[CES 2026] ‘AlphaMayo’ autonomous driving AI in alliance with Mercedes Explains its decision-making grounds in natural language like a human Mass production of next-generation superchip ‘Vera Rubin’ begins
Jensen Huang, NVIDIA Chief Executive Officer (CEO), delivers a keynote speech with a robot at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada, United States, on the 5th (local time). Las Vegas = News1
NVIDIA is joining hands with Mercedes-Benz to launch an autonomous driving vehicle in the first quarter of this year (January–March). It will be equipped with “Alpamayo,” NVIDIA’s first autonomous driving artificial intelligence (AI) software capable of independent judgment, reasoning, and decision-making. The world’s leading AI company, NVIDIA, is entering the autonomous vehicle market led by Tesla.
At “NVIDIA Live,” held on the 5th (local time) ahead of the opening of “CES 2026,” the world’s largest information technology (IT) and consumer electronics exhibition, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang said, “Autonomous vehicles will become the first large-scale physical AI market.” This reflects the outlook that the spread of “physical AI,” a theme he highlighted at last year’s CES, will begin in earnest with autonomous vehicles.
The new Mercedes-Benz CLA model equipped with Alpamayo as its “brain” will be launched first in the United States in the first quarter of this year. It is then scheduled to be released in Europe in the second quarter (April–June) and in Asia in the second half (July–December) of this year. Huang described Alpamayo as “the world’s first autonomous driving AI that thinks and reasons.”
Alpamayo is a next-generation autonomous driving technology based on a Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model, characterized by the ability of an autonomous vehicle to explain the basis of its decisions in human language and logic. Alpamayo targets “Level 4” autonomous driving, in which no human intervention is required.
On stage, Huang unveiled a video of a Mercedes-Benz autonomous vehicle driving on public roads. He said, “(NVIDIA’s autonomous vehicle) reasons about the situation in every scenario and explains what it will do and why it is doing it.”
Huang also announced the start of mass production of “Vera Rubin,” a next-generation AI accelerator. Vera Rubin is the successor to “Blackwell,” NVIDIA’s latest AI accelerator, and delivers five times the inference performance and 3.5 times the training performance at the full-system level compared with Blackwell.
Lee Min-a
AI-translated with ChatGPT. Provided as is; original Korean text prevails.
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