Robotaxi welcomes a heavy-duty catalyst! Mercedes-Benz collaborates with NVIDIA and Uber to jointly deploy a global Robotaxi fleet.

On Thursday, Eastern Time, after Mercedes-Benz, the leader in luxury European cars, and NVIDIA Corporation (NVDA.US) and Uber Technologies, Inc. (UBER.US) announced a major three-way collaboration project, the global lineup of Robotaxi (fully autonomous taxi) participants can be said to have further expanded. It is understood that the three parties will collaborate to build a global Robotaxi platform, which will use Mercedes-Benz's new S-Class model, NVIDIA Corporation's AI computing system's hardware and software stack for autonomous driving, and Uber Technologies, Inc.'s large ride-hailing network to provide autonomous travel services in major markets around the world. The Robotaxi service will run on the MB.OS operating system developed by Mercedes-Benz, allowing NVIDIA Corporation and other autonomous driving technology partners to overlay advanced autonomous driving applications on top of it, while the German car manufacturer will still control the core vehicle software and integration systems. For NVIDIA Corporation, it will provide DRIVE Hyperion architecture vehicle high-performance autonomous driving chips, Alpamayo AI autonomous driving models, and exclusive simulation and safety tools to achieve autonomous driving systems with L4 capability. This also builds on related major releases - its AV stack will hit the road with Mercedes, and will be included in Uber Technologies, Inc.'s plan to deploy a large autonomous driving fleet in the later stages of this decade. It is reported that the role of the American ride-hailing giant Uber Technologies, Inc. is to directly incorporate or integrate the three-party collaborative Robotaxi system into its existing ride-hailing platform, allowing human-driven vehicles and autonomous driving S-Class Robotaxis to operate in parallel. Although the companies have not provided a specific timeline for launch, this collaboration is seen as an important step towards the commercial deployment of large-scale Robotaxi in multiple cities around the world. "Mercedes-Benz, NVIDIA Corporation, and Uber Technologies, Inc. will jointly create a global platform that benefits all users with autonomous driving." NVIDIA Corporation CEO Huang Renxun said in a video shown at an event hosted by Mercedes-Benz. NVIDIA Corporation's ambitious 'AI + Autonomous Driving' According to NVIDIA Corporation CEO Huang Renxun, "physical AI" emphasizes allowing the Siasun Robot & Automation / Autonomous OS to perceive, reason, and complete a full set of actions in the real world. In Huang Renxun's view, an era assisted by "physical AI" for the evolution of human civilization is coming. Applications of "physical AI," including fully autonomous driving technology, emphasize enabling the Siasun Robot & Automation / Autonomous system to perceive, reason, and take action in the real world, and these three capabilities are the key tool chain that moves models from "just talking" to "doing work in the physical world." During CES 2026, NVIDIA Corporation announced the launch of the open-source autonomous driving AI model Alpamayo family. Huang Renxun referred to Alpamayo as the "GPT moment of physical AI." The flagship autonomous driving large model product Alpamayo 1 is a visual-language-action (VLA) model with 10 billion parameters. Unlike traditional autonomous driving systems that only detect objects and plan paths, Alpamayo employs a groundbreaking "chain AI reasoning system" that focuses on processing video input and generating driving trajectories, but more importantly, it also outputs the logic behind decisions. Huang Renxun said, "This is not just a driving model, but a model that can explain its thought process." Huang Renxun played a demonstration video at the show, showing that Alpamayo can not only drive a car but also explain its decision-making logic in natural language, such as "the brake lights of the vehicle ahead are on, it may slow down, so I should keep my distance." In addition to the Alpamayo family (open-source inference-based VLA model), NVIDIA Corporation also launched the latest AlpaSim simulation tool + Physical AI Open Datasets dataset: these combine with Alpamayo to form a complete development loop of "model + simulation + data" to improve the safety and verifiability of fully autonomous driving technology. For NVIDIA Corporation, its open-source strategy focuses on ecosystem access, while profits are concentrated in computing power and enterprise delivery. For example, open models and tool chains will significantly lower the development threshold and drive more car manufacturers/Siasun Robot & Automation development and manufacturing companies to tie their R&D and mass production routes to NVIDIA Corporation's proprietary computing platform, thereby driving strong demand for AI computing platforms in data center racks, vehicle-side computing platforms (DRIVE), and edge computing platforms (Jetson) of Siasun Robot & Automation. At CES, NVIDIA Corporation also promoted the "Rubin six-in-one" cabinet-level AI computing infrastructure platform, emphasizing a significant reduction in token costs, essentially using a platform-based computing power supply to meet the substantial increase in AI training/inference workloads brought by the "physical AI" wave.