Nvidia invests in autonomous trucking
The startup, TuSimple, was formed in 2015 and develops technology for autonomous long-distance freight delivery. Nvidia’s investment is part of a more than $20 million funding led by Chinese social media company Sina (Beijing, China).
TuSimple uses Nvidia graphic processing units (GPUs) to develop its autonomous driving platform. These include the NVIDIA DRIVE PX 2 AI car computing platform, Jetson TX2 AI supercomputer on a module, CUDA parallel computing platform and programming model, TensorRT deep learning inference optimizer and runtime engine, and cuDNN CUDA deep neural network library.
In June, TuSimple – which has over 100 employees in two R&D centers in Beijing and San Diego, CA – successfully completed a 200-mile Level 4 test drive from San Diego to Yuma, AZ using Nvidia GPUs and cameras as the primary sensor.
“Nvidia is unrivaled in delivering the computing performance needed for autonomous vehicles,” says TuSimple CTO Xiaodi Hou. “By combining Nvidia technology with our expertise in computer vision and artificial intelligence, we’re building a world-class platform that will disrupt the freight industry. We highly value our strategic partnership with Nvidia.”
TuSimple is just the latest startup investment for Nvidia. Other recent investments for the company include startups involved in AI-powered retail analytics, AI data-mining, cybersecurity, streaming analytics, voice-enabled AI, GPU-accelerated weather forecasting, and using AI to read medical images.
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