Tech companies and investors have recently been piling money into artificial intelligence--and plenty has been trickling down to chip maker Nvidia. The company's revenues have climbed as it has started making hardware customized for machine-learning algorithms and use cases such as autonomous cars. At the company's annual developer conference in San Jose, California, this week, the company's CEO Jensen Huang spoke to MIT Technology Review about how the machine-learning revolution is just starting. Nvidia has benefitted from a rapid explosion of investment in machine learning from tech companies. Can this rapid growth in the use cases for machine learning continue?

Today NVIDIA and Baidu today announced a broad partnership to bring the world's leading artificial intelligence technology to cloud computing, self-driving vehicles and AI home assistants. NVIDIA and Baidu have pioneered significant advances in deep learning and AI," said Ian Buck, NVIDIA vice president and general manager of accelerated computing. "We believe AI is the most powerful technology force of our time, with the potential to revolutionize every industry. Our collaboration aligns our exceptional technical resources to create AI computing platforms for all developers – from academic research, startups creating breakthrough AI applications, and autonomous vehicles." Speaking at Baidu's AI developer conference in Beijing, Baidu president and COO Lu Qi described his company's plans to work with NVIDIA to: Today, we are very excited to announce a broader and deeper strategic partnership with NVIDIA," said Lu Qi, Baidu president and COO, at Baidu Create 2017 in Beijing.

Self-driving cars need AI, and we delivered big on AI at the GPU Technology Conference in Silicon Valley this week. During his keynote, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang made a host of announcements that will change how the automotive industry designs, builds and drives its cars. Chief among these was the unveiling of Volta, the world's most advanced GPU architecture, which will fuel the forthcoming DRIVE PX Xavier AI car supercomputer. Xavier is a complete system-on-chip that integrates a next-generation CPU, Volta GPU and our new Tensor Cores. Huang also announced that Toyota, legendary for its high standards and priority on safety, has selected NVIDIA DRIVE PX for autonomous vehicles.

Tech companies and investors have recently been piling money into artificial intelligence--and plenty has been trickling down to chip maker Nvidia. The company's revenues have climbed as it has started making hardware customized for machine-learning algorithms and use cases such as autonomous cars. At the company's annual developer conference in San Jose, California, this week, the company's CEO Jensen Huang spoke to MIT Technology Review about how the machine-learning revolution is just starting. Nvidia has benefitted from a rapid explosion of investment in machine learning from tech companies. Can this rapid growth in the use cases for machine learning continue?

Tech companies and investors have recently been piling money into artificial intelligence--and plenty has been trickling down to chip maker Nvidia. The company's revenues have climbed as it has started making hardware customized for machine-learning algorithms and use cases such as autonomous cars. At the company's annual developer conference in San Jose, California, this week, the company's CEO Jensen Huang spoke to MIT Technology Review about how the machine-learning revolution is just starting. Nvidia has benefitted from a rapid explosion of investment in machine learning from tech companies. Can this rapid growth in the use cases for machine learning continue?

My other car drives itself

Intel's (NASDAQ:INTC) stock has remained a dog for quite a long time despite the company's desperate efforts aimed at not missing the boat popularly called the "next chip wave." After missing the opportunities in the cellphone revolution, the company has left no stone unturned to capture the so-called next chip wave. The company's recent decision to buy Israeli auto-chipmaker Mobileye (NYSE:MBLY) for more than $15 billion is another step in that direction. Intel's primary objective to buy Mobileye is to surpass Nvidia's (NASDAQ:NVDA) dominance in the self-driving car revolution. Although the autonomous vehicle industry is a nascent one, it has tremendous growth prospects.

Investors kind of have crush on NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA). The company has posted quarter after quarter of strong sales, grown gaming GPU market share, introduced new driverless car technologies, and expanded its artificial intelligence (AI) opportunities -- all of which have led investors to swoon to the stock, pushing it up over 200% over the past 12 months. If you're bullish on NVIDIA's prospects in gaming, AI, and driverless cars, then perhaps you should give Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN), Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA), and Sony (NYSE:SNE) a good look as well. These companies aren't making the exact same moves as NVIDIA, but each is poised to dominate one of these segments in their own way. NVIDIA is already taking big steps to make AI a priority through its investments in deep learning technologies like Drive PX 2 (for cars) and servers (DGX-1).

Roborace, the driverless car championship that has been under development for more than a year, unveiled its vision for the future on stage Monday at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. For the startup, that future is an electric race car that can reach a top speed of 199 miles per hour that's driven by software, not humans. The car was revealed by Roborace CEO Denis Sverdlov and the company's chief design officer Daniel Simon during a keynote address on the evolution of autonomous vehicles. Simon, who designed the car, is an automotive futurist responsible for creating vehicles for movies, including the cycles in Tron: Legacy. "Roborace opens a new dimension where motorsport as we know it meets the unstoppable rise of artificial intelligence," Simon said Monday.

NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA) was one of the hottest tech stocks of 2016, jumping 230% over the past 12 months. The company makes the vast majority of its revenue from gaming -- about 62% in the fiscal fourth quarter 2017 -- but NVIDIA is much more than just a a gaming processor company. The artificial intelligence (AI) market is quickly expanding and NVIDIA is positioning itself to make big gains in the space. According to an investor note published by Goldman Sachs' Toshiya Hari a couple of months ago, NVIDIA's total addressable market in AI and deep learning could be as big as $5 billion to $10 billion -- out of a total market of $40 billion. Hari mentioned that NVIDIA already has a lead in the AI space and that the company's competition "continues to face high barriers to entry."