Shares of NVIDIA Corp. (NASDAQ:NVDA) and Baidu Inc. (NASDAQ:BIDU) gained over 2% yesterday after the two tech companies announced a partnership, wherein the latter will use the former’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology in three different areas. This partnership will help Baidu to bring in the best AI technology in its cloud computing services, self-driving vehicles and AI home assistants.
Per the agreement, Baidu uses NVIDIA’s Volta GPUs in its cloud offerings and AI framework Paddle, through which companies and researchers can develop products and services, with real-time understanding of images, speech, text and video.
The next big thing is that Baidu has selected NVIDIA's DRIVE PX 2 AI supercomputer for its self-driving car initiative known as Apollo. Per the company, “Apollo, an open platform for self-driving cars, leverages NVIDIA technology from the server to the car, including Tesla GPUs and NVIDIA DRIVE PX 2, combined with NVIDIA software including CUDA and TensorRT.”
Baidu is not the first company which has tied up with NVIDIA to develop products for self-driving vehicles. Notably, since 2015, NVIDIA has been providing various autonomous technologies, such as digital instrument clusters, navigation, advanced driver-assistance systems and infotainment, under its partnerships with several automakers, including Honda (NYSE:HMC) , Tesla Motors (NASDAQ:TSLA), Audi, Volvo, Mercedes-Benz and BMW.
Most recently, Autoliv and Volvo Cars also joined forces with NVIDIA to develop next-generation software systems for self-driving cars. Moreover, Volkswagen (DE:VOWG_p) AG (OTC:VLKAY) recently made a strategic partnership with NVIDIA to enhance its expertise in the field of Artificial Intelligence and deep learning.
NVIDIA’s efforts toward autonomous vehicle segment indicate that it intends to be the largest player in the self-driving and machine learning arena.
Notably, the partnership between NVIDIA and Baidu didn’t stop here only. As part of the deal, NVIDIA has agreed to use Baidu’s DuerOS AI assistants in its Shield TV product.
The recent deal is a win-win situation for both the companies. The collaborations will help the companies in developing new products and strengthen their capabilities in different areas, more specifically in autonomous vehicle market.
Notably, NVIDIA remains one of the best performers in the semiconductor space. The stock has gained a whopping 192.6% in the last one year, outperforming the Zacks categorized Semiconductor-General industry’s gain of just about 33.7%.
Currently, NVIDIA carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.
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