Nvidia adds BYD, Geely, Lyft to robotaxi platform
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- Nvidia added BYD, Geely, Nissan, and Isuzu to its robotaxi program at GTC, with BYD and Geely committing to use its Drive Hyperion platform to develop Level 4 autonomous vehicles.
- Geely is deploying Nvidia's Thor chips in its Zeekr vehicles, and Geely also supplies Zeekr cars to Waymo's US robotaxi service — which runs on Nvidia products both inside the vehicle and in the cloud, per VP Ali Kani.
- Nvidia's automotive division generated just $592 million in Q3 2025, roughly 1.2% of its $51.2 billion total quarterly revenue, underscoring how small the unit still is relative to its data-center business.
- Lyft will build robotaxis on Nvidia's Hyperion platform, while a beefed-up Nvidia-Uber partnership now spans 28 markets across four continents targeting 100,000 vehicles by 2027.
- Nvidia unveiled Halos OS, which Kani described as a "safety guardrail" for Level 4 partners that "will intervene" when AI driving models are about to make unsafe decisions.
- Kani claimed "pretty much everyone" developing Level 4 autonomy runs on Nvidia, name-checking Waymo, Nuro, Waabi, Zoox, Wayve, Momenta, Pony, WeRide, Baidu, DeepRoute, and ZYT.
Why it matters: Nvidia is positioning itself as the underlying compute layer of the global robotaxi industry — collecting design wins from Waymo, Uber, Lyft, and now China's two largest automakers — even as its automotive unit brings in just 1.2% of quarterly revenue. With BYD and Geely on Hyperion and Geely already feeding Zeekr cars to Waymo, Nvidia's platform could accelerate China's push to overtake the US in a field where the two countries are currently closely matched.
