Last week, Cruise announced a new DIY project: in-house chip design.

The General Motors-owned self-driving startup is following in Tesla’s footsteps by forgoing its partnership with Nvidia to develop its own processors that will be deployed in Cruise vehicles by 2025.

• “Two years ago, we were paying a lot of money for a GPU from a famous vendor,” Carl Jenkins, head of hardware at Cruise, told Reuters.
• He added, “There is no negotiation because we’re tiny volume. We couldn’t negotiate at all. So that’s why I said, ‘Okay, then we have to take control of our own destiny.’”

But when it comes to chip development, taking control of one’s own destiny is expensive. The type of AI chips likely needed to power Cruise’s autonomous vehicles typically cost over $100 million to design, according to Jared Mondschein, a physical scientist at the RAND Corporation.

Zoom out: Cruise’s decision to move chip design in-house is part of a larger shift among automakers and tech companies more broadly—tech giants like Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Meta have invested in in-house chip design as well.

By 2025, Gartner predicts, half of the top 10 automotive original equipment manufacturers will move the practice in-house.

Read the full story on Cruise’s decision to go it alone.—HF

You’d be forgiven for thinking that, after the passage of the CHIPS Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, we here at Emerging Tech Brew had decided to do what so many people understandably do: Tune out Washington, DC politicking.

Alas…One more measure crucial to the fate of US climate-tech adoption was introduced last week, and Sen. Joe Manchin is again at center stage. On Wednesday, Manchin released the text of a bill that aims to expedite the permitting process for energy infrastructure across the board.

The permitting process is a key barrier in the development of any large-scale piece of energy infrastructure, clean or dirty. It can take more than a decade for a new mine to be permitted, and building new electricity transmission lines, which carry electricity from generation sites to where it’s needed, isn’t a much quicker process.

The latter point is a big problem for climate tech:

• The US needs to more than double the pace of transmission expansion in order to meet the “full emissions-reduction potential” of the IRA, per Repeat analysis.
• If transmission isn’t expanded fast enough, growing demand from EVs and other electric-powered tech could wind up causing an increase in coal consumption.

Looking ahead…As is almost always the case, the bill will have to navigate a political minefield.

While some climate advocates argue that permitting reform is crucial to meeting clean energy goals, some progressives are opposed to this specific bill on environmental justice grounds, as it could make it easier to build more fossil fuel infrastructure and also erode the ability of communities to push back on potentially harmful energy projects.

Also, Republicans are reportedly considering blocking it as revenge for the Inflation Reduction Act’s passage.

Click here to read on-site.—DM

Coworking is a weekly segment where we spotlight Emerging Tech Brew readers who work with emerging technologies. Click here if you’d like a chance to be featured.

How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in tech?

As the senior director of engineering at Foursquare, I lead the product, design, and engineering teams in the Unfolded studio. I really care deeply about our customer needs while simultaneously emphasizing the importance of delivering excellent engineering solutions. I also help Foursquare execute on bold business decisions while simultaneously helping them focus on growing the revenue of core projects by working on customer pain points.

What emerging tech are you most optimistic about? Least? And why?

I am optimistic about the future of geospatial analytics and visualization. Geospatial intelligence has the potential to fundamentally transform how we understand our world and do business. There are tons of untapped possibilities. Specifically, there is an opportunity with data like satellite imagery, traffic movement, or census demographics to draw correlations and help businesses make informed decisions. Seeing what new technologies emerge in this space and how they can be applied is very exciting.

What’s the best piece of tech-related media you’ve read/watched/listened to?

I follow multiple popular tech podcasts, such as How I Built This, TED Radio Hour, and RadioLab. One of my favorite tech-related podcasts is actually Tech Won’t Save Us. Tech Won’t Save Us critically examines the tech industry, its new technology trends, its thought leaders.

One thing we can’t guess from your LinkedIn profile?

I am a black belt in Taekwondo, and my nickname on the mat is “Head Hunter.”

Stat: OpenAI released an open-source speech-recognition system that was trained on 680,000 hours of multilingual speech data from across the web. We know all of you can do arithmetic on your own, but just to save you the trouble, that’s about 77.6 years worth of training data.

Quote: “Right now, across the board, you’ve got a talent shortage. When it comes to cybersecurity, that’s even more amplified.”—David Chaddock, director of cybersecurity at consulting firm West Monroe, told us

Read: The mining industry is caught between its dirty past and a clean future.

Think like a CFO: Instead of panicking about what may or may not happen in the market, read Oracle NetSuite’s 7-step guide to fortifying your business against recessions and economic downturns. Get it here.*

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It’s trivia time: How well do you remember last week’s tech news?

Click here to play.

Catch up on the top Emerging Tech Brew stories from the past few editions:

• Why Revel sees an opportunity in selling energy back to NYC’s grid
• As John Deere digitizes, some experts worry about cyber risks
• Google, Amazon face new protests over contract with Israeli government and military