To achieve the full potential of its software-defined car with centralized core compute architecture, Volvo is taking collaboration with NVIDIA to the next level. Later this decade, volvo introduce cars built on NVIDIA DRIVE Thor, which is capable of up to 1,000 TOPs. That’s four times as many operations per second as one DRIVE Orin SoC, while offering seven times greater energy efficiency.

Integrating DRIVE Thor will help further future-proof our next generation of cars. DRIVE Thor, which integrates the NVIDIA Blackwell GPU architecture, will enable us to deploy even more advanced driving assistance and safety features, develop autonomous driving, and introduce generative AI-based capabilities and in-car experiences.  

Mr.Jim Rowan, CEO of Volvo Cars, said, “With NVIDIA DRIVE Thor in our future cars, our in-house developed software becomes more scalable across our product line-up, which will help us to continue to improve the safety in our cars, deliver best-in-class customer experiences, reduce our costs, and increase our margins.”

To further explore the potential of AI, Volvo Cars, through its fully owned software company, Zenseact, is also using the NVIDIA DGX systems – an AI supercomputing platform optimized for large workloads – to help develop safe autonomous driving.

The DGX systems for AI model training will be used before deploying to our future fleets on the road. With the power of the NVIDIA DGX platform – utilizing its purpose-built AI infrastructure and optimized software stack – we can enhance the efficiency of training both current and future AI models.

Mr.Anders Bell, Chief Engineering & Technology Officer at Volvo Cars, said, “The NVIDIA DGX AI supercomputer will supercharge our AI training capabilities, making this in-house AI training data center one of the largest in the Nordics. By leveraging NVIDIA technology and setting up the data center, we can pave a quick path to high-performing AI, ultimately helping make our products safer and better.”