Jensen Huang pitches Nvidia’s self-driving car tech, sparks reaction from Tesla’s Elon Musk

Jensen Huang took the stage at the CES trade show in Las Vegas this week to make the clearest push yet toward Nvidia Corp.’s autonomous driving technology. In doing so, the CEO’s vision for self-driving vehicles is reflected in Tesla Inc. and has entered the domain of major clients such as its boss Elon Musk.

Huang’s remarks sparked several days of an indirect — albeit particularly polite — debate between two of the tech world’s most influential figures that was widely watched. It also sharpened a fundamental question about autonomous driving: Who first controls the technology that will power self-driving consumer cars, and later driverless cars known as robotaxis designed for ride-hailing? So whose autonomous vehicle system is the best?

On Monday, Huang used his speech at America’s largest tech fair to extol the virtues of Nvidia’s Alpamayo, an open-source artificial intelligence model designed to accelerate the development of Level 4 self-driving cars. Originally owned by the consumer and later operated by a fleet of robotaxi, such cars can drive autonomously within a given geographic area without human supervision or intervention.

Nvidia has described Alpamayo as part of a broader set of tools it offers to automakers alongside open models. This includes powerful chips in data centers to train autonomous driving software, chips inside vehicles that act as the “brain” of the car while on the road, and simulation software that can virtually generate large amounts of driving data; thus reducing the time and cost of collecting this data in the real world. The speech was aimed directly at automakers.

Nvidia wants to provide the intelligence layer for autonomy without producing the car itself, but it still wants to have the technology that makes autonomous driving a reality.

“The world’s first thinking, reasoning, autonomous artificial intelligence vehicle,” Huang proudly announced in his shiny leather jacket.

That afternoon, Musk shared a post about X after a user shared the text of Huang’s remarks. Musk replied, “Well, that’s exactly what Tesla does????” he wrote.

The Tesla CEO added that most of the time it is relatively easy to operate a system, but solving rare and unpredictable edge cases is much more difficult.

The world’s richest man has long claimed that Tesla’s system will have reasoning ability (i.e. the ability to make human decisions in certain traffic scenarios) after a future software update. Earlier this week, AI chief lieutenant Ashok Elluswamy responded to a question about X by saying another update would be coming in the current quarter.

Huang learned of Musk’s reaction during an interview with Bloomberg Television at CES the next day.

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Huang interjected, in response to Musk’s claim that he was already reasoning. “I think the Tesla stack is the most advanced AV stack in the world.”

Tesla shares finished the week up 1.6% and closed Friday at $445.01. New Street Research analyst Pierre Ferragu, who has a buy rating on the stock and a $600 price target, wrote on X earlier in the week after Huang’s opening statement that Nvidia’s strategy “validates” Tesla’s approach.

What attracted wider attention was the tone of what followed Nvidia’s announcement. This conversation went viral; not because of conflict, but because of restriction. The two rivals acknowledged each other’s technical reliability as they moved on different paths.

Tesla and Nvidia already have an important, if unbalanced, relationship. Even as Tesla builds its own in-house chips to run this software inside vehicles, it relies heavily on Nvidia’s graphics processing units, or GPUs (chips that go into data centers to train autonomous driving software).

Musk said Tesla will spend about $10 billion cumulatively on Nvidia hardware by the end of this year, and that figure would be higher if it wasn’t working on its own AI chips. Musk’s artificial intelligence startup xAI is also a major Nvidia customer, and Nvidia is also an investor in xAI.

Tesla and Nvidia are fundamentally different companies. Tesla manufactures cars and builds the entire system end-to-end. Nvidia makes chips and software that others use.

Their technologies are also different. Tesla has a vision-only approach that relies solely on camera sensors. The company argues that this is the most economically viable approach at scale and prevents sensors from interfering with each other. The rest of the industry argues that other sensors such as lidar, radar and ultrasonic are better because they are more secure and offer redundancy.

But the dynamic shows how unstable the autonomous vehicle arms race is. Tesla relies on Nvidia to develop its software, although Nvidia develops tools that could one day help Tesla’s rivals catch up.

Their routes to consumers are also increasingly overlapping. Tesla sells a set of features known as Fully Self-Driving (Supervised), a driver assistance system that requires the vehicle operator to remain behind the wheel and monitor the road. The system sold by Tesla is capable of point-to-point driving with navigation, changing lanes and reacting to traffic, but drivers still need to keep their eyes on the road.

Nvidia now also sells advanced driver assistance and autonomy platforms to automakers. And these automobile manufacturers offer the systems to consumers in the cars they sell.

Market analysts see robotaxi as the end game; Alphabet Inc.’s Waymo currently leads real-world commercial deployments, and Tesla argues it can win at scale.

Before that, the proving ground is consumer-owned cars, which can do most of the driving under the owner’s supervision, serving as a bridge to broader adoption of robotaxis.

Tesla sees FSD as a stepping stone to the robotaxi network it will control in the future. Nvidia, Uber Technologies Inc. Other tech companies including are pursuing a similar endgame by working with automakers and ride-hailing companies. Again, Nvidia will provide the technology and see it powering robotaxi fleets as soon as 2027.

While Tesla is trying to gain autonomy as a specialist, Nvidia is positioning itself as an arms dealer selling gadgets to the entire industry.

Huang said the upcoming Mercedes-Benz CLA will be the first car to use Nvidia’s hardware that offers FSD-like capabilities. Deliveries will begin in the US in early 2026 and expand to Europe and Asia later in the year. Going beyond that would require additional hardware like lidar, increasing cost and highlighting how far today’s cars remain from full autonomy.

Musk returned to the topic of Nvidia’s push into autonomous vehicles on Tuesday, arguing that it poses little threat to Tesla’s efforts. The technology is far from ready to be rolled out safely on a large scale, he said.

He wrote of He added that meaningful competition for Tesla could still be at least five or six years away.

Despite all the passion shown, Huang and Musk effectively stated that fully autonomous driving at scale is still a distant prospect.

And for both, the closer proving ground comes first: cars that can drive part of the way themselves. Who wins this stage could help decide who will dominate the next stage.