In response to media reports that it is planning to develop a self-driving computing chip, Chinese EV maker NIO (NYSE: NIO) said it will communicate with the market when the time is right and could not respond to all of the rumors.
Chinese tech website 36kr.com reported on Wednesday citing industry sources as saying that NIO is planning to develop its own computing chip for self-driving and the program is still in its early stages and is being driven primarily by NIO chairman and CEO William Li Bin.
NIO was quoted by iAutoDaily as saying, "NIO has been continuing to invest in the field of automated driving technology. We will communicate details about AD's specific technology route, research and development hardware and software when the time is right, and we can't respond to market rumors one by one."
The reply shows that NIO has not dismissed the possibility of developing its own autopilot chip.
The 36kr report quoted a chip practitioner as saying that the capital investment required to develop their own chips could range From 1 billion yuan to 1 billion US dollars, depending on the extent of research and development.
Just this August, Ren Shaoqing, former director of R&D at Momenta, has joined NIO as assistant vice president, reporting directly to William Li Bin, who, according to public records, was formerly director of R&D at Momenta.
According to public records, the latter, a former director of R&D at Momenta, is a graduate of the joint PhD program between the University of Science and Technology of China and Microsoft Research Asia.
He has proposed Faster RCNN, an efficient framework for object detection, and ResNet, an image recognition algorithm, the latter of which won a Best Paper Award from CVPR, the top conference in computer vision, in 2016.
In addition, Ren Shaoqing was also included in Forbes Asia's Outstanding Young People Under 30 list in 2018.
During the Chengdu Auto Show, William Li Bin also revealed, "In the long term, ADAS is about improving capabilities around four areas: chip, system, algorithm and data, and we are definitely building full-stack capabilities now."
And back last year, NIO also announced a partnership with Mobileye, an Intel-owned autopilot technology company, which will see the two companies build L4-level autopilot models based on NIO's second-generation vehicle platform.
So, whether it is rumored to develop its own self-driving chip, or Ren Shaoqing to join, or announced the partnership with Mobileye, a series of measures can reflect the NIO want to establish its own "technical barriers" desire.
For reference, Chinese EVs Li Auto and XPeng Motors, also on the market in the US, have chosen Orin, Nvidia's next-generation automated driving chip with 200TOPS of computing power and 45W of power consumption.
Tesla, the only company to use its own chip, officially launched its FSD fully automated driving computing platform last April, equipped with the new Autopilot 3.0 system.
Tesla said the FSD chip has 144TOPS of computing power and can handle 2,100 frames per second of image input, equivalent to 2.5 billion pixels per second, enough to support the computing power required for full autopilot.
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