Joby and NVIDIA join forces to accelerate next era of autonomous flight

Joby Aviation has announced a landmark collaboration with NVIDIA, becoming the chipmaker’s exclusive aviation launch partner for its new IGX Thor platform, a high-performance computing system built to power next-generation physical AI applications.

The partnership marks a major step in Joby’s efforts to commercialise its autonomous flight technology, known as Superpilot, which the company is developing for both civil and defence aviation. By combining NVIDIA’s computing power with Joby’s aircraft design and testing expertise, the two firms aim to set new standards for autonomous operations in the air.

Gregor Veble Mikić, Joby’s Flight Research Lead, said the collaboration would enable “a new era of safety-first autonomy in aviation.” He added: “The autonomous systems under development at Joby are poised to complement human intelligence by providing speed, precision and stamina beyond what a person alone is capable of. To achieve this, an aircraft needs a powerful onboard computer that can interpret extraordinary amounts of information to make decisions in real-time. Combining NVIDIA’s compute power with our world-class aircraft design, certification and flight testing capabilities will make that possible.”

The NVIDIA IGX Thor platform, powered by the company’s latest Blackwell architecture, has been built to deliver the high-density computing and safety standards required for industries such as robotics, autonomous vehicles, and now — aviation. By integrating the platform into its aircraft, Joby hopes to create a system capable of analysing data from radar, LiDAR, and vision sensors in milliseconds, allowing for instant decision-making and adaptive flight path management.

In practical terms, the collaboration will allow Joby’s aircraft to process information in real time — optimising flight paths, responding dynamically to changing weather and air traffic conditions, and maintaining environmental awareness even in low-visibility situations. The technology will also underpin advanced capabilities such as predictive system health monitoring and digital twin modelling, allowing aircraft to continuously assess their own performance and feed that data back into mission planning systems.

The move positions Joby at the forefront of a race among aerospace manufacturers to achieve certifiable autonomy, as regulators including the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) begin laying the groundwork for self-directed flight operations. NVIDIA’s support for industry safety standards on the IGX Thor platform will help Joby pursue official certification for its autonomous systems — a key step before commercial deployment.

This partnership also reinforces NVIDIA’s growing dominance in the broader autonomous technology space. Only last month, the company unveiled a major expansion of its collaboration with Waymo, Google’s self-driving car subsidiary, to provide the computing infrastructure behind its autonomous vehicle fleet. The deal with Waymo underscored NVIDIA’s ambition to be the central nervous system of the world’s most advanced mobility systems — from cars navigating city streets to aircraft traversing the skies.

Speaking about the scale of this technological leap, Veble Mikić drew parallels between advances in driverless vehicles and the emerging capabilities in aviation. “Autonomous cars have shown the ability to interpret large volumes of data to make split-second decisions,” he said. “For an aircraft, the compute power needed for autonomy is similarly high, but also needs to meet even higher levels of design rigour to achieve certification for operation in controlled airspace. In aviation, every calculation must be perfect, and every decision infallible.”

For NVIDIA, the collaboration with Joby is another demonstration of how its hardware is expanding beyond data centres and consumer electronics into mission-critical physical systems. For Joby, it represents a decisive step in bringing certifiable, scalable autonomy to air mobility — a future in which aircraft think and react with the same precision and reliability as their human pilots.

The companies said the integration process is already underway, with early testing focused on flight decision-making and sensor fusion. The ultimate goal is to deliver a computing foundation capable of handling trillions of operations per second, while meeting aviation’s stringent safety and certification standards.

As Joby continues to refine its Superpilot system and NVIDIA deepens its reach into autonomous industries, their collaboration marks a convergence of two frontiers — one in AI, the other in flight — that could define the next chapter of global mobility.