NVIDIA's new Thor chip for smart EVs picked up by BYD, SAIC Motors, other Chinese EV companies

NVIDIA is moving into the automotive market in 2025, with the AI and GPU giant reportedly working with high-end Chinese EV companies to use its new Drive Thor chip.

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In a new report from the Commercial Times and picked up by TrendForce, we're learning that NVIDIA's new Drive Thor chip will be used by high-end smart EV brands including BYD, SAIC Motors, Li Auto, and more. These companies plan to fully transition to NVIDIA's new Thor platform by the end of 2025, or by early 2026.

NVIDIA's new Thor platform is reportedly available in 5 versions depending on how much computing power the EV companies need, with the GPU side handled by the Blackwell architecture, boosting TOPS performance over the current Orin platform.

Commercial Times reports that NVIDIA is shifting its entire product line to be manufactured on next-generation processes, with the upcoming GeForce RTX 50 series "Blackwell" gaming GPUs made on TSMC's new 4nm process node and launching in Q1 2025, while Thor is planned to move from 7nm down to 4nm.

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The current Orin chip is based on the Ampere GPU architecture, with 12 CPU cores and up to 5.2 TFLOPS of FP32 compute performance, with 254 TOPS of AI performance. NVIDIA's next-gen Thor chip is based on the Blackwell GPU architecture, with 14 CPU cores, up to 9.2 TFLOPs of FP32 compute performance, and a huge 1000 TOPS of AI performance.

After that, we have the Thor SUPER chip which is also based on the Blackwell GPU architecture, but doubles the CPU, GPU, and AI power: 18.4 TFLOPs of FP32 compute performance, 28 CPU cores, and 2000 TOPS of AI workload power. We should expect NVIDIA to debut its new Thor platform in 2025.