Volkswagen (VWAGY) is looking to expand its foray into the electric vehicle market with a $2.4 billion investment, the German carmaker said Thursday. The company is also pursuing a joint venture with Chinese firm Horizon Robotics, a major chipmaker in the world's largest economy. However, the deal is pending regulatory approval. Following the deal's completion, software firm CARIAD, a subsidy of the carmaker, will hold a 60% majority stake in the joint venture. The partnership is an effort to "speed up customization of automated driving solutions for the Chinese market," the company said in a statement.

As the industry grapples with the best way to accelerate AI performance to keep up with requirements from cutting-edge neural networks, there are many startup companies springing up around the world with new ideas about how this is best achieved. This sector is attracting a lot of venture capital funding and the result is a sector rich in not just cash, but in novel ideas for computing architectures. Here at EETimes we are currently tracking around 60 AI chip startups in the US, Europe and Asia, from companies reinventing programmable logic and multi-core designs, to those developing their own entirely new architectures, to those using futuristic technologies such as neuromorphic (brain-inspired) architectures and and optical computing. Here is a snapshot of ten we think show promise, or at the very least, have some interesting ideas. We've got them categorized by where in the network their products are targeted: data centers, endpoints, or AIoT devices.

A staff member displays a DJI Phantom 3 4K drone during CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in Las Vegas, Nevada. It may come as a surprising fact that there are now 14 Chinese AI companies valued at $1 billion or more. These unicorns are worth a combined $40.5 billion, according to a report China Money Network recently released during the World Economic Forum's Summer Davos gathering in Beijing. Just to put these numbers in perspective. Google bought DeepMind for over $500 million in 2014. Chinese voice recognition giant iFlytek Co. has a market capitalization of 63 billion yuan ($9.2 billion). Chinese AI startups raised $27.7 billion via 369 VC deals in 2017, according to a recent report from Tsinghua University. So naturally, it raises questions on if there is a bubble waiting to pop in the Chinese AI space. How could these companies, with an average age of less than five years, be worth so much money?

China is on its way to developing a strong artificial-intelligence industry and won't be derailed by the Trump administration's steps to protect sensitive American technologies amid rising trade tensions. So says Nomura-Instinet analyst Joel Ying. In a note to clients Friday, Ying said Alibaba Group (BABA) and other Chinese internet giants are funding a slew of artificial-intelligence startups. "Despite headwinds from the U.S.-China disputes in the high-tech sector, we believe Chinese companies can still maintain strong momentum in the AI industry," he wrote. Get these newsletters delivered to your inbox & more info about our products & services.

As the race intensifies to run machine learning tasks in embedded devices instead of the cloud, several companies are trying to set themselves up with custom chips to ease the shift. Horizon Robotics is not only tackling chips but also software and the cloud, with an eye toward beating rivals in applications like security cameras and autonomous cars. "The chip is the local brain that directly senses the surrounding environment, while the algorithm is the miner of the data," said Kai Yu, founder and chief executive of Horizon Robotics, and the former head of Baidu's artificial intelligence unit, called the Institute of Deep Learning, in an interview with Electronic Design. "We want to empower end devices with A.I. capacity and make them smart without relying on the cloud alone," Yu said, adding that the "chip and algorithms are used to perceive and filter big data, perform real-time processing and transmit valuable data to the cloud for further mining and modeling. The central component in Horizon Robotics' SoCs is the brain processing unit, a custom block of circuitry that specializes in algorithms trained on vast libraries of images, hundreds of hours of video, or other data.

Modern life is one big photo shoot. The glassy eyes of closed-circuit TV cameras watch over streets and stores, while smartphone owners continually surveil themselves and others. Tech companies like Google and Amazon have convinced people to invite ever-watching lenses into their homes via smart speakers and internet-connected security cameras. Now a new breed of chips tuned for artificial intelligence is arriving to help cameras around stores, sidewalks, and homes make sense of what they see. Even relatively cheap devices will be able to know your name, what you're holding, or that you've been loitering for exactly 17.5 minutes.

The smart cameras of 2018 are getting smarter still. Startup Horizon Robotics has debuted a new HD smart camera that boasts serious artificial intelligence capabilities and can identify faces with an accuracy of up to 99.7 percent, the company claims. Read more: Horizon Robotics' smart security camera uses AI for serious facial recognition

From shopping centers and airports to concert venues and mobile phones, facial recognition technology can now be used in all of them due to advances in technology. Countries including China and the United States are developing, testing and using facial recognition technology. At the Los Angeles International Airport, the U.S. Transportation Security Administration, or TSA, has been trying out several security devices, including a facial recognition technology that takes a picture of the passenger and compares it to the passport picture just before he or she goes through airport security. "We're always looking at technology, processes, even doctrine changes on how to better our security at an airport," said Steve Karoly, acting assistant administrator with the TSA's Office of Requirements and Capabilities Analysis. If any one of the technologies being tested is implemented in the future, it will take two to three years for the TSA to install them in U.S. airports.

In an office at Tsinghua University in Beijing, a computer chip is crunching data from a nearby camera, looking for faces stored in a database. Seconds later, the same chip, called Thinker, is handling voice commands in Chinese. Thinker is designed to support neural networks. But what's special is how little energy it uses--just eight AA batteries are enough to power it for a year. Thinker can dynamically tailor its computing and memory requirements to meet the needs of the software being run.

For years, tech industry financiers showed little interest in start-up companies that made computer chips. How on earth could a start-up compete with a goliath like Intel, which made the chips that ran more than 80 percent of the world's personal computers? Even in the areas where Intel didn't dominate, like smartphones and gaming devices, there were companies like Qualcomm and Nvidia that could squash an upstart. But then came the tech industry's latest big thing -- artificial intelligence. A.I., it turned out, works better with new kinds of computer chips.