After 'surprise car announcement', Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang meets CEOs of Mercedes and Hyundai

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang met privately with the heads of Mercedes-Benz and Hyundai at CES 2026, a report claims. This meeting took place just after the chipmaking giant announced Alpamayo, its first self-driving-car technology.

The timing of Hyundai Executive Chair Euisun Chung's meeting has raised questions about whether Hyundai may use Nvidia's new system in its own cars. According to a report by Korea JoongAng Daily, Hyundai has spent heavily on self-driving technology for years but still trails rivals like Tesla, which already offers more advanced features. The Korean carmaker aims to add Level 2+ self-driving capabilities to its regular cars by the end of 2027.The report claims ​​that Hyundai has already shown interest in working more closely with Nvidia. The automaker previously announced plans to buy 50,000 of Nvidia's Blackwell graphics processing units (GPUs) to help develop self-driving cars and robotics.Meanwhile, Mercedes-Benz has moved faster in this area and has become the first carmaker to use Nvidia's Alpamayo AI. The first Nvidia AI-powered self-driving vehicle will be Mercedes-Benz's upcoming CLA model, which is planned to hit US roads in the first quarter of the year, followed by Europe in the second quarter and Asia in the third quarter.

What is Nvidia Alpamayo AI and what CEO Jensen Huang said about it

Nvidia’s Alpamayo is a family of open-source AI models described as the world's first "thinking and reasoning" self-driving car AI. It will introduce vision-language-action, or VLA, models that help self-driving systems understand what they see, think through difficult driving situations, and perform exact driving moves. The platform will also include large-scale reasoning models, simulation tools for testing rare or dangerous scenarios, and open datasets to train AI systems and verify information."We open source to everyone, so if a customer would like to use our model that we train, they're welcome to do that," Huang said during a recent question-and-answer session with the press and analysts in Las Vegas."We just want to enable the world's autonomous industry. Everything that moves should be autonomous," he added.When asked about potential memory shortages, Huang said he is not concerned, as Nvidia is the "first and only consumer of HBM4," referring to the high-bandwidth memory technology."We're not expecting anybody else to be using HBM4 for some time. So we have the benefit of being the primary and the only consumer of HBM4," Huang explained."Our demand is so high, every factory, every HBM supplier is gearing up and we're all doing great,” Huang claimed. Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix are the two leading HBM suppliers to Nvidia.Major Korean shipbuilder HD Hyundai was mentioned as an essential example during an onstage conversation between Siemens CEO Roland Busch and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang at CES 2026.

HD Hyundai's shipyards were digitalised by combining Siemens' digital twin technology with Nvidia's Omniverse platform."This is quite a perfect example of the type of the work we do together. This realisation of the digital twin idea, that you would design every aspect of engineering, it's not just the CAD, but the computing, the electronics, all of it would be integrated and built into a digital twin. It would of course run all of the software in the digital twin, and in the future, I hope the digital twin of the ship, we'll actually put it in the ocean, a virtual simulation of the ocean, and see it completely operate,” ​​Huang said on stage, referring to digital twin replicas of HD Hyundai ships.