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Waymo-Nvidia Autonomous Driving Battle Heats Up
"Higher Likelihood of Hyundai Motor and Kia Forming Partnership with Nvidia"

As the competition in autonomous driving between Nvidia, a major U.S. big tech company, and Waymo, Google’s autonomous driving subsidiary, is gaining momentum, there is an outlook that Hyundai Motor Group, a global original equipment manufacturer (OEM), will benefit.

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On the 21st, Yoo Jiwoong, an analyst at Daol Investment & Securities, said, "Nvidia launched its synthetic autonomous driving simulation platform 'Alpha Mayo' early this year, targeting demand for autonomous driving training, and among large OEMs, Hyundai Motor Group, which has the widest global sales distribution, is one of the few options available to Nvidia."

He continued, "In other words, for Hyundai Motor Group, this is an opportunity to significantly widen the gap with other large competing OEMs in the autonomous driving domain, and it could serve as a decisive factor for the group to settle at a valuation with a price-to-earnings ratio (P/E) of 10 times or more."

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Waymo recently decided on a capital increase and unveiled its autonomous driving simulation technology, the 'Waymo World Model.' Analyst Yoo said, "This largely means two things: first, an acceleration in reducing dependence on Google GPUs, and second, a strengthening of collaboration structures between Waymo and the automotive camp," adding, "This is creating momentum for Nvidia, which does not have real-world autonomous driving data, to accelerate its entry into the automotive industry."

According to Daol Investment & Securities, this also includes expansion into more than 20 cities worldwide. Yoo said, "The World Model is trained based on simulations of generative synthetic data, and compared with Tesla’s end-to-end training method, it could drive even greater demand for data centers," and added, "However, in the case of Genie 3, on which Waymo relies for training, the company is gradually reducing its dependence on graphics processing units (GPUs) and increasing its own tensor processing units (TPUs) to enable large-scale training."

Nvidia aims to sell AI GPUs such as Blackwell, taking into account the virtually unlimited training demand in the automotive industry. Sales of Drive edge chips bundled with data center training have been constrained by the automotive industry’s preference for vertical integration. Since last year, many automakers have seen profitability deteriorate, and the number of companies capable of making large-scale investments in autonomous driving has also decreased.

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Amid this trend, Daol Investment & Securities sees a very high likelihood that a partnership between Nvidia and Hyundai Motor and Kia will move forward. Yoo said, "Since CES 2026, this relationship has been developing rapidly, and the securing of 50,000 Blackwell GPUs at the end of last year also appears to have ultimately been carried out in anticipation of using Nvidia’s autonomous driving platform."

He added, "Hyundai Motor is set to launch its Software-Defined Vehicle (SDV) pace car in the second quarter, so expectations for the use of Nvidia’s platform could rise sharply," and continued, "The same is expected to apply to Kia, and this will likely serve as a background factor for raising valuation multiples across the entire group."

Daol Investment & Securities set its target price for Hyundai Motor at 640,000 won and for Kia at 210,000 won.