Volvo Cars’ new, fully electric EX90 is being shipped from the automaker’s assembly line in Charleston, South Carolina, to dealerships around the U.S.
To ensure its customers benefit from future improvements and advanced safety features and capabilities, the Volvo EX90 appears to be built on the NVIDIA DRIVE Orin system-on-a-chip (SoC), capable of more than 250 trillion operations per second (TOPS).
Running NVIDIA DriveOS, the system delivers high-performance processing in a package the size of a postage stamp. This core compute architecture handles all vehicle functions, enabling safety and driving assistance features and supporting the development of autonomous driving capabilities while delivering an excellent user experience.
The state-of-the-art SUV is an intelligent mobile device on wheels, equipped with the automaker’s most advanced sensor suite, including radar, lidar, cameras, ultrasonic sensors, and more. NVIDIA DRIVE Orin enables real-time, redundant, and advanced 360-degree surround-sensor data processing, supporting Volvo Cars’ unwavering commitment to safety.
DRIVE Thor Powering the Next Generation of Volvo Cars
Setting its sights on the future, Volvo Cars also announced plans to migrate to the next-generation NVIDIA DRIVE Thor SoC for its upcoming fleets.
Before the decade ends, Volvo Cars will move to NVIDIA DRIVE Thor, which boasts 1,000 TOPS—quadrupling the processing power of a single DRIVE Orin SoC while improving energy efficiency sevenfold.
The next-generation DRIVE Thor autonomous vehicle processor incorporates the latest NVIDIA Blackwell GPU architecture, helping unlock new possibilities and capabilities in and around the car. This advanced platform will facilitate the deployment of safe advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) and self-driving features — and pave the way for a new era of in-vehicle experiences powered by generative AI.
Highlighting Volvo Cars’ leap to NVIDIA’s next-generation processor, Volvo Cars CEO Jim Rowan noted, “With NVIDIA DRIVE Thor in our future cars, our in-house-developed software becomes more scalable across our product lineup, and it helps us to continue to improve the safety in our cars, deliver best-in-class customer experiences—and increase our margins.”
Zenseact Strategic Investment in NVIDIA Technology
Volvo Cars and its software subsidiary, Zenseact, also invest in NVIDIA DGX systems for AI model training in the cloud.
Managing the massive data needed to safely train the next generation of AI-enabled vehicles demands data-center-level computing and infrastructure.
NVIDIA DGX systems provide the computational performance essential for training AI models with unprecedented efficiency. Transportation companies use them to speed up autonomous technology development cost-effectively, enterprise-ready, and easily deployable.
Volvo Cars and Zenseact’s AI training hub, based in the Nordics, will use the systems to help catalyze multiple facets of ADAS and autonomous driving software development.
A key benefit is optimizing the data annotation process, which is traditionally time—consuming and involves identifying and labeling objects for classification and recognition.
The cluster of DGX systems will also enable processing of the required data for safety assurance, delivering twice the performance and potentially halving time to market.
“The NVIDIA DGX AI supercomputer will supercharge our AI training capabilities, making this in-house AI training center one of the largest in the Nordics,” said Volvo Cars’s chief engineering and technology officer. “By leveraging NVIDIA technology and setting up the data center, we pave a quick path to high-performing AI, ultimately helping make our products safer and better.”
With NVIDIA technology as the AI brain inside the car and in the cloud, Volvo Cars and Zenseact can deliver safe vehicles that allow customers to drive safely wherever the road may lead.