"This Will Be the Next 1 Trillion Dollar Company": The Firm Personally Chosen by Jensen Huang [Tech Talk]

The Startup Cherished by Jensen Huang
Wave, a Promising Autonomous Driving Company Founded in 2018
"Wave Will Become a $1 Trillion Company"

On September 18 (local time), Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, met with Alex Kendall, founder and CEO of the autonomous driving startup Wave, in London. During this meeting, CEO Huang encouraged Kendall by saying, "Wave will be the next one-trillion-dollar company." He also personally handed over Nvidia's artificial intelligence (AI) computer DGX Pod, asking, "Please use this as the next-generation brain of your vehicles."

Wave is a company developing E2E (end-to-end) model autonomous vehicles, where AI independently recognizes its surroundings to operate and control cars. It is regarded as a promising tech startup, having formed partnerships with companies such as Uber and Nissan. However, it has yet to launch any commercialized services and does not possess the massive computing infrastructure or top-tier talent found at companies like Waymo or Tesla. So why does CEO Huang continue to have high expectations and provide such direct support?

UK Startup Personally Visited by Jensen Huang

Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, delivering the next-generation AI computer to Alex Kendall, founder of Wave. Photo by X Capture

At a state banquet in the UK attended by former US President Donald Trump, CEO Huang pledged to invest 2 billion pounds (approximately 3.76 trillion won) in the UK startup sector, stating, "The UK is too modest about its AI capabilities. The country's first one-trillion-dollar company will come from AI." At that time, Nvidia and other US tech companies announced plans to invest a total of 150 billion pounds (about 280 trillion won) in the UK's AI industry.

Nvidia has signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) for an additional 500 million dollars (about 700 billion won) investment in Wave. Wave had already received 1.05 billion dollars (about 1.466 trillion won) in investment from Nvidia and others early last year.

Collaboration Since the Days of Only 10 Employees

CEO Huang began collaborating with Wave on technology in 2018, a year after CEO Kendall founded the company. At that time, Wave was a very small company with only 10 employees. What caught CEO Huang's attention was Wave's ambition. Wave aimed to develop E2E computer vision autonomous driving technology, which enables driving with just a single AI model and a camera.

Wave's Gaia World model. This video features a virtual driving environment entirely created by artificial intelligence (AI), enabling the creation of rich driving scenarios without the need to collect massive amounts of real driving data. Wave

The E2E computer vision autonomous driving that Wave is pursuing is extremely challenging to develop, as it performs all processes of autonomous driving-perception, prediction, planning, and control-using a single model. Considering that even a giant company like Tesla only committed to E2E computer vision autonomous driving in 2021, this was an extraordinary ambition for a newly established startup.

Nevertheless, Wave has achieved results on par with large corporations through the agility and creativity unique to startups. Wave is leading the concept of the "world model," which uses generative AI to create virtual road environments for training autonomous driving models. This allows the creation of rich driving scenarios without collecting actual vehicle driving data.

Wave has been conducting autonomous driving experiments in 500 cities worldwide using a single AI model since the beginning of this year. Wave

Wave began research as early as 2023 on "RL Gym," a training technique attracting attention for correcting AI errors, and "embodied AI," which is considered the next-generation technology for humanoids, based on the concept of manifesting intelligence through interaction with real environments. In a US autonomous driving test in March, Wave achieved the remarkable feat of matching UK-level driving performance after only 500 hours of training. This means the company has reached "generalization of intelligence," enabling rapid adaptation to changes in urban environments, road types, or steering wheel positions.

"A Privilege to Invest in Startups"

Although CEO Huang is the founder of the company with the highest market capitalization in the US, he has consistently demonstrated a deep affection for startups. Whenever he delivers a keynote speech at Nvidia's GPU Technology Conference (GTC), he always begins by introducing the new startups Nvidia is collaborating with. According to Crunchbase, the investment by Nvidia's venture capital subsidiary, NVentures, increased fivefold from 300 million dollars in 2023 to 1.5 billion dollars last year. The investment fields are also highly diverse, including chatbots, platforms, humanoids, and data analytics.

CEO Huang's investments in promising startups also benefit Nvidia's business. Startups like Wave rely on Nvidia's hardware and technology, so as these companies grow, demand for Nvidia's products will also increase.

At the same time, CEO Huang considers investing in startups with high potential to be a "personal honor." In an interview with tech media outlet Wired last year, he said, "We invest in companies doing great work and help the world's best talent. These companies would have succeeded even without Nvidia's support, and in fact, I was the one privileged to have the opportunity to invest in them."