Intel made an important announcement at the Los Angeles Auto Show. The company’s CEO Brian Krzanich revealed during his keynote speech that Intel is going to invest more than $250 million over the next two years to develop self-driving cars. That’s a big chunk of money and it shows that Intel is very serious about competing in the automobile market of the future. It’s certainly not the only company spending hundreds of millions of dollars on this agenda so it’s not like Intel won’t have to deal with rivals.
Don’t think that just because it’s investing almost a quarter of a billion dollars into this project that Intel will start building its own self-driving car from scratch. It’s actually going to be building the technology that’s going to power self-driving cars.
The company has said that this investment is going to help “push the boundaries on next-generation connectivity, communication, context awareness, deep learning, security, safety and more.”
So basically, what this means is that Intel is going to spend this money to create new technology that effectively processes data that’s crucial for self-driving cars to function. It’s going to provide the technology to companies like BMW who are already working with the chipmaker on cars of the future.
Intel aims to power fully self-driving cars, ones that are capable of going from point A to point B without requiring any input from the human driver.