Nvidia to Ship Vera Rubin AI Chip; Mercedes to Offer Cars with Its Self-Driving Tech

At the CES conference in Las Vegas, Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang said the company will begin shipping a new A.I. chip called the Vera Rubin later this year and that Mercedes-Benz will start shipping cars equipped with Nvidia self-driving technology comparable to Tesla’s Autopilot.

The Vera Rubin, which Nvidia has been developing for three years, is designed to perform more computing with less power than prior generations. Nvidia says companies will be able to train A.I. models with one-quarter as many Rubin chips as with the previous Blackwell chips and that the Rubin can provide information for chatbots at about one-tenth the cost.

The chips are being manufactured and are expected to be shipped to customers, including Microsoft and Amazon, in the second half of the year. Nvidia also showed redesigned supercomputers that use fewer cables, and the company named the chip for astronomer Vera Rubin. On autonomous vehicles, Nvidia said it has worked with Mercedes since 2020 on a class of self-driving cars and that an early result of the collaboration will appear when Mercedes CLA models become available in the first half of the year in Europe and the United States.

Nvidia also announced new A.I. software called Alpamayo, which it said will let customers such as Uber and Lucid develop cars that navigate roads autonomously. Mr. Huang said Nvidia started work on self-driving technology eight years ago and that more than a thousand people are working on the project.

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Tech, Nvidia, Vera Rubin, Mercedes-benz, Alpamayo, Ces