China Wants Its Own Brains Behind 30 Million Self-Driving Cars
China’s aspiration to deploy 30 million autonomous vehicles within a decade is seeding a fledgling chip industry, with startups like Horizon Robotics Inc. emerging to build the brains behind those wheels.
Horizon Robotics is an example of China’s resolve to move up the manufacturing value chain by focusing less on commodity smartphones and TVs, and more on sophisticated semiconductors and artificial intelligence that can help cars drive themselves or spaceships land on the moon. That industrial policy is meant to help China reduce its 1.75 trillion yuan ($276.4 billion) in annual chip imports, a value dwarfing its oil imports.