NVIDIA DRIVE Hyperion Platform Achieves Critical Automotive Safety and Cybersecurity Milestones for AV Development

CES—NVIDIA today announced that its autonomous vehicle (AV) platform, NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Hyperion, has passed industry safety assessments by TÜV SÜD and TÜV Rheinland – two of the industry’s leading automotive safety and cybersecurity authorities. This achievement raises the bar for AV security, innovation and performance.

DRIVE Hyperion is the industry’s first and only end-to-end autonomous driving platform. It includes the DRIVE AGX system-on-a-chip (SoC) and reference board design, the NVIDIA DriveOS automotive operating system, a sensor suite, and a Level 2+ active safety and driving stack.

Automotive safety pioneers such as Mercedes-Benz, JLR and Volvo Cars are adopting the platform, which is designed to be modular so customers can easily use what they need. It is also scalable and built to be upgradable and compatible across future DRIVE SoC generations.

Available in the first half of this year, the latest iteration of the DRIVE Hyperion – designed for both passenger and commercial vehicles – will feature the high-performance DRIVE AGX Thor SoC built on the NVIDIA Blackwell architecture.

“One billion vehicles driving trillions of miles each year move the world. With self-driving vehicles—one of the largest robotics markets—now here, the NVIDIA Blackwell-powered platform will shift this revolution into high gear,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “The next wave of autonomous machines will rely on physical AI-world models to understand and interact with the real world, and NVIDIA DRIVE is purpose-built for this new era, delivering unmatched functional security and AI.”

Driving safety ahead: Certified insurance for next-generation vehicles
Next-generation vehicles will increasingly become software-defined and able to receive new features and functionality during their lifetime. Leveraging NVIDIA’s 15,000 engineering years invested in vehicle safety, DRIVE Hyperion will help ensure that advanced automotive systems with rich, AI-based functionalities comply with the automotive industry’s stringent functional safety and cybersecurity standards.

NVIDIA recently received security certifications and assessments from accredited third parties, including:

• TÜV SÜD, which awarded ISO 21434 Cybersecurity Process certification to NVIDIA for automotive SoC, platform and software engineering processes. In addition, NVIDIA DriveOS 6.0 complies with ISO 26262 Automotive Safety Integrity Level (ASIL) D standards, pending certification release.
• TÜV Rheinland, which performed an independent United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) safety assessment of NVIDIA DRIVE AV related to safety requirements for complex electronic systems.

In addition, NVIDIA is now accredited by the ANSI National Accreditation Board (ANAB) to provide security and cybersecurity inspections for NVIDIA DRIVE ecosystem partners. The new one NVIDIA DRIVE AI Systems Inspection Lab will help the NVIDIA DRIVE automotive ecosystem build autonomous driving software that meets the industry’s evolving safety and AI standards.

NVIDIA is the first platform company to receive a comprehensive set of third-party assessments for its automotive technologies – including the NVIDIA DRIVE end-to-end self-driving platform spanning SoC, OS, sensor architecture and Level 2+ application software – as well as independent accreditation as an AI system safety – and cyber security inspection laboratory for the automotive market.

Intelligence powered by industry-leading compute
NVIDIA DRIVE Thor, the core computer for DRIVE Hyperion, is the successor to the production-proven NVIDIA DRIVE Orin. Its architecture compatibility and scalability means developers can use existing software from previous DRIVE product generations as well as integrate future updates to achieve seamless development pipelines.

DRIVE Thor is based on the NVIDIA Blackwell architecture and is optimized for the most demanding processing workloads, including those involving generative AI, vision language models, and large language models. Its simplified architecture improves generalization, reduces latency and increases security by leveraging powerful NVIDIA accelerated computing to run the end-to-end AV stack and a proven security stack in parallel.

DRIVE Thor paves the way for the next era of AV technology, known as AV 2.0, which involves delivering human-like autonomous driving capabilities to navigate the most complex roadway scenarios.

In addition to the DRIVE AGX vehicle computer, two other NVIDIA computers serve as the foundation for automotive-grade AV development: NVIDIA DGX systems for training advanced AI models and building a robust AV software stack in the cloud, and NVIDIA Omniverse platform runs on NVIDIA OVX systems for simulation and validation. These three computers, now enhanced with the new NVIDIA Cosmos world base model platform, are set to accelerate end-to-end AV development and mass deployment.

To learn more about NVIDIA’s three-computer approach to automotive development and the Cosmos World Foundation model platform along with other automotive news, tune in to Huang’s CES opening keynote.