Chinese EV maker NIO has selected the NVIDIA DRIVE Orin system-on-a-chip (SoC) for its new generation of electric vehicles, which will offer advanced automated driving capabilities.

NIO wants to bring high performance EVs to a mass consumer market. The company has revealed its NVIDIA DRIVE Orin-powered supercomputer, dubbed Adam, which will first appear in the ET7 sedan that will ship in China starting in 2022.

Adam has a centralised, software-defined computing architecture. NIO’s next-generation EVs, like the ET7 sedan, will feature upgradable AI-enabled capabilities, which the NIO says will be perpetually updated after the point of sale.

NVIDIA Orin is a scalable supercomputer-on-a-chip family that ranges from a high end of 254 trillions of operations per second (TOPS) to an entry-level ADAS/Level 2 use cases (10 TOPS/5 watts). NIO will feature four high-performance Orin SoCs in each of its EVs to achieve a performance of 1,000+ TOPS — delivering the redundancy and diversity necessary for safe autonomous operation.

The first of NIO’s EVs to feature Orin, the ET7 is a high-performance vehicle that accelerates from zero to 100km in 3.9 seconds. It also features a new 150kw battery for extended mileage range.

“Autonomy and electrification are the key forces transforming the automotive industry,” said Jensen Huang, NVIDIA founder and CEO. “We are delighted to partner with NIO, a leader in the new energy vehicle revolution—leveraging the power of AI to create the software-defined EV fleets of the future.”

“The cooperation of NIO and NVIDIA will accelerate the development of autonomous driving on smart vehicles. NIO’s in-house developed autonomous driving algorithms will be running on four industry-leading NVIDIA Orin processors, delivering an unprecedented 1000+ TOPS in production cars,” said William Li, Founder, Chairman and CEO of NIO.