PlusAI, International, Nvidia move closer to autonomous truck commercialization (www.freightwaves.com)

Truck OEM International, autonomous software provider PlusAI and NVIDIA confirmed progress toward commercial Level 4 autonomous trucking with plans for factory-built vehicles that integrate PlusAI’s SuperDrive “virtual driver” and NVIDIA’s DRIVE AGX Thor compute platform (powered by Blackwell AI chips). International will build the trucks, PlusAI supplies the autonomy stack, and NVIDIA supplies automotive-grade, safety-focused AI compute — a hardware/software pairing aimed at meeting production performance and functional-safety requirements for real-world deployment. The update follows second-generation pilot trials along I‑35 in Texas and sits within a broader Traton/International roadmap that targets broader European rollouts and PlusAI’s stated commercialization goals by 2027. Technically, the move emphasizes scalable, high-throughput inference and safety validation (via Thor’s Blackwell architecture) combined with an AI-native stack tuned for fleet operations. For the AI/ML community, this signals maturing end-to-end stacks (model to silicon to vehicle) and increasing focus on production constraints — deterministic safety, latency/bandwidth for sensor fusion, and manufacturability at scale — that will shape research priorities and AV deployment timelines. PlusAI’s concurrent SPAC path also underlines growing commercial momentum and capital flow into autonomous trucking.