Bot Auto has picked Lenovo’s AD1 autonomous-driving domain controller, built on Nvidia Hyperion, as the production computer for its Class 8 driverless trucks. The Houston company announced the deal Tuesday.
The AD1 goes into Bot Auto trucks starting in the first quarter of 2027. Bot Auto expects the full hardware bill of materials for its autonomy system, compute and sensors included, to run $50,000 per truck.
That is three to eight times less than other systems, Bot Auto said. The comparison rests on “Self-Driving Truck ROI: Costs and Benefits Explained,” a Heavy Duty Journal cost guide that puts a complete autonomous truck at $350,000 to $600,000, a range the company said implies $150,000 to $400,000 for the autonomy system alone.
Bot Auto now moves about 350 loads a month across Texas. The company said revenue grew 270% from May to August as it increased its focus on commercial freight and fleet utilization. In April it ran its first fully humanless commercial load, a 231-mile overnight trip on Interstate 45 from Houston to Hutchins, just south of Dallas, with no safety driver, remote operator or in-cab observer.
It had 12 tractors at the time of that run. Founder and CEO Xiaodi Hou has tied fleet growth to the computer inside each truck.
“Standard servers can take you a long way during development, but they are not the architecture we want to replicate across hundreds or thousands of commercial trucks,” Hou said.
Bot Auto’s driverless trucks run today on a single Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 per server, a setup Hou credits to the efficiency of the company’s neural networks.
“The AD1 takes that efficiency into a production automotive platform with the compute, safety, reliability, and manufacturing characteristics required for scale with better unit-economics per truck,” he said.
Rated for Class 8 duty
The AD1 is rated for continuous operation from minus 40 to 85 degrees Celsius (minus 40 to 185 degrees Fahrenheit) and built for the shock and vibration of a heavy-duty chassis. It runs on Nvidia DRIVE AGX Thor and Nvidia Halos OS and delivers up to 2,000 FP4 teraflops of AI compute.
The unit carries two Thor compute domains and two safety controllers, each on independent primary and backup power, so the system can isolate a single fault without going offline. Lenovo designed it to support the ISO 26262 functional-safety standard up to ASIL D and the ISO 21434 automotive cybersecurity standard.
Dedicated liquid cooling holds performance steady under sustained load. Lenovo also folded vehicle control, networking and inertial sensing into the one box, which cuts the parts count on every truck.
Other driverless truck developers are building on the same Nvidia hardware. Aurora said in January 2025 that its primary computer would use a dual DRIVE Thor configuration, and in September Einride agreed to build its next-generation driver on Hyperion.
Lenovo’s vehicle computing business
Lenovo builds the AD1 at automotive volumes. Its other announced AD1 partners include WeRide, whose GXR robotaxi debuted a computing platform built on the controller in July 2025, and autonomous-driving company Nuro, which announced a collaboration with Lenovo in March 2025.
“Our collaboration with Bot Auto marks another milestone for Lenovo Vehicle Computing in the U.S. as we expand our footprint in the critical commercial transportation market,” said Peter Xu, vice president of Lenovo and general manager of vehicle computing.
Bot Auto and Lenovo plan to show the system at CES 2027 in Las Vegas in January.
Deployment widens across Texas and the Southwest
Bot Auto will expand the AD1 rollout as it adds autonomous capacity across Texas and the Southwest. The company has set a goal of 1 billion autonomous miles by 2031.
Until now, the company said, it has held back significant capital from fleet expansion while it validated its driving system and its freight operation. Hou said in September 2025 that Bot Auto had spent $41 million to reach its first driverless run, a hub-to-hub validation trip in Houston.
“We made a deliberate choice not to scale our fleet until the compute platform itself is scalable,” Hou said.
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