Rivian announced that it was designing its own AI chips for fully autonomous driving, in a bold — if belated — move to catch up with Tesla and other automakers that have working on the technology for far longer.
At an “AI and Autonomy” event at the company’s office in Silicon Valley on Thursday, Rivian unveiled its own proprietary silicon chip, as well as a number of forthcoming autonomous features that it says will enable it to eventually sell Level 4 autonomous vehicles to customers. That includes equipping the company’s upcoming R2 vehicles with lidar sensors.
Rivian also said it will launch a new AI-powered voice assistant as well as a foundational “Large Driving Model” trained similarly to large language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT that will “distill superior driving strategies from massive datasets into the vehicle.” And it said it would wrap everything up in an Autonomy Plus subscription service for a new potentially lucrative revenue stream for the company.
“Large Driving Model”
With sales expected to slow in the wake of the expiration of the $7,500 federal EV tax credit, Rivian is under pressure from investors to demonstrate a plan to compete with Tesla and other big names in autonomous vehicles. The company is still losing billions of dollars a year, despite its efforts to rein in costs and software advances thanks to a $5 billion tie-up with Volkswagen. Rivian reported its first positive gross profit earlier this year.
At the event, Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe said that the company was at an “inflection point” and that today’s announcement was about “being able to give customers their time back when in the car.”
The centerpiece of this new effort is the tiny chip, 5 nanometers, called the Rivian Autonomy Processor. Taiwan’s TSMC will produce the chip for Rivian. The company says that it “integrates processing and memory onto a single multi-chip module,” and is being used to power the company’s third generation computer. Rivian says the chip’s architecture will deliver “advanced levels of efficiency, performance, and Automotive Safety Integrity Level compliance,” referencing a risk classification system for safety-critical automotive electronics.
Rivian estimates its neural engine can perform 800 trillion operations a second (TOPS) while its third generation computer with a dual-chip setup can do 1,600 trillion 8-bit integer operations per second (INT8 TOPS) while utilizing data sparsity. For comparison, Nvidia’s H100 class GPUs are quoted at 3,000-3,900 INT8 TOPS on datasheets with sparsity, while Google’s TPU v5e per-chip INT8 number is estimated 393 INT8 TOPS. (Google recently announced its seventh-generation TPUs capable of over 40 exaflops in clustered pods.)
Rivian estimates its AI chip can perform 1,600 trillion 8-bit integer operations per second (INT8 TOPS) while utilizing data sparsity.
The chip can process 5 billion pixels of camera data per second, Rivian claims. And it features RivLink, a low latency interconnect technology that allows chips to be connected to multiply processing power. The processor is also enabled by an in-house developed AI compiler and platform software.
Most notably, the announcement of the proprietary silicon aligns Rivian with Tesla, the other major automaker that has been trying to brute-force its way to self-driving cars by making its own chips, while the rest of the auto industry increasingly lines up behind Nvidia. Rivian is an EV-only manufacturer, just like Tesla, and has said that vertical integration is a key element to its future growth.
Rivian will use a variety of sensors to power its autonomous driving, including lidar. The company plans on integrating lidar into its upcoming R2 vehicles to help with redundancy and improved real-time driving. Waymo and other robotaxis use lidar to create 3D maps of their environment, while Tesla famously does not. Some automakers have said they would use lidar in future production vehicles, but that turned out to be easier said than done. Volvo, for example, recently dropped lidar for its EX90 SUV.
Rivian also outlined a series of advanced features coming to its cars in the future, including hands-free driver assist, also known as Level 2 Plus, and eyes-off driving, also known as Level 3. Early next year, Rivian plans on rolling out hands-free driving for its second-generation R1 vehicles that will function on 3.5 million miles of roads across the US and Canada — a big leap over the 135,000 miles it covered earlier this year. And the feature will be available on more than just highways. In a video, Rivian demonstrated its hands-free system on a variety of roads, including across the Golden Gate Bridge, up the steep hills of San Francisco, and along the Pacific Coast Highway.
Rivian is trying to catch up with automakers like Ford and GM, that have offered hands-free driving options for years, and are increasingly pushing more advanced forms of autonomous driving. Level 3 eyes-off driving is limited to a handful of models and is only useable in a couple states. Rivian plans on making its partially autonomous features available, either as a one-time upgrade of $2,500 or a monthly subscription of $49.99, starting in early 2026.
And no autonomy announcement would be complete without an AI-powered voice assistant. The Rivian Assistant will launch in both first- and second-generation R1 vehicles in early 2026. The assistant will be deeply embedded in the vehicle’s operations, and will pair with third-party apps like Google Calendar. Rivian says the assistant is designed in-house, but “augmented” by third-party models “for grounded data, natural conversation and powerful reasoning.”
All in all, it’s a grab-bag of announcements designed to better position Rivian in the race for autonomous driving. Most of its rivals have a huge head start, but Rivian has proven itself a scrappy and capable player, and there’s no reason to assume that it can’t eventually catch up to any of the big names, including Tesla.
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