While Nvidia’s (NVDA) blockbuster data center business gets all the headlines, its growing auto business keeps chugging along — and is poised for a big year.
Nvidia’s automotive segment hit $586 million in its fiscal 2026 second quarter, a 69% jump year over year. Nvidia said the gain was primarily driven by its self-driving solutions. CEO Colette Kress said the chipmaker also began shipping its DRIVE AGX Thor SoC (system on chip), the successor to its Orin self-driving platform.
“Thor’s arrival coincides with the industry’s accelerating shift to vision, language, model architecture, generative AI, and higher levels of autonomy. Thor is the most successful robotics and AV computer we’ve ever created,” Kress said on the earnings call. “Thor will power our full stack DRIVE AV software platform – now in production – opening up billions to new revenue opportunities for Nvidia while improving vehicle safety and autonomy.”
Essentially, Nvidia’s “full-stack” solutions are platforms where Nvidia combines hardware like its new DRIVE AGX Thor chips with its DriveOS software to power advanced driver-assistance features in next-generation vehicles.
Nvidia said earlier this year that Toyota (TM) — the world’s largest automaker by volume — would be using Nvidia’s self-driving tech as well.
Nvidia’s platform is already used to power self-driving technologies for Mercedes-Benz (MBGAF), Volvo (VOLCAR-B.ST), China’s BYD (BYDDY), and device maker Foxconn (FXCOF), among others.
At the end of last year, CEO Jensen Huang said the auto business would pull in $5 billion in revenue this fiscal year, on its way to eventually being a trillion-dollar business.
That’s because it’s not just Nvidia’s DRIVE platform powering the results.
Nvidia GPU chips are also used in some of Tesla’s (TSLA) supercomputers, and with Tesla abandoning its Dojo supercomputer project, the EV maker will lean even more heavily on Nvidia chips to train its AV models.
Nvidia reported earnings on Wednesday, Aug. 27.
The confluence of supercomputing and robotics is one of the next big frontiers for AI. Huang calls it physical AI, or embodied AI, in which physical objects like cars or robots harness AI to interact with the real world, for instance, with self-driving cars or robots moving about a factory floor.
At CES this year, Huang said the AV “revolution” and embodied AI would likely be the first multitrillion-dollar robotics opportunity and noted that Tesla is a partner.
“We do a lot of business with Tesla and xAI,” Huang said in an interview following Q1 results in May. “We’re going to build many more computers together. [CEO Elon Musk’s] self-driving car, his Optimus robot, every single one of them is world-class and revolutionary.”
