Lucid and mobility company Bolt signed a partnership to operate at least 25,000 autonomous electric vehicles in Europe, but no specific orders or transactions have been made and the deployment timing was not disclosed. The vehicles will be built on Lucid’s next-generation midsize platform and designed to be “ADS-ready” for SAE Level 4 autonomy, using Nvidia’s Hyperion. Bolt said it will own and operate the fleet, while the autonomous driving software provider has not been named.

Demand is rising for high-performance automotive system-on-chip processors used in domain controllers that handle driver assistance and cockpit functions. As automakers consolidate function-specific electronic control units into domain controllers and central computers, each chip must process more computing workloads. Qualcomm and Nvidia are expanding in a market long led by Renesas and NXP. Korean Tier 1 suppliers are weighing partnerships and in-house chip design as centralised architectures spread.