LAS VEGAS, January 5, 2026 – Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang unveiled the company’s next-generation AI platform, Rubin, at CES 2026 on Sunday, alongside an expanded partnership with Mercedes-Benz to bring advanced autonomous driving capabilities to consumer vehicles starting this year.
Rubin, Nvidia’s first six-chip “extreme-codesigned” system, succeeds the Blackwell architecture and is in full production. Huang said it enables AI training with one-quarter the chips and inference at one-tenth the cost of prior generations.
Nvidia also introduced Alpamayo, an open-source family of reasoning models for self-driving vehicles. Alpamayo handles rare scenarios, complex environments, and decision explanations. Code is available on Hugging Face for developers.
The first production vehicle using Alpamayo on Nvidia’s DRIVE platform will be the Mercedes-Benz CLA, launching in the U.S. soon with Level 2+ “AI-defined driving” under supervision.
The collaboration, dating to 2020, combines end-to-end models with traditional stacks for safety. Mercedes vehicles use 30 sensors powered by a single Orin chip.
Huang outlined broader autonomy ambitions: “We imagine that someday a billion cars on the road will all be autonomous.” Nvidia plans small-scale Level 4 trials in 2026 and partner robotaxi services in 2027, building on an October Uber deal.
Nvidia shares rose slightly in after-hours trading. Automotive revenue remains modest at $592 million last quarter, but is growing.
The announcements reinforce Nvidia’s integrated hardware-software strategy across data centers and mobility, as competition intensifies from custom silicon and open models.
