Inside Bolt and NVIDIA's Autonomous Vehicles Mission

Europe's leading ride-sharing company Bolt has partnered with NVIDIA to accelerate the deployment of autonomous vehicles across Europe

The Estonia-based business will leverage NVIDIA's AI technologies and computing infrastructure to build scalable foundations for autonomous vehicle technology throughout the continent.

It comes as Europe accelerates its deployment of AI-powered autonomous systems, working to match the technological adoption rates already seen in China and the US.

NVIDIA integration with Bolt

Bolt's operations span more than 850 cities in 50+ countries through ride-sharing, car hailing and delivery services.

The firm serves more than 200 million customers, with real-world driving data generated from these operations providing a foundation for training AI systems.

Jevgeni Kabanov, President & Head of Autonomous Driving at Bolt, says: "Real-world data is the most valuable asset in the race for safe autonomy.

"By marrying Bolt's operational scale with the NVIDIA Hyperion Platform, Alpamayo foundation models, AI infrastructure and open models and libraries, we are creating a European-led AV offering that ensures our continent remains at the forefront of mobility innovation while maintaining full control over our data and technology."

Bolt will integrate the NVIDIA DRIVE Hyperion platform, designed for autonomous taxi deployments. Dual NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Thor processors will be utilised by the system along with a multi-sensor architecture combining lidar, camera and radar for robust perception and redundancy.

This system, running NVIDIA DriveOS, provides the high-performance compute required for real-time processing and Level 4-ready autonomous capabilities.

Bolt's fleet will use NVIDIA Omniverse libraries, NVIDIA Cosmos world foundation models, NVIDIA Alpamayo foundation models and NVIDIA AI infrastructure to accelerate AV development for European roads.

David Gardner, VP of Corporate Finance at Bolt, comments: "Our work together will combine Bolt's real-world mobility data with NVIDIA's AI infrastructure, simulation tools and autonomous vehicle platform to accelerate the development of safe and scalable AV systems designed for European roads.

"This builds on the partnerships we announced last year with Pony.ai and Stellantis.

"Adding NVIDIA strengthens the AI and compute layer needed to train and scale these systems, and ensures Bolt is well-positioned to be a leader in bringing autonomous mobility technology to Europe."

NVIDIA's Alpamayo foundation models

NVIDIA's Alpamayo, which is a library of technology and infrastructure, is focused on ensuring that autonomous systems can overcome rare or unexpected events. The technology achieves this by using vision-language-action AI models, which can verbalise their decision logic.

Alpamayo will be used to accelerate policy learning and behavioural adaptation across diverse European traffic norms, helping ensure the resulting AI models reflect the complexity and diversity of European city streets.

The adoption of AI-powered autonomous vehicles has been slower in Europe compared to the US and China, where the technology has already been deployed in various cities.

While Europe has seen the rollout of various pilot projects, the US and China each clock up more than 450,000 and 250,000 commercial rides per week, respectively, according to data from McKinsey.

According to Deloitte, more than a quarter of UK drivers do not trust AI in cars, mirroring scepticism in the US (26%) and Germany (25%). This contrasts with the overwhelming acceptance seen in India (82%) and China (77%).

Increasing awareness of AI projects, as well as more widely available public safety information about autonomous systems, may go some way towards convincing Europe's drivers.