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Berlin, Germany — 21 October 2026 — PhysicsX, the AI company transforming industrial engineering, and GB1, Britain’s America’s Cup team, today unveiled a new phase of their partnership at NVIDIA GTC Berlin, using generative AI and physics AI to transform how racing yacht hulls are designed for the 2029 America’s Cup.
A new ruleset for the 2029 competition is opening an entirely new hull design space. PhysicsX and GB1 are developing an AI-native engineering workflow that generates novel hull geometries, predicts their performance in seconds, and continuously learns from the results to steer exploration toward increasingly promising designs.
At the core of this approach are two classes of foundation models. Large Geometry Models, pre-trained on 3D geometry and fine-tuned for GB1’s design space, generate new, physically plausible hull concepts. Large Physics Models then predict the performance of these designs in seconds.
The workflow is powered by NVIDIA accelerated computing, with NVIDIA GPUs supporting the large-scale, distributed training of the AI models at its core. PhysicsX uses NVIDIA CUDA-X libraries, including cuBLAS and cuFFT, for model training, while also exploring NVIDIA Warp as part of its broader physics AI development stack. Integrated into a closed-loop active learning system, the models enable GB1’s engineers to explore a vastly larger and more complex design space than would be practical using traditional optimization and high-fidelity simulation alone.
Early results demonstrate the scale of the opportunity, delivering a 5x reduction in high-fidelity RANS simulation, 100x greater accuracy compared with GB1’s previous panel-method simulation, and 100x faster evaluation overall.
David Wheater, Technical Director at PhysicsX, said: “This is a fundamentally different way of approaching engineering design. Instead of defining a narrow set of parameters and using simulation to test one design after another, we can use AI to generate entirely new geometries, understand their performance almost instantly, and continuously learn where to explore next. It gives engineers the ability to search a design space at a scale that simply wasn’t practical before, and that has implications far beyond yacht design.”
The work builds on PhysicsX and GB1’s existing collaboration for the 2027 America’s Cup, moving from parametric optimization within a predefined design space toward using generative AI to create and evaluate entirely new geometries at scale.
Nick Holroyd, Head of Design at GB1, said: “The partnership with PhysicsX has become a real game changer for GB1. It’s allowing us to significantly increase both the speed and fidelity of our design process, explore a much broader range of design variables and ultimately make better-informed decisions, faster. This is probably one of the tightest timelines in America’s Cup history, so our ability to accelerate the design and development cycle is critical. The work with PhysicsX gives us greater confidence that we are making the optimal decisions at each stage of the process and focusing our time and resources in the areas that will deliver the greatest performance gains. In the America’s Cup, where every fraction of performance matters and time is one of your most valuable resources, that capability can make a huge difference.”
The collaboration represents a significant step toward a new paradigm in engineering, where AI is not simply accelerating established processes but fundamentally changing what can be achieved. With the America’s Cup providing one of the most demanding environments for technological innovation, the work offers a compelling demonstration of how frontier AI can reshape the development of complex physical systems across critical industries.
About PhysicsX
PhysicsX is the physics AI company for industrials. The company’s mission is to accelerate hardware innovation by overhauling what industrial engineering and manufacturing look like today. PhysicsX is building a new simulation software stack to deliver deep physics AI enablement across the entire engineering lifecycle. The company partners with leading organizations in aerospace & defense, automotive, semiconductors, materials, and energy & renewables, supporting them on some of their most critical and complex challenges. PhysicsX is headquartered in the United Kingdom, with offices in London, New York, and Singapore and an expanding presence in the Bay Area.
For press inquiries, contact press@physicsx.ai