Artificial Intelligence Factories Are Being Established for Driverless Cars

Driverless cars, autonomous machines and industrial robots are becoming an important part of our lives with the development of technology. To compete in these areas, supercomputing power is needed. To meet this need, giant companies such as Nvidia and Foxconn are establishing artificial intelligence factories.

Nvidia and Foxconn partnered to accelerate the development of driverless cars Nvidia is one of the world's leading graphics processor (GPU) manufacturers. Foxconn is the world's largest contract electronics manufacturer. These two giant companies announced that they will work together to build “AI factories,” a new class of data centers that promise to provide the supercomputing power needed to accelerate the development of driverless cars, autonomous machines and industrial robots.

Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang and Foxconn Chairman and CEO Young Liu announced their partnership at an event. The AI ​​factory will be built to process and refine large amounts of data and turn it into valuable AI models. Nvidia's GPU computing infrastructure will be used in this facility.

How Will the Artificial Intelligence Factory Work?

Huang emphasized that the artificial intelligence factory will build an end-to-end system. Nvidia aims to establish an artificial intelligence factory that develops software for advanced electric cars with an artificial intelligence brain that allows them to interact with passengers and drive autonomously. Thus, the data collected on both sides will feed each other. The data will go to the AI ​​factory, which will develop the software and update the entire AI fleet.

The AI ​​factory partnership builds on the partnership between Nvidia and Foxconn announced in January to develop autonomous vehicle platforms. The deal involved Foxconn becoming the primary supplier of electronic control units (ECUs) for automakers and manufacturing those units with Nvidia's supercomputer AI platform called Drive Orin, which supports autonomous driving functions. Foxconn has also committed to producing ECUs with Nvidia's next-generation chip, Drive Thor, after production starts in 2025.

Who will the Artificial Intelligence Factory compete with?

As part of this partnership, Foxconn announced that the vehicles for which it is a contract manufacturer will be produced with Nvidia's Drive Hyperion 9 platform, and that this platform will support not only Drive Thor but also zamHe said that it will also include a series of sensors such as camera, radar and lidar, which are necessary for autonomous driving capabilities.

This system will actually rival Tesla's Dojo supercomputer. The dojo will train neural networks used to power, train and improve Tesla's "full autonomous driving" (FSD) software, its advanced driver assistance system. Tesla currently uses a large Nvidia GPU-based supercomputer, but the Dojo will use chips designed by Tesla. Foxconn-Nvidia AI fabs, on the other hand, will be based on Nvidia's GH200 Grace Hopper Superchip and AI Enterprise software.

Meanwhile, the partnership will play a critical role in transforming Foxconn from a manufacturing services company to a platform solutions company. Foxconn is targeting three platforms to start with: smart electric vehicles, smart cities and smart manufacturing.

When we look at the developments in artificial intelligence, it is actually not very difficult to imagine the future. Before us are “factories” that take data input from sensors, cameras and everything else and produce intelligence as output. And it seems that in the future, every industry, every company will have an artificial intelligence factory.