Nvidia, Baidu Team Up to Develop Self-Driving Car

BEIJING—Chip maker Nvidia Corp. and Chinese internet giant Baidu Inc. said Thursday that they are forming a partnership to develop a self-driving, artificially intelligent car.

Speaking at the annual Baidu World conference, Nvidia co-founder and Chief Executive Jen-Hsun Huang announced that his Santa Clara, Calif.-based company will work with Baidu to build a self-driving car platform whose algorithm-based operating system will include cloud-based, high-definition maps and the ability to perceive and react to different road environments.

"No company in the world today has demonstrated the ability to integrate this system and deploy it at scale for millions of cars to drive by themselves," Mr. Huang said. "We are going to bring together our technical capabilities and expertise in AI" to make this happen.

The partnership comes after Baidu received approval earlier this week from regulators to test its self-driving cars in California, where Tesla Motors Inc., Ford Motor Co. and Google parent Alphabet Inc., among others, are testing their autonomous-driving cars on the road. Baidu already is testing self-driving cars in China and has said it plans to mass produce them within five years.

Mr. Huang said Nvidia started collaborating on artificial intelligence with Baidu in 2012 when the two companies worked to develop a large-scale graphics processing unit which made it possible for machine intelligence to train at a larger scale.

Write to Alyssa Abkowitz at [e-mail]

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

September 01, 2016 04:05 ET (08:05 GMT)

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