Car races are definitely fun to watch, but they’re certainly not very safe. So Nvidia chief executive Jen-Hsun Huang announced today that the company is creating a self-driving race car with an Nvidia-based supercomputer.

The robot race car will have a Nvidia Drive PX 2 AI supercomputer, and it will compete in the Roborace Championship, the first global autonomous motor sports competition, Huang said.

The Roborace will be part of the new Formula E ePrix series, where drivers race electric cars.

Every Roborace will pit 10 teams, each with two driverless cars equipped with Nvidia Drive PX 2, against each other in one-hour races. The teams will have identical cars. The sole competitive advantage for each team will be software. It’s a contest to build the most advanced artificial mind that can race a car.

Kinetik, the London-based investment firm behind Roborace, approached Nvidia about creating the race. The timing was good because Nvidia had just launched the PX 2, which can process 24 trillion operations a second for AI applications.

The first car was conceived by auto designer Daniel Simon, the man behind Tron: Legacy’s light cycles. The car can look a lot different because there’s no driver. And it should be a lot safer.

VentureBeat