In his keynote address at CES 2026, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang sent a clear signal: autonomous driving is entering a new phase. NVIDIA officially released Alpamayo, an end-to-end trained autonomous driving AI system whose core change is not "driving more smoothly," but "starting to think."

Unlike traditional autonomous driving systems, Alpamayo not only receives sensor data and controls the steering wheel, brakes, and acceleration, but it can also reason before taking action, clearly explaining what it will do next, why it will do it, and the corresponding driving trajectory. This means that autonomous driving is moving from black-box execution to a new stage with explainable decision-making capabilities.

Alpamayo was trained using a large amount of real-world driving data, human demonstration driving, and synthetic data generated by Cosmos. This release marks a key inflection point for autonomous driving technology, moving from "perception and control" to "thinking and decision-making."