Boost for Self-Driving Technology Firm, Wayve as NVIDIA Explores $500 Million Investment

NVIDIA is exploring a $500 million investment in U.K.’s autonomous driving technology firm, Wayve. According to Reuters, the U.S. chip maker will make the investment during Wayve’s next funding round. The autonomous driving tech company said that it had signed a letter of intent to evaluate NVIDIA’s investment in Wayve.

A Rich History of Partnership

NVIDIA has been part of Wayve’s self-driving startup growth since 2018. The autonomous driving technology developer has accelerated each of its robot platforms with NVIDIA technology.

The two companies are focused on developing a production-ready self-driving technology that combines NVIDIA’s automotive-grade accelerated computing platforms and Wayve’s foundation AI model. Wayve says its upcoming Wayve Gen 3 platform will also be built on NVIDIA’s DRIVE AGX Thor technology.

“Continued support from a global technology leader like Nvidia underscores confidence in our AV2.0 approach to building embodied AI and its potential to transform the future of mobility,” Wayve Co-founder and CEO Alex Kendall said.

Wayve’s autonomous driving technology uses machine learning with mounted camera sensors to learn from driver behaviour and traffic patterns. NVIDIA participated in Wayve’s $1.05 billion Series C funding round led by SoftBank Group in May 2024.

Wayve’s Expansion Plans

Wayve currently operates in the U.S. and the U.K. In June 2025, American ride-hailing company Uber partnered with Wayve to roll out driverless cars in London. Uber’s ride-hailing cars in London were powered by Wayve’s self-driving technology.

Nvidia is exploring a $500 million investment in Wayve at a time when the U.K. startup is expanding its technology testing and development in other markets, like Germany and Japan. In April 2025, the self-driving technology startup signed its first commercial deal with Japanese automaker, Nissan. The deal paved the way for Wayve to integrate its self-driving technology in Nissan vehicles to support the automaker’s driver assistance system starting 2027.

NVIDIA-Wayve U.K. self-driving funding comes just days after the U.S. and the U.K. closed a tech prosperity deal during President Donald Trump’s recent state visit. The deal is aimed at strengthening partnerships between the two countries in fields like AI and quantum computing. It includes a $30 billion investment by Microsoft towards establishment of AI infrastructure and deployment of 120,000 Blackwell AI chips in the U.K by NVIDIA.

NVIDIA’s AI Startup Investments

Besides supporting Wayve, NVIDIA announced other investments as part of the U.K. tech pact. On September 18, 2025, the U.S. chip maker committed to invest $2.7 billion in U.K.’s AI startup ecosystem. Some of the new initiatives that the company announced include an £11 billion investment towards building U.K AI factories by the end of 2026. NVIDIA will partner with Microsoft, CoreWeave, and Nscale in this project.

The tech giant noted that “limited access to supercomputing, constrained venture capital outside London, rising energy costs and difficulty for VCs to access leading academic institutions, where many researchers are also entrepreneurs” make it difficult for AI firms to scale. To help address these challenges, the chip maker committed an additional £2 billion for supporting British AI startups.

“The new capital will be used to foster economic growth, develop more innovative AI technologies, create new companies and jobs, and empower the UK to compete in the AI market globally,” NVIDIA said.

Search giant Google plans to make a $6.8 billion U.K. AI investment for infrastructural development. This investment includes establishment of a new data center in Waltham near London, which is expected to create 8,250 jobs annually and meet rising demand for Google’s AI-powered services.