At NVIDIA's GTC conference this week, the chipmaker and European ride-hailing firm Bolt unveiled a strategic alliance. The deal is straightforward: Bolt gains access to NVIDIA's sophisticated autonomous vehicle technology, while NVIDIA secures a valuable stream of real-world European driving data from Bolt's extensive fleet.

The partnership will see Bolt employ NVIDIA's Cosmos platform to manage and search millions of miles of driving data. Using NVIDIA's Omniverse, the company will create precise digital simulations of European streets from that data. These virtual environments will then feed back into Cosmos to generate vast amounts of synthetic training data. At the core of the AI development will be NVIDIA's Alpamayo, a foundational model built for autonomous driving systems, tasked with learning the nuanced rules of the road from Rome to Riga. Bolt's future autonomous vehicles will be built on NVIDIA's Drive Hyperion computing and sensor architecture.

Philippe Van Den Berge, NVIDIA's Vice President of Automotive for EMEA, stated, "This collaboration brings together Bolt's operational experience with our full-stack platform. The goal is to build a system that can handle the specific demands of European urban mobility."

Bolt has been actively laying groundwork for driverless services, announcing partnerships with Pony.ai and automaker Stellantis last year. While no launch date for the robotaxis has been set, the companies emphasized that all data handling will adhere to European GDPR regulations. They also plan to offer open-source access to certain tools for academic institutions and smaller enterprises across Europe.

Source: Engadget