Computer graphics chips maker Nvidia, makers of the Jetson DiY-AI boards I reported on earlier, already has partnerships all-electric carmakers Tesla and Baidu. Now Nvidia is poised to expand into technology for self-driving cars. At the CES technology conference in Las Vegas Nvidia revealed that Uber's self-driving car fleet was using their technology to help its autonomous cars perceive the world and make very rapid decisions. Uber has been using Nvidia's GPU computing technology since its first test fleet of Volvo SC90 SUVS were deployed back in 2016 in Pittsburgh and Phoenix.

Also from our recollection but fresher, Uber's autonomous driving program was perturbed this year by a lawsuit filed in San Francisco by rival Waymo alledging trade secret theft. Despite this setback the Uber self-driving program achieved one million autonomous miles being driven in just the past 100 days.

By adding Volkswagen and using their new Drive-IX platform, Nvidia links to the German automakers' future lineups.

Nvidia’s first Xavier processors used in the roadmap to self-driving vehicles are scheduled to reach customers this quarter. The system on a chip (SoC) delivers 30 trillion operations per second using 30 watts of power. Nvidia said it will team up with Silicon Valley startup Aurora to build a new self-driving hardware platform using the Xavier processor.