Embedded AI For Self-Driving Cars Will Drive NVIDIA Stock Higher
NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA) launched NVIDIA DRIVE PX 2, the world’s most powerful engine for in-vehicle Artificial Intelligence (AI) for autonomous cars. At a press event at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2016 in Las Vegas, NVIDIA unveiled AI technology that will let cars sense the world around them and drive themselves.
NVIDIA leads the Graphical Processing Units (GPU) sector and offers specialized platforms for the gaming, automotive, data center, and professional visualization markets. NVIDIA's products, services and software power applications in virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and autonomous cars. It appears that NVIDIA has identified high performance on-board computing for self-driving cars as a new, important strategic focus - at the time of writing, autonomous driving innovation is prominently featured on the front page of the NVIDIA's official blog.
"Drivers deal with an infinitely complex world," said NVIDIA co-founder and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang. "Modern artificial intelligence and GPU breakthroughs enable us to finally tackle the daunting challenges of self-driving cars." Huang also announced that NVIDIA has established a first deal with Volvo (OTC:VOLVY) - the Swedish car maker will start deploying DRIVE PX 2 technology in 2017. Other users announced so far include Ford Motor (NYSE:F), Daimler, and Audi.
“Due to our close collaboration with NVIDIA, Audi has the ability to integrate technology quickly and move at the same innovation cycle as the consumer electronics industry,” said Audi Head of Electrics/Electronics Ricky Hudi. “We will push the technology of artificial intelligence, of machine learning, to get the same recognition rate - or even better than a human being. For me this is the most disruptive technology - machine learning - in what you can discover now, and not just in the automotive industry." According to the company, AI will give cars the ability to analyze and learn from hundreds of thousands, even millions, of driving situations to learn better than any human being can.
"NVIDIA's GPU is central to advances in deep learning and supercomputing," added Huang. "We are leveraging these to create the brain of future autonomous vehicles that will be continuously alert, and eventually achieve superhuman levels of situational awareness. Autonomous cars will bring increased safety, new convenient mobility services and even beautiful urban designs - providing a powerful force for a better future."
The launch follows the first announcement of NVIDIA DRIVE PX, described as a powerful self-driving car computer designed to add the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology to real-world cars, at CES 2015. In November, NVIDIA unveiled its Jetson TX1 module, a credit-card sized module that harnesses the power of machine learning to enable a new generation of smart, autonomous machines that can learn. According to NVIDIA, the device will open the way to a new wave of millions of smart devices and efficiently add machine learning to drones, robots, surveillance and law enforcement systems, and autonomous vehicles.
The autonomous car sector is becoming crowded, with the participation of more and more traditional car makers, including Ford, Toyota Motor Corp (NYSE:TM), Daimler, and Hyundai, as well as innovative Silicon Valley companies such as Alphabet Inc-A (NASDAQ:GOOGL), which is planning a fleet of self-driving cars on-demand with a business model similar to Uber, Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) with its secret self-driving car project, and Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) with its accelerating development of luxury all-electric autonomous cars. All these companies predict commercial self-driving cars on the roads by the end of the decade, and a huge explosion of the autonomous driving market.
The new DRIVE PX2, which has 10 times the processing power of the previous-generation unit, can process 24 trillion operations per second, and NVIDIA is reported to be supplying Alphabet with self-driving car processors. Therefore, according to The Motley Fool, NVIDIA is likely to earn a share of the autonomous driving market.
NVIDIA's stock jumped more than 60 percent in 2015, and the new focus on embedded super computing for autonomous driving, which is expected to be one of the hottest technology areas of the next decade, is likely to contribute to the high performance of NVIDIA stock in the mid and long term.
Disclosure: I do not hold any positions in the stocks mentioned in this post and don't intend to initiate a position in the next 72 ...
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