By Gary S. Vasilash

Quick quiz.

What’s missing from these lists:

• BYD
• Xpeng
• Hyper (a luxury brand owned by GAC AION)

Those OEMs will al be using the in-vehicle computing platform that’s architected for generative AI applications, NVIDIA DRIVE Thor.

And there are:

• NIO
• Geely

NIO is using NVIDIA AI stacks for its in-cabin capabilities including Cabin Atmosphere Master and Vehicle Assistant.

Geely is using NVIDIA TensorRT-LLM , generative AI and large language model (LLM) tech, for personalized cabin experiences.

These were announced at the NVIDIA GTC conference this week in Silicon Valley.

What’s missing? Companies like Ford and GM.

It should be noted that other companies, including BMW and Mercedes, are using NVIDIA tech for their vehicles.

And that Danny Shapiro, NVIDIA vice president, Automotive, points out that non-listed OEMs use NVIDIA GPUs in their data centers.

DRIVE Thor, which will make its way into vehicles by next year, provides 1,000 teraflops of performance (with a teraflop being one trillion floating operations per second, and while that may not be meaningful in and of itself, clearly that’s a whole lot of processing capability).

To be fair, NVIDIA isn’t the only game in town, with competitors including Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, and others. They may be providing the silicon to the OEMs not on the lists.

But it surely seems to be the case that as NVIDIA holds its massive GTC global technology event in San Jose this week there would be at least some announcement of automotive companies that aren’t based in China using the company’s processors.

While there is concern in the U.S. about low-cost Chinese EVs threatening the U.S. market at some point, there ought to be similar concern with highly capable Chinese EVs that are offering all manner of AI-enhanced features and functions doing the same.

NVIDIA, incidentally, is headquartered in Santa Clara, California, so it is not like U.S.-based OEMs would have to travel far to pay it a visit.