CES 2026: Nvidia unveils open-source ‘reasoning’ AI technology for autonomous vehicles

Nvidia boss Jensen Huang reportedly announced on Monday Alpamayo, a tech platform which the company says will help self-driving cars think like humans.

The recent revelations present a significant shift from conventional pattern recognition to reasoning AI, which can think through novel and challenging scenarios.

At CES 2026, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on Monday unveiled Alpamayo, a tech platform the company says will help self-driving cars think like humans.

In this connection, Huang said on stage at the annual CES technology conference in Las Vegas: “Alpamayo brings reasoning to autonomous vehicles, allowing them to think through rare scenarios, drive safely in complex environments, and explain their driving decisions.”

Huang has further confirmed that Nvidia has begun producing a driverless car powered by its technology-the Mercedes-Benz CLA-in collaboration with the German automaker.

According to BBC, the plans to release vehicles in the US will take effect in the coming months, before being rolled out in Europe and Asia.

According to analysts the recent announcement strengthened Nvidia’s leadership in integrating AI hardware and software while furthering its efforts into physical AI.

An analyst at PP Foresight from Las Vegas said: “Nvidia's pivot toward AI at scale and AI systems as differentiators will help keep it way ahead of rivals.”

The shares of the AI chip designer advanced marginally following Huang’s presentation.

Huang emphasized that Alpamayo is an open-source AI model, with the source code now available on a machine learning platform, where autonomous vehicle researchers can access it for free and instruct the model.

Nvidia's Alpamayo unveiled: A direct challenge to Tesla’s full self-driving

The recent project could pose a threat to companies like Elon Musk’s Tesla, which offers driver assistance software called Autopilot.

After the official announcement of Alpamayo, Musk posted on social media that it's exactly what Tesla is doing, “What they will find is that it's easy to get to 99% and then super hard to solve the long tail of the distribution.”

Nvidia is the world’s most publicly listed company with a market cap of more than $4.5trillion. It became the first company to reach $5trillion in October, though it has been seen some volatility.

Additionally, the recent advancement shifts automated driving from simple pattern recognition toward human-like reasoning.