McLaren embeds agentic AI across engineering lifecycle

Tailored for McLaren, Rescale’s digital engineering platform, powered by NVIDIA, applies a ‘perfect-fit’ AI stack to bring rapid speed and scale throughout the design and engineering development process.

McLaren can now explore more design space, run complex test and simulations significantly faster, tune every component with greater precision and reduce manual, repetitive tasks through leveraging engineering agents. As well as dramatically accelerating product development, it also protects McLaren’s engineering heritage by creating an environment for teams to focus on high value design and engineering thinking. 

Nick Collins, chief executive officer of McLaren Automotive, explained: “This is a genuine strategic transformation for the business. By continuously compounding and optimising our data, our intelligence and our engineering philosophies at unimaginable speed, we can deliver product developments at pace, while protecting the DNA of our company.”

Within the Rescale environment, the platform is trained exclusively on McLaren data and utilises NVIDIA AI infrastructure, AI physics models and agentic engineering libraries. This creates a unified platform approach that connects McLaren CAE, systems engineering and design into a unified AI data fabric which continuously learns and optimises while adhering to the integrity of McLaren’s quality standards and performance characteristics.

“Our foundational platform allows McLaren to leverage the latest agentic engineering technologies powered by NVIDIA AI infrastructure, providing a compounding source of competitive advantage for engineers in critical areas of product development, such as carbon materials, structural dynamics, durability, and ultimately the programmatic scaling of engineering excellence across every discipline, to deliver world-class products faster,” said Joris Poort, Founder and CEO of Rescale.

“The future of automotive engineering is being rewritten by agentic AI and advanced simulation, turning decades of design heritage into a live, generative engine that accelerates every stage of the vehicle lifecycle,” said Tim Costa, Vice President & General Manager, Computational Engineering at NVIDIA. “By integrating Rescale’s unified control layer with NVIDIA’s open models for agentic AI and accelerated physics, McLaren is compressing years of traditional simulation into hours of real-time design exploration.”

Transforming McLaren’s product development lifecycle

AI-accelerated workflows allow McLaren to operate and explore beyond the constraints of traditional physics and computational modelling methods. 

• Faster Virtual Simulation: AI-driven physics significantly cuts simulation time with every test feeding new data back into the system to continuously improve surrogate models and AI agents’ understanding of the physical world.
• Rapid Design Exploration: Engineers can evaluate thousands of design iterations in hours, covering multiple physics and engineering domains, fundamentally changing how rapidly an optimal performing design can be achieved.
• Real-Time Performance Prediction: Machine learning models enable instant predictions of manufacturing performance, for example in the production of high-performance carbon fibre structures and components.
• Agentic Engineering: Rescale helps McLaren automate complex repetitive engineering tasks, boosting expert productivity by 3x on infrastructure powered by NVIDIA.
• Knowledge-based Engineering: Rescale’s platform builds 'engineering knowledge graphs that capture insights from previous work, powering the agentic engineering workflows and accelerating product development decisions.