Xpeng working to integrate advanced AI chips into VW cars in China
Xpeng expects that in addition to Volkswagen, other automotive companies will also become customers for these advanced Turing chips designed for autonomous driving, reported The Financial Times.
Xpeng chairman and CEO He Xiaopeng said: 'Developing chips is fundamentally a long-term commitment, as Xpeng envisions doing a lot of things across cars, aircraft and robotics. We need a type of chip that can support these platforms and also power our [AI] large language model.'
The company is also engaged in discussions to provide chips to additional car manufacturers. "We are seeking long-term partners," Xiaopeng stated.
A VW spokesperson in China was quoted by the financial daily as saying: 'As announced, Volkswagen and Xpeng are jointly developing two Volkswagen brand cars for the mid-class segment. Both parties contribute their respective strength. These cars will be launched next year.'
Xpeng's latest product highlights China's chip design efforts, part of a long-standing goal to lessen reliance on foreign semiconductors.
In the automotive industry, there is a growing demand for high-end AI chips to support the development and operation of advanced driver assistance and autonomous driving systems.
In 2023, the German company invested $700m for a 5% stake in Xpeng, as part of a strategic initiative to adapt to the global shift towards EVs.
This partnership has seen Volkswagen engineers collaborating with Xpeng at their facilities in Hefei and Guangzhou to enhance Volkswagen's smart-driving capabilities.
Xpeng is reportedly investing approximately about $700m annually in the development of AI-related technologies, which constitutes about half of the company's total research and development budget.
This investment has enabled Xpeng to become the 'first Chinese automaker' to introduce autopilot features for expressways and a fully voice-controlled smart cabin system, stated Xiaopeng.
The advanced chips are claimed to have a computing power of 2,200 tera-operations per second (TOPS), which is based on how many trillion operations a processor can execute in one second. In comparison, vehicles commonly available in the Chinese market typically range from 80 to 700 TOPS.
While referring to the processor made by Nvidia, Xiaopeng said at a launch event for enabled Xpeng G7 car: 'The effective computing power of the Turing AI chip is three times greater than that of the leading autonomous driving chip, Orin-X.'
Xpeng plans to expand its chip business to recover the significant investments it has made in recent years.
In May, Xpeng partnered with European EV charging network provider Plugsurfing to offer its users access to more than 940,000 charging points across 27 countries.
"Xpeng working to integrate advanced AI chips into VW cars in China" was originally created and published by Just Auto, a GlobalData owned brand.
The information on this site has been included in good faith for general informational purposes only. It is not intended to amount to advice on which you should rely, and we give no representation, warranty or guarantee, whether express or implied as to its accuracy or completeness. You must obtain professional or specialist advice before taking, or refraining from, any action on the basis of the content on our site.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
27 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Beneath Trump's China truce, a race to find pressure points in high stakes game of ‘3D chess'
The United States and China have settled into a steady state of pragmatic, if uneasy, détente. Tariffs sit at unprecedented, but not economically debilitating levels. Three rounds of bilateral talks have steadily developed and expanded, with a fourth expected this fall. President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping are circling an in person meeting before the end of the year. 'I don't think anyone wants to see those tariffs snap back to 84%,' US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said ahead of Trump's decision to sign off on a 90-day extension of the trade truce agreement put into place in May. But beneath the surface, Trump's trade war has dramatically accelerated efforts to find and demonstrate an ability to exploit vulnerabilities that will define the future of the relationship and shape the potential conflict for years ahead. '3D chess' China's grip on rare-earth elements, critical for electronics, defense equipment and other crucial products, has triggered an urgent scramble across the US government and its allies. Despite an agreement that China would unlock the supply of rare earths, US officials and corporate executives with knowledge of the acquisition and export process say there remain difficulties for critical industries, exceedingly granular demands for corporate data and a seemingly implicit effort to choke off some national security related purchases. 'It was a wakeup call to the world,' a senior White House officials said. 'That was a major thing in world geopolitics.' Xi's ability the choke off western access to essential components has become the dominant topic of discussion during all three rounds of bilateral talks so far. 'We're focused on making sure that the flow of magnets from China to the United States and the and the adjacent supply chain can flow as freely as as it did before the control,' said Greer, leading up to Trump's extension of the pause, as US and Chinese continued intensive technical discussions behind the scenes. 'And I'd say we're about halfway there.' At the same time, US technological advantages have sparked sharp rebukes and a push to rapidly ramp up capabilities in Beijing. The United States also probed clear choke points in supply for industries critical to China's economy. America imposed export controls for software tools, aerospace equipment and the sale of ethane, a major petroleum byproduct for China. The actions weren't heavily publicized – most of the coverage came from corporate securities filings or leaks from frenzied executives. Some of those executives were Republican donors, people familiar with the matter said, and raised concerns directly to Washington. The lobbying appeared to have little effect, as US officials leveraged the economic pressure as an unequivocal counter to China's rare-earth actions in the second round of bilateral talks. They were maintained in the immediate aftermath as US officials continued to press for quicker action on the matter. Shortly before the July 4th holiday, US Commerce officials notified major ethane producers the export controls had been rescinded. 'I am informing you that effective as of the date of this letter, the license requirements set forth in my June 1, 2025 and June 25, 2025 letters are hereby rescinded,' a top export administration official wrote in the notification letter sent July 2 to Enterprise Products Partners. Over the last several weeks, Trump clinched a rolling series of bilateral trade frameworks that have included explicit commitments to shore up US supply chain vulnerabilities and implicit agreements to shift production, supply chains and security assets away from Chinese influence. New penalties for 'transshipped' products – an additional 40% tariff on goods shipped from a high-tariff country to a lower tariff country prior to export to the US – have been put into place, with new regulations expanding their reach forthcoming. At the same time, China has grown more aggressive in pushing against regional players in territorial disputes as US officials have used Trump's brute-force tariff approach to build a nascent but deeply consequential new alignment that breaks from the global trading system the president has long pilloried. Even student visas for Chinese citizens have been leveraged for effect. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Trump's lead negotiator in three rounds of trade talks with China, has told associates it's the equivalent of 'three-dimensional chess.' 'The world's with us now' Bessent insists that the US now holds a clear advantage – a message he said he delivered directly to his Chinese counterparts last month during two days of negotiations in Stockholm, Sweden. 'I just said the world's with us now,' 'It looked in April, May like that the US was alone against the world,' Bessent said during a policy event with Breitbart news shortly after he returned from the third round of US-China trade talks. 'Now that we've done deals with our top trading partners, we have a lot more leverage.' The near-term goal, US officials say, is to utilize any leverage to accomplish Trump's overarching desire to secure a major trade deal with Chinese Leader Xi Jinping. Trump's trade agreements sharply diverge from any traditional 'trade deal' format and each remain devoid of the granular detail that historically takes years for negotiators to hammer out. There are significant questions about how much of what Trump has announced will actually become reality, according to diplomats and former trade officials, though administration officials say the threat of future tariffs serve as the ultimate dispute mechanism. But the decidedly Trumpian bespoke nature of the deals includes a series of significant commitments from countries like Japan and South Korea to provide hundreds of billions of dollars to the US for the explicit purpose of shoring up US supply chain vulnerabilities. Bessent, in an interview on Fox Business this week, described the unprecedented arrangement designed to use foreign capital for investments entirely subject to Trump's discretion as a way 'other countries are, in essence, providing us with a sovereign wealth fund.' 'We will be able to direct them as we re-shore these critical industries,' Bessent said. 'We are trying to de-risk the US economy.' Rankling allies Trump and his advisers have framed the size and structure of the commitments as a way for foreign partners to 'pay down' or 'buy out' of a higher tariff rate in bilateral talks. That option, however, is not on the table for Xi or his negotiators. 'The funds from the buyout are going to go to critical industries that we need to reshore,' Bessent said. 'And a lot of those need to be reshored away from China.' Still, the Trump's version of trade deals have created friction with the very partners viewed as a necessity in any new trade alliance to counter China's economic strength. Japanese officials have raised concerns with the way the structure and delivery have been framed by US officials, which in turn created domestic backlash for the critical Indo Pacific ally. 'The other party is not a normal person,' Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba said of Trump earlier this month to members of parliament demanding details of the US-Japan agreement. 'In negotiations like this, implementation is far more difficult than reaching an agreement.' Ishiba's comment wasn't framed as a criticism, but instead a candid expression of reality. 'It's a feature, not a bug,' a senior administration official said of how the administration took the comments. 'He's stating a fact, and one that we use to our advantage.' Reality bites But the rapidly evolving tools deployed across economic, security and diplomatic actions – since Trump initially triggered a de facto trade embargo between the two nations – has laid bare a far more existential reality: Trump needs China. The bilateral agreement to extend the temporary trade war truce this week came after a third round of negotiations framed by both sides as positive. Trump's advisers regularly cite his 'excellent' personal relationship with Xi and continue to weigh the possibility of a face-to-face meeting in China later this year. But, to accomplish that peace, Trump gave the green light for US companies to sell less-advanced artificial intelligence chips to China, drawing the ire of hawks within his own party. 'If he doesn't reverse this decision, it may be remembered as the moment when America surrendered the technological advantage needed to bring manufacturing home and keep our nation secure,' Matt Pottinger, Trump's first term deputy national security adviser, wrote this week with Liza Tobin, who served as China director on the National Security Council in during Trump's first term and under former President Joe Biden. Trump officials counter that the chips represent lower-tier technology and the highest end of the US chip stack isn't will remain blocked. More critically, they say, Chinese access to the chips would anchor the rapidly developing global AI race to US technology at the same time Trump, in a series of Oval Office meetings and calls over the last several weeks the CEOs of the largest tech firms in the world, has offered exemptions from forthcoming semiconductor tariffs in exchange for commitments to manufacture in the US. 'His objective is to get semiconductor manufacturing done here of our best technology and that way we can control it the best,' Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said last week. 'That's the strategy.' Sign in to access your portfolio
Boston Globe
42 minutes ago
- Boston Globe
Shopping for school supplies becomes a summer activity as families juggle technology and tariffs
Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Retail and technology consulting company Coresight Research estimates that back-to-school spending from June through August will reach $33.3 billion in the U.S., a 3.3% increase from the same three-month period a year ago. The company predicted families would complete about 60% of their shopping before August to avoid extra costs from tariffs. Advertisement 'Consumers are of the mindset where they're being very strategic and conscientious around price fluctuations, so for back to school, it prompts them to shop even earlier,' said Vivek Pandya, lead analyst at Adobe Digital Insights, the research division of software company Adobe Inc. Getting a head start Miami resident Jacqueline Agudelo, 39, was one of the early birds who started shopping for school supplies in June because she wanted to get ahead of possible price increases from new U.S. tariffs on imported products. Advertisement The teacher's supply list for her 5-year-old son, who started kindergarten earlier this month, mandated specific classroom items in big quantities. Agudelo said her shopping list included 15 boxes of Crayola crayons, Lysol wipes and five boxes of Ticonderoga brand pencils, all sharpened. Agudelo said she spent $160 after finding plenty of bargains online and in stores, including the crayons at half off, but found the experience stressful. Kylie and Cash Zimmerman shop in the back-to-school supplies section of a Target in Sherwood, Ore., Friday, Aug. 8, 2025. Jenny Kane/Associated Press 'I am overwhelmed by the need to stay on top of where the deals are as shopping has become more expensive over the years,' she said. A lot of the backpacks, lined paper, glue sticks — and Ticonderoga pencils — sold in the U.S. are made in China, whose products were subjected to a 145% tariff in the spring. Under the latest agreement between the countries, Chinese goods are taxed at a 30% rate when they enter the U.S. Many companies accelerated shipments from China early in the year, stockpiling inventory at pre-tariff prices. Some predicted consumers would encounter higher prices just in time for the back-to-school shopping season. Although government data showed consumer prices rose 2.7% last month from a year earlier, strategic discounting by major retailers may have muted any sticker shock for customers seeking school supplies. Backpacks and lunchboxes, for example, had discounts as deep as 12.1% during Amazon's Prime Day sales and competing online sales at Target and Walmart in early July, Adobe Insights said. Throughout the summer, some of the biggest chains have are advertising selective price freezes to hold onto customers. Advertisement Walmart is advertising a 14-item school supplies deal that costs $16, the lowest price in six years, company spokesperson Leigh Stidham said. Target said in June that it would maintain its 2024 prices on 20 key back-to-school items that together cost less than $20. An analysis consumer data provider Numerator prepared for The Associated Press showed the retail cost of 48 products a family with two school age children might need — two lunchboxes, two scientific calculators, a pair of boy's shoes — averaged $272 in July, or $3 less than the same month last year. Digital natives in the classroom Numerator, which tracks U.S. retail prices through sales receipts, online account activity and other information from 200,000 shoppers, reported last year that households were buying fewer notebooks, book covers, writing instruments and other familiar staples as students did more of their work on computers. The transition does not mean students no longer have to stock up on plastic folders, highlighters and erasers, or that parents are spending less to equip their children for class. Accounting and consulting firm Deloitte estimates that traditional school supplies will account for more than $7 billion of the $31 billion it expects U.S. parents to put toward back-to-school shopping. Shopping habits also are evolving. TeacherLists, an online platform where individual schools and teachers can upload their recommended supply lists and parents can search for them, was launched in 2012 to reduce the need for paper lists. It now has more than 2 million lists from 70,000 schools. Users have the option of clicking on an icon that populates an online shopping cart at participating retail chains. Some retailers also license the data for use on their websites and in their stores, said Dyanne Griffin, the architect and vice president of TeacherLists. Advertisement The typical number of items teacher request has remained fairly steady at around 17 since the end of the coronavirus pandemic, Griffin said. 'The new items that had come on the list, you know, in the last four or five years are more the tech side. Everybody needs headphones or earbuds, that type of thing, maybe a mouse,' she said. She's also noticed a lot of schools requiring clear backpacks and pencil pouches so the gear can't be used to stow guns. Enter artificial intelligence For consumers who like to research their options before they buy, technology and retail companies have introduced generative AI tools to help them find and compare products. Rufus, the AI-powered shopping assistant that Amazon launched last year, is now joined by Sparky, an app-only feature that Walmart shoppers can use to get age-specific product recommendations and other information in response to their questions. Just over a quarter of U.S. adults say they use AI for shopping, which is considerably lower than the number who say they use AI for tasks such as searching for information or brainstorming, according to an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll in July. Some traditions remain Before the pandemic turned a lot more people into online shoppers, schools and local Parent Teacher Associations embraced the idea of making back-to-school shopping easier by ordering ready-made bundles of teacher-recommended supplies. An extra fee on the price helped raise money for the school. Market data from Edukit, a supplier of school supply kits owned by TeachersList parent company School Family Media, shows that about 40% of parents end up buying the boxes, meaning the other 60% need to shop on their own, Griffin said. She noted that parents typically must commit no later than June to secure a bundle, which focus on essentials like notebooks and crayons. Advertisement Agudelo said her son's school offered a box for $190 that focused on basics like crayons and notebooks but didn't include a backpack. She decided to pass and shop around for the best prices. She also liked bringing her son along for the shopping trips. 'There's that sense of getting him mentally prepared for the school year,' Agudelo said. 'The box takes away from that.'
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
UMAC Gears Up to Report Q2 Earnings: What's in the Offing?
Unusual Machines UMAC is scheduled to release second-quarter 2025 results on Aug. 14, after market close. The company delivered a negative earnings surprise of 75% for the first quarter of 2025. Unusual Machines, Inc. Price and EPS Surprise Unusual Machines, Inc. price-eps-surprise | Unusual Machines, Inc. Quote UMAC's Q2 Expectations The Zacks Consensus Estimate for revenues is set at $2.1 million, implying 50.4% growth from the year-ago quarter's actual. The U.S. commercial drone market is anticipated to grow, seeing a CAGR of 12.5% from 2024 to 2033. We expect this expanding market to boost demand for secure and high-octane unmanned aerial systems across different sectors in the United States, aiding UMAC's top line. The Drones of America Act, introduced in the Senate on June 25, aimed at banning Chinese components, is anticipated to have benefited UMAC in terms of contract growth. An increasing number of government agencies and infrastructure providers adhering to the National Defense Authorization Act and the Blue UAS Framework is likely to have favored domestic manufacturers, supporting UMAC's growth. The consensus estimate for loss is pegged at 7 cents per share, whereas it incurred a loss of 16 cents a year ago. What Our Model Says About UMAC Our proven model does not conclusively predict an earnings beat for Unusual Machines this time around. The combination of a positive Earnings ESP and a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy), 2 (Buy) or 3 (Hold) increases the odds of an earnings beat. But that is not the case here. You can uncover the best stocks to buy or sell before they are reported with our Earnings ESP Filter. UMAC has an Earnings ESP of 0.00% and a Zacks Rank #3 at present. You can see the complete list of today's Zacks #1 Rank stocks here. Earnings Snapshot Gartner, Inc. IT reported second-quarter 2025 results, wherein earnings and revenues surpassed the Zacks Consensus Estimate. IT's adjusted earnings per share of $3.53 beat the Zacks Consensus Estimate by 4.4% and increased 9.6% from the year-ago quarter. Revenues of $1.7 billion beat the consensus estimate by a slight margin and improved 5.7% year over year. IQVIA Holdings Analytics Inc. IQV posted impressive second-quarter 2025 results. IQV's adjusted earnings were $2.81 per share, beating the Zacks Consensus Estimate by 1.8% and rising 6.4% on a year-over-year basis. Total revenues of $4 billion surpassed the consensus estimate by 1.5% and grew 5.3% from the year-ago quarter. Want the latest recommendations from Zacks Investment Research? Today, you can download 7 Best Stocks for the Next 30 Days. Click to get this free report Gartner, Inc. (IT) : Free Stock Analysis Report IQVIA Holdings Inc. (IQV) : Free Stock Analysis Report Unusual Machines, Inc. (UMAC) : Free Stock Analysis Report This article originally published on Zacks Investment Research ( Zacks Investment Research Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
