This humble chip will change cars forever

Nvidia, the £2.7 trillion US tech giant behind it, has the power to shape motoring's intelligent future. JAMES ATTWOOD learns how

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If you pay any attention to the world of tech or the stock market, you've probably heard of Nvidia. And if you haven't, you will definitely know car firms that use the American tech giant's hardware or software in some capacity: Tesla, Volvo, JLR, Mercedes-Benz, BYD, Hyundai and more.

Basically, in the coming era, when TOPS (tera operations per second, a measure of how fast a computer chip can process data) might be as key to a car as BHP or MPG, Nvidia is becoming a major player in the automotive industry and is the dominant force in an emerging fieldso you absolutely should care about it.

With huge processing power being required for autonomous vehicles, automotive is shaping up to be very big business for Nvidia: around $5 billion (£4.1bn) annually, if you include related services. But as its automotive vice-president and general manager, Ali Kani, tells me at the CES tech event in Las Vegas, "less than 10% of the market today" offers even level-two (so semiautonomous) functions. It's easy to do the maths.

Nvidia was founded in 1993 to build graphics processing units (GPUS) - the chips that make it possible for PCs and games consoles to have fancy graphics. And because they need the power to process vast amounts of data for 3D effects, GPUs have also turned out to be incredibly well suited to the sort of advanced computing required for artificial intelligence (AI) - an area in which Nvidia has a real edge. That's why its share price has skyrocketed in recent years, such that it is now worth $3.3 trillion (£2.7tn). Yes, trillion.

Nvidia's arrival in the automotive industry was almost an accident, with early clients such as Audi sourcing its chips to power their infotainment systems.