NVIDIA is partnering with two of China's biggest automakers, BYD and Geely, to tap into the growing autonomous vehicle market as the chipmaker looks beyond artificial intelligence for growth.

NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang made the announcement on Monday during his keynote address at the company's annual GTC conference in San Jose, California, declaring that "the ChatGPT moment of self-driving cars has arrived".

The two Chinese automakers will deploy NVIDIA's Drive Hyperion autonomous vehicle development platform, an integrated system combining chips, computers, sensors and software engineered specifically for the development of Level 4 autonomous vehicles.

Level 4 vehicles are capable of operating without human intervention within predefined areas or circumstances.

Japanese automakers Isuzu and Nissan were also added to NVIDIA's robotaxi platform as part of the same announcement.

The Hyperion platform is designed to support the full lifecycle of autonomous driving development, from the AI models trained in the cloud to the systems that process decisions on the road.

The autonomous vehicle business itself is much larger than people think, as every autonomous vehicle company in the world is working on some kind of autonomous vehicle, Huang told reporters at a press conference on Tuesday.

"It's only limited, because driving is limited by butts on seats. If we were not limited by butts on seats, the number of miles driven in the world will definitely go up," he said, adding that when road travel becomes largely autonomous, it would be a "multitrillion-dollar business".

Autonomous vehicles designed to transport passengers on demand without a human driver, commonly known as robotaxis, represent one of the most commercially significant applications of Level 4 technology.

While most consumer vehicles currently on the market remain at Level 2, which require drivers to continuously monitor the road, a growing number of companies are deploying Level 4 robotaxi fleets in select cities.

WeRide, a Chinese autonomous driving technology company, displayed its Robotaxi GXR at the GTC conference. The vehicle was built with the NVIDIA Drive Hyperion platform, which WeRide said helps reduce system costs while accelerating safe and reliable Level 4 robotaxi operations, and "easier cross-market validation".

The company has outlined ambitious expansion plans, targeting a fleet of more than 2,600 robotaxis in operation globally this year, and tens of thousands globally by 2030.