Why Tesla Is Designing Chips to Train Its Self-Driving Tech

Now, it's also the latest company to seek an edge in artificial intelligence by making its own silicon chips. At a promotional event last month, Tesla revealed details of a custom AI chip called D1 for training the machine-learning algorithm behind its Autopilot self-driving system. The event focused on Tesla's AI work and featured a dancing human posing as a humanoid robot the company intends to build. Tesla is the latest nontraditional chipmaker to design its own silicon. As AI becomes more important and costly to deploy, other companies that are heavily invested in the technology--including Google, Amazon, and Microsoft--also now design their own chips.