Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s keynote address on Tuesday at the company’s GTC 2025 conference was packed with announcements, following the traditional format. However, the company also managed to sneak in a brief history lesson.

During the segment of his speech focused on automotive technology, Huang referenced AlexNet, a groundbreaking neural network architecture that garnered significant attention in 2012 when it emerged victorious in a computer image recognition contest. Created by computer scientist Alex Krizhevsky in collaboration with Ilya Sutskever, who would later found OpenAI, and AI researcher Geoffrey Hinton, AlexNet achieved an impressive 84.7% accuracy in the ImageNET academic competition.

This breakthrough result sparked a renewed interest in deep learning, a subset of machine learning that utilizes neural networks.

As Huang recounted, AlexNet’s success inspired Nvidia to fully commit to the development of autonomous vehicles.

“The moment I saw AlexNet — and we had been exploring computer vision for a long time — was truly an inspiring and exciting moment,” Huang stated on stage. “It prompted us to decide to go all in on building self-driving cars. We have been working on self-driving cars for over a decade now, and our technology is used by almost every single self-driving car company.”

Nvidia has established partnerships with numerous automakers, automotive suppliers, and tech companies involved in the development of autonomous vehicles. The company’s latest collaboration, an expanded partnership with GM, was announced earlier today.

Automakers such as Tesla and autonomous vehicle developers like Wayve and Waymo utilize Nvidia GPUs in their data centers. Other companies leverage Nvidia’s Omniverse product to create “digital twins” of factories, allowing them to virtually test production processes and design vehicles. Meanwhile, companies like Mercedes, Volvo, Toyota, and Zoox have employed Nvidia’s Drive Orin computer system-on-chip, which is based on the company’s Nvidia Ampere supercomputing architecture. Additionally, Toyota and other companies are utilizing Nvidia’s safety-focused operating system, DriveOS.

The overall impact is that Nvidia’s technology has become deeply embedded in the automotive industry, particularly in the realm of automated driving.