Mad Money

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang: Uber accident made us realize the importance of self-driving tech

Key Points
  • "Mad Money" host Jim Cramer gets Nvidia founder, President and CEO Jensen Huang's take on the recent fatal accident with an Uber self-driving vehicle.
  • Huang emphasizes that Uber was not using Nvidia's technology and explains why he thinks autonomous technology will make roads safer.
Uber accident drove home the importance of self-driving tech: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang
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Uber accident drove home the importance of self-driving tech: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang

The recent fatal accident in which a pedestrian was hit by an Uber-operated self-driving vehicle made Nvidia founder, President and CEO Jensen Huang realize how important his company's work really is.

"It's tragic and we have to make sure that we learn from it," Huang told Jim Cramer, host of CNBC's "Mad Money," on Thursday. "We now realize the importance of this work, of course, and we're going to continue to do it as carefully and as safely as we can."

Reiterating his point that Uber wasn't using Nvidia's self-driving applications in the faulty car, Huang defended his decision to halt Nvidia's autonomous driving tests until the Uber situation was resolved.

"The important thing is that Nvidia's technology is an open platform. Uber developed their own sensing and driving applications and software," Huang said. "We want to make sure that we take a moment, wait until they do their investigation and learn what we can learn from them."

"But their technology and our technology is completely different," the CEO emphasized.

Huang went on to say that Nvidia's own self-driving platform, DRIVE, is used by roughly 370 of the company's partners around the world with a core mission of making transportation safer.

"There aren't enough trucks to be able to carry all of the online shopping that's going on. There aren't enough cars in the world to be able to support the next billion people that come online. We want to make the roads more safe," Huang told Cramer.

"We're more determined than ever to make sure that autonomous vehicles work perfectly," he said, adding that Nvidia was committed to building the world's first functional computer to ensure autonomous vehicle safety.

Huang said the computer would adhere to international safety standards and would be designed in a similar way to an airplane.

He added that his company, a leader in creating high-powered graphics processing units and semiconductor chips for video games and virtual reality, would test its driverless vehicles in a virtual environment spanning billions of miles.

"We're going to turn these into autonomous vehicle computers and over the course of the next two or three years, we'll be able to put them on the road," Huang said. "Our partners are running full steam ahead and nobody is stopping."

Read: Huang says cryptocurrency is here to stay, will be an 'important driver' for business

Watch Jensen Huang's full interview here:

Nvidia CEO: Uber accident made us realize the importance of self-driving tech
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Nvidia CEO: Uber accident made us realize the importance of self-driving tech

Disclosure: Cramer's charitable trust owns shares of Nvidia.

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