nvidia

Nvidia (NVDA) held its CES 2026 keynote today, and as expected, Jensen Huang dropped a massive amount of news on the autonomous driving front. The biggest takeaway? Nvidia is moving beyond just “perceiving” the road to “reasoning” about it with a new family of open-source models called Alpamayo, which will power new autonomous and driver-assistance features.

Starting with Mercedes-Benz as soon as this quarter.

The race for autonomous driving has three fronts: software, hardware, and regulatory. For years, we’ve watched Tesla try to brute-force its way to “Full Self-Driving (FSD)” with its own custom hardware, while the rest of the automotive industry is increasingly lining up behind NVIDIA.

Now that we know Tesla’s new AI5 chip is delayed and won’t be in vehicles until 2027, it’s worth comparing the two most dominant “self-driving” chips today: Tesla’s latest Hardware 4 (AI4) and NVIDIA’s Drive Thor.