Amid the ongoing chip shortage, BYD cooperated with AI chip maker Horizon Robotics, which just crossed the mark of 1 million pre-installed sets.

Horizon Robotics, a company that is mainly focusing on the development, production, and sale of artificial intelligence (AI) chips for smart vehicles, has announced its cooperation with BYD on April 21.

As the first auto maker that announced a decision to stop manufacturing traditional fuel vehicles, BYD sold 1.5 million new energy vehicles (NEV) globally, including 600,000 passenger vehicles in 2021. BYD is the investor of Horizon Robotics and has announced that part of the BYD’s models will use the Journey 5 (J5) AI chips supplied by the chip maker. 

Moreover, BYD said mass production of cars equipped with J5 will begin in the middle of 2023. J5 is the third-generation AI chip that is developed by Horizon Robotics. It has an eight-core ARM Cortex A55 CPU and a dual-core Horizon Bayesian architecture Brain Processor Unit (BPU) AI computing unit, with a single chip capable of 128 TOPS of computing power, according to information released by the company. 

China’s AI chip market is intensively competitive, and Horizon Robotics faces competition in the domestic market from international giants such as Qualcomm, Mobileye, and NVIDIA.