Tesla Drops (!) as Nvidia’s Faster Chip Goes to China By Investing.com

By Christiana Sciaudone

Investing.com —  Stop the presses. Tesla (NASDAQ:) stock traded down on Monday.

Shares fell more than 4% from a record after Nvidia (NASDAQ:) said Nio (NYSE:) and other electric vehicle companies are now using its technology, which features the “world’s most advanced processor” for use in autonomous vehicles and robots.

Nio’s ET7 vehicle puts Tesla “squarely in its sights,” according to 24/7 Wall Street.

It’s all about computing power, and that’s what Nvidia’s Orin brings to Nio. The scalable supercomputer-on-a-chip can deliver up to 254 trillion operations per second (TOPS). Nio’s Adam platform uses four of the chips on a single board to deliver a total computing power of 1,016 TOPS.  

Data from 2019 showed that the Orin chip could perform 200 trillion operations per second, almost seven times NVIDIA’s previous Xavier chip (30 trillion operations) and more than Tesla’s FSD Computer (144 trillion), according to Electrik.

Last week, Nio said it will use NVIDIA DRIVE Orin for advanced automated driving technology in its future fleets. Li Auto said in September it would use Orin in its next generation of cars, which are being developed with Desay SV. Xpeng, also working with Desay, uses NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Xavier in its XPilot. 

The three Chinese automakers doubled their sales in 2020, with a combined volume of more than 103,000 vehicles, Nvidia said in a statement. 

The Orin-powered supercomputer will debut in the flagship ET7 sedan, scheduled for production in 2022, and will be in every subsequent NIO model.