The most valuable company in the world is in discussions over an investment of $500 million in a British selfdriving car company as part of a catalogue of funding pledges announced to accompany President Trump’s state visit.
Nvidia announced the talks with Wayve at an event in London as it set aside £2 billion to fund British start-ups including Revolut, the online finance business, and Synthesia, an AI video company.
Jensen Huang, chief executive of Nvidia, promised the investments in front of an audience of technology entrepreneurs and investors on Thursday and predicted that the first trillion-dollar company in the UK would be an AI business.
Nvidia is already an investor in Wayve after participating in a $1.1 billion funding round alongside Microsoft last year, which was the largest known investment into a European AI company at the time.
Wayve, which is headquartered in King’s Cross, north London, is creating technology that will help vehicles to understand the environment around them and navigate obstacles without a human driver.
The group is also backed by Soft- Bank, Uber and Eclipse Ventures.
Wayve is also working with Uber to deploy self-driving vehicles across its ride-hailing network.
Alex Kendall, co-founder and chief executive of Wayve, said the support from Nvidia “underscores confidence” in the group’s approach to AI “and its potential to transform the future of mobility”. Kendall co-founded the business in 2017 after completing a PhD in deep learning, computer vision and robots at Cambridge University.
Wayve’s technology allows cars to work out how pedestrians are likely to move, to predict whether they may cross into a road, based on their body language.
The business does not manufacture cars, but produces an AI system that learns from data that allow cars to learn to drive themselves.
Nvidia announced this week that it would invest £500 million in Nscale, an AI infrastructure start-up, which Huang said “could be a national champion for the UK”.
Nscale develops data centres and delivers cloud services and it has signed a contract to build the biggest “UK sovereign”
AI data centre in Loughton, Essex.
The UK has secured £150 billion in inward investment from US firms as part of Trump’s state visit.
Sir Keir Starmer said: “Today we put tech out there as a special feature of the special relationship.
Thank you so much, Jensen, for your confidence in what we are doing.
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