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Aurora Innovation (AUR) stock rose 29% Tuesday following news the autonomous trucking company had scored a partnership with AI chip giant Nvidia (NVDA) to deploy self-driving trucks at scale.
Aurora designs AI-powered autonomous driving technology systems used in self-driving trucks (think 18-wheelers), and the hardware for those systems is manufactured by automotive supplier Continental. Continental plans to mass-produce Aurora’s system in 2027.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said during his keynote address at the tech industry’s annual CES trade show that Aurora and Continental will use Nvidia’s newest autonomous vehicle chip, DRIVE Thor, which uses Nvidia’s latest Blackwell chip architecture and is specifically designed to power “the transportation industry’s most demanding data-intensive workloads.”
“The autonomous vehicle revolution is here,” Huang said late Monday evening during his keynote, adding that Nvidia’s latest DRIVE Thor chips are “now in full production.”
Aurora went public in 2021 during the tech IPO boom through a merger with a SPAC (Special Purpose Acquisition Company) co-headed by LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman.
The merger valued the company at $13 billion. After peaking just above $13 in late 2021, shares plummeted amid a broader slump in the autonomous vehicle industry over the next two years. Aurora shares have gained over 150% in the last year.
Aurora is currently testing around 30 autonomous trucks, supervised by human drivers, using its software on Texas roads, according to a spokesperson.
The company had planned to deploy 20 fully self-driving haul trucks by the end of 2024, but those goals were recently revised, with Aurora now planning to put “at least 10” trucks on the road in April 2025 as it works to meet its own internal safety tests.
Aurora already meets the standards for self-driving vehicles laid out in Texas’s state regulations, the spokesperson said.
“There’s a misconception that Texas is the wild wild west. It isn’t. We work closely with the Texas Department of Transportation and the Texas Department of Public Safety to ensure that we are aligned as we work towards the deployment of self-driving technology,” the spokesperson told Yahoo Finance in an email.
They added, “Commercial AVs are a regulated industry and as a result we want to make sure that the partnership with our regulators and law enforcement is strong. As a result, Texas is supportive of our work in the state towards delivering the Aurora Driver.”
Laura Bratton is a reporter for Yahoo Finance. Follow her on X @LauraBratton5.