From car to cloud: Volvo Cars expands collaboration with NVIDIA

At Volvo Cars, we don’t focus on technology for the sake of technology. We develop human-centric technology that creates value and makes cars safer, life better, without compromise on safety.

Our software-defined cars are a key part of this ambition, bringing next-generation safety, connectivity, data and software all together in one product. We’re guided by our technology roadmap: by striking a balance between in-house development and smart partnerships with global tech leaders, so that we can work with both speed and the latest, cutting-edge technology.

The new Volvo EX90 is the first Volvo car to be truly software-defined – it’s built on a centralised core compute architecture, made possible through our long-standing collaboration with NVIDIA.

The EX90’s industry-leading core computing system is powered by an NVIDIA DRIVE Orin system-on-a-chip (SoC) which is capable of over 250 trillions of operations per second (TOPS). This core compute system orchestrates everything in the car: from powering the deep learning capabilities underpinning our AI-based active safety and driving assistance systems; to helping introduce safe autonomous driving in the future and delivering best-in-class customer experience.

To help unleash the full potential of our software-defined car with a centralised core compute architecture, we’re taking our collaboration with NVIDIA to the next level.

Later this decade, we will introduce cars built on NVIDIA DRIVE Thor, which is capable of up to 1,000 TOPs. That’s four times as many operations per second as one DRIVE Orin SoC, while offering seven times greater energy efficiency.

Integrating DRIVE Thor will help further future-proof our next generation of cars. DRIVE Thor, which integrates the NVIDIA Blackwell GPU architecture, will enable us to deploy even more advanced driving assistance and safety features, develop autonomous driving, and introduce generative AI-based capabilities and in-car experiences.

 “With NVIDIA DRIVE Thor in our future cars, our in-house developed software becomes more scalable across our product line-up, which will help us to continue to improve the safety in our cars, deliver best-in-class customer experiences, reduce our costs, and increase our margins,” says Jim Rowan, CEO of Volvo Cars.

To further explore the potential of AI, Volvo Cars, through its fully owned software company, Zenseact, is also using the NVIDIA DGX systems – an AI supercomputing platform optimised for large workloads – to help develop safe autonomous driving.

The DGX systems for AI model training will be used before deploying to our future fleets on the road. With the power of the NVIDIA DGX platform – utilising its purpose-built AI infrastructure and optimised software stack – we can enhance the efficiency of training both current and future AI models.

Our long-standing collaboration with NVIDIA, and our use of the production-proven NVIDIA DRIVE platform, has enabled us to further explore and apply our deep understanding of safety as we train large foundation AI models. These models are used to help our cars understand the world around them even better, all with the aim of further improving safety and convenience in our cars and developing autonomous driving.

“The NVIDIA DGX AI supercomputer will supercharge our AI training capabilities, making this in-house AI training data centre one of the largest in the Nordics,” says Anders Bell, Chief Engineering & Technology Officer at Volvo Cars. “By leveraging NVIDIA technology and setting up the data centre, we can pave a quick path to high-performing AI, ultimately helping make our products safer and better.”