Foxconn and NVIDIA have joined hands to realize a new era of safe and intelligent electric vehicles by combining their DRIVE Hyperion sensor architecture.

NVIDIA announced today that its founder and CEO Jensen Huang, a leader in AI computing technology, announced the partnership with Foxconn Chairman and CEO Young Liu at the company's fourth annual Hon Hai Tech Day in Taiwan.

This partnership was signed to develop a next-generation intelligent electric vehicle (EV) platform that will lead the global automobile market.

Through this partnership, Foxconn plans to realize its EV vision with a range of NVIDIA DRIVE solutions, including NVIDIA DRIVE Orin and its successor, DRIVE Thor.

Foxconn will also adopt the NVIDIA DRIVE Hyperion 9 platform to transform itself into a manufacturer of highly automated, AI-based autonomous electric vehicles. The NVIDIA DRIVE Hyperion 9 platform, which is coming soon, includes DRIVE Thor and a state-of-the-art sensor architecture.

The computational requirements for highly automated, fully autonomous vehicles are enormous. NVIDIA provides the transportation industry with the most advanced, highest-performance AI vehicle computer, with more than 25 global automakers choosing DRIVE Orin.

Foxconn, already a leading manufacturer of DriveOrin-based electronic control units (ECUs), will also manufacture ECUs featuring DriveThor.

The upcoming DRIVE Thor superchip will leverage advanced AI capabilities first implemented in NVIDIA’s Grace CPU and Hopper, Ada Lovelace architecture-based GPUs, and is expected to deliver 2,000 teraflops of high-performance computing to enable functionally safe intelligent driving.

Unveiled at GTC last year, DRIVE Hyperion 9 is the latest evolution of NVIDIA’s modular development platform and reference architecture for automated and autonomous vehicles. It is based on DRIVE Thor and integrates a proven sensor architecture for Level 3 urban and Level 4 highway driving scenarios.

Drive Hyperion processes a large amount of safety-critical data with a diverse and redundant array of high-resolution cameras, radars, lidar, and ultrasonic sensors, enabling the vehicle to navigate its surroundings with agility.

Another advantage of Drive Hyperion is cross-generation compatibility. It maintains the same compute form factor and NVIDIA DriveWorks application programming interface, allowing a seamless transition from DRIVE Orin to DRIVE Thor and beyond.

Additionally, DRIVE Hyperion uses sensors on its platform that have passed NVIDIA’s rigorous certification process, reducing development time and costs for electronics manufacturers like Foxconn.

The shift to software-defined vehicles with centralized electronics architecture will drive the need for high-performance, energy-efficient computing solutions like DriveThor. Combining this with the Drive Hyperion sensor architecture will provide Foxconn and its automotive customers with enhanced technologies that will enable a new era of safe, intelligent electric vehicles.