Semiconductor giant Nvidia (NVDA) is close to pressing the go button on a new $500 million investment in British autonomous driving technology group Wayve.
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According to London-based Wayve, Nvidia has signed a letter of intent to evaluate investing the cash in the company’s next funding round.
Continued Investment
It came after Britain and the United States signed a technology pact aimed at boosting ties in artificial intelligence and other fields. But Nvidia has already been on board Wayve for a number of years now
Founded in 2017, Wayve raised over $1 billion last year, led by SoftBank Group (SFTBY) and supported by Nvidia. Ride-hailing platform Uber (UBER) had also made a separate investment in the firm in 2024, for an undisclosed sum.
Nvidia also supplies the chips to power the Wayve platforms. Indeed, the upcoming Wayve Gen 3 platform will be built on NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Thor.
Wayve’s technology, unlike conventional systems that rely on detailed digital maps and coding, uses machine learning with camera sensors mounted on the vehicles to learn from traffic patterns and driver behavior.
Making Wayves
Wayve currently operates in Britain and the U.S. and has been expanding testing and development to wider markets like Germany and Japan.
The autonomous driving market, say some reports, could be worth as much as $133 billion by as soon as 2030. That is despite a raft of challenges getting the technology up and running over the last decade.
In many ways Wayve is Europe’s best competitive hope in this space taking on the likes of Tesla (TSLA) and Chinese makers such as BYD (BYDDY). Wayve also has Waymo, owned by Alphabet (GOOGL) in its sights.
It is not only on the roads where competition is fierce. Each of the above companies, including Nvidia, hope that self-driving can give another boost to their often volatile share prices – see below:
Alex Kendall, Co-founder and CEO of Wayve, said of the potential Nvidia investment: “Continued support from a global technology leader like NVIDIA underscores confidence in our approach to building embodied AI and its potential to transform the future of mobility.”
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