Apple Inc is speeding up work on a project that could lead to the California tech giant building its own electric car, the Wall Street Journal said on Monday.
The iPhone and iPad vendor is tripling the number of engineers on the project, code-named Titan, and has set a “ship date” of 2019, the report said, adding that it could just be a target for engineers to sign off on the design, not necessarily when a car would be available for sale.
Apple declined to comment on the report.
While Apple has never officially confirmed it is planning to build a car, there are strong indications it is at least interested in automotive technology. In recent months, Apple has hired a number of engineers with backgrounds in automotive and battery design.
Apple representatives in May also met with officials at an automotive testing facility east of San Francisco, and last month an Apple attorney met with officials at California’s Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) to discuss the state’s regulations for self-driving cars.
“DMV often meets with various companies regarding DMV operations. The Apple meeting was to review DMV’s autonomous vehicle regulations,” DMV Deputy Director Armando Botello said in an e-mail.
A number of automakers and tech firms, including Google Inc and Uber Technologies Inc, are working on technology for autonomous and electric-powered vehicles. Google announced last week that it has hired former Hyundai US CEO John Krafcik to run its self-driving car program.
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
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OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to