The Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology is doling out large sums of money, naming as a specific goal the construction of a chip with performance and energy efficiency twenty times better than one of Nvidia’s current offerings. Chinese chip startups like Horizon Robotics, Bitmain, and Cambricon Technologies are flush with investment capital and working on products tailor-made for self-driving cars or other AI use-cases. The country’s edge in data will also feed into chip development, offering hardware makers a feast of examples on which to test their products.
