up to $ 100 million

The chip maker's venture capital fund, Qualcomm Ventures, plans to invest a hundred million dollars to boost start-ups in artificial intelligence.

In 2000, Qualcomm created a venture capital fund, Qualcomm Ventures, intended to invest and develop start-ups related to its ecosystem. The American company, chip maker currently mired in a fierce battle with Apple, plans to invest up to 100 million dollars in artificial intelligence. The venture capital fund will provide capital to start-ups that build an artificial intelligence directly integrated into a device.

Get away from the cloud-device stage to save time and security

Leaving aside the cloud, Qualcomm Ventures is betting on new companies that develop artificial intelligence that can run on the end device used by the consumer, which can be a vehicle or a smartphone, for example.

Albert Wang, the investment director at Qualcomm, makes a blame to the cloud to justify his company's approach: " When you talk to Alexa, nothing is processed on your device, what you say is transferred to the cloud and is truncated. This poses some problems: performance is degrading, it consumes a lot of bandwidth and there are privacy issues ". Wang specifies that with an AI directly integrated into the device that would thus free itself from the round-trip device-cloud, Alexa would, in fact, faster and more protective of privacy.

Qualcomm is very interested in AI since recently the company has invested in companies like SenseTime, a facial recognition specialist, and Cruise, which is developing an autonomous driving technology compatible with artificial intelligence.