Core Insights - Wayve, a UK-based autonomous driving startup, announced on September 18 that it has signed a letter of intent with NVIDIA for a strategic investment of $500 million in its upcoming funding round [1][3] - This investment is based on NVIDIA's participation in Wayve's Series C funding and aims to drive Wayve's continued development [3] Group 1 - The collaboration between Wayve and NVIDIA reflects a shared vision to bring safe, scalable, and production-ready autonomous driving technology to market [3] - Wayve's foundational model, combined with NVIDIA's automotive-grade accelerated computing platform, will provide advanced AI technology and hardware support to automotive manufacturers [3] - Since 2018, Wayve has benefited from NVIDIA's technology, with each generation of Wayve's platform showing performance improvements due to this collaboration [3] Group 2 - The upcoming Wayve Gen 3 platform will be built on NVIDIA's DRIVE AGX Thor, which utilizes NVIDIA's Blackwell GPU architecture for computational power [3] - The DRIVE AGX Thor runs a safety-certified NVIDIA DriveOS and relies on NVIDIA's Halos comprehensive safety system to ensure operational safety [3] - The Gen 3 platform aims to push the boundaries of embodied AI technology, enabling Wayve AI Driver to gradually achieve "hands-free driving" (L3) and "fully autonomous driving" (L4) capabilities in urban and highway scenarios [3]