Waabi will integrate next-generation autonomous vehicle processor to deliver safe and reliable autonomous trucking at scale
TORONTO, MARCH 18, 2024 — Waabi, a company pioneering AI for self-driving, today announced it is collaborating with NVIDIA to deliver the first generative AI-powered autonomous trucking solution to market. Working together, Waabi will integrate the next-generation NVIDIA DRIVE Thor into its breakthrough autonomous trucking solution.
“To realize the promise of self-driving at scale, we need to rethink how we are building autonomous systems,” said Raquel Urtasun, Founder and CEO of Waabi. “At Waabi, we’ve built a generative AI system that empowers our autonomous trucks with the complex decision-making skills needed to safely operate in the real world. Bringing together our technology and best-in-class engineering teams, who are operating at the cutting edge of AI, will rapidly advance the development and production of autonomous trucks at scale.”
Waabi and NVIDIA are working together to develop and deploy the NVIDIA DRIVE Thor next-generation compute platform into generative AI-powered self-driving applications. DRIVE Thor offers the performance and reliability needed to help safely achieve billions of driverless miles and delivers an industry-leading 1000 teraflops of compute, along with an inference transformer engine purpose-built for AI.
DRIVE Thor, the successor to NVIDIA DRIVE Orin, integrates a wide range of intelligent functions into a single AI compute platform and will integrate the new NVIDIA Blackwell architecture, designed for transformer, LLM, and generative AI workloads. Its software stack was designed for automotive safety and reliability, in compliance with rigorous specifications such as ISO 26262. The DRIVE Thor platform will help scale the production of Waabi’s next-generation autonomous solution, the Waabi Driver, beginning in 2025.
“The transportation industry, including the trucking sector, will be redefined by accelerated computing and generative AI,” said Rishi Dhall, Vice President of Automotive at NVIDIA. “The integration of DRIVE Thor, purpose-built to support the massive onboard AI workloads critical for safe self-driving, will help advance Waabi’s generative AI-powered autonomous trucking system.”
The collaboration was announced during NVIDIA GTC, a global AI conference running March 18-21 at the San Jose Convention Center and online, where Waabi CEO Raquel Urtasun will be presenting on March 19. The news marks the latest sign of tremendous momentum for Waabi over the past year, including an industry-first partnership with Uber Freight, committing billions of miles of driverless capacity, and the launch of the company’s first commercial autonomous trucking routes in the U.S.
About Waabi
Waabi, founded by AI pioneer and visionary Raquel Urtasun, is an AI company building the next generation of autonomous driving technology. With a world-class team and a revolutionary approach that unleashes the power of generative AI to “drive” safely in the real world, Waabi is bringing the promise of autonomous driving closer to commercialization than ever before.
Waabi is backed by best-in-class investors across the technology, logistics and the Canadian innovation ecosystem, including Khosla Ventures, Uber, Volvo Group Venture Capital, 8VC, Radical Ventures, OMERS Ventures and BDC. To learn more, visit: www.waabi.ai.
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