Hardware & compute Companies

A robotics company spun out of MIT in 1992, known for legged and humanoid machines such as BigDog, Atlas, Spot and Handle, and now majority-owned by Hyundai Motor Group.

NVIDIA is the company that created the GPU in 1999 and, through the CUDA architecture and the chips behind AlexNet, became a central supplier of computing power for modern AI.

Amazon is the American technology company founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994. Through Amazon Web Services it became a major cloud provider, and it has built its own AI models, chips and assistants, including the Nova models and Trainium chips.

Mobileye makes camera-based vision chips and software for cars, from basic driver assistance up to systems for driverless vehicles; its EyeQ chips have shipped in hundreds of millions of vehicles.

Chinese supplier of advanced driver assistance and automated driving systems for passenger cars, founded in 2015, the largest domestic provider by installation volume, and listed in Hong Kong in 2024.

A Chinese robotics company established in Hangzhou in 2016 that designs and builds quadruped and humanoid robots, selling them at both low starting prices and industrial contract scale.

Aurora Innovation is a self-driving technology company founded in 2017 that went public in 2021 and began regular driverless commercial trucking between Dallas and Houston in April 2025.

IBM is an American technology company founded in 1911 as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company and renamed International Business Machines in 1924. Its researchers built Deep Blue, which beat Garry Kasparov in 1997, and the Watson question-answering system.

Bell Labs was the research arm of the Bell System, where the transistor, Unix and the C language were created. Yann LeCun's convolutional networks for handwritten digits were developed there, which made it an early home of neural-network research.

IBM Research built Deep Blue, which beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997, and Watson, which won Jeopardy! in 2011. Nathaniel Rochester of IBM was also one of the four signatories of the 1955 Dartmouth proposal.

PARC is a Silicon Valley research center founded by Xerox in 1970, known for Ethernet, laser printing and the Alto personal computer; it became an independent company in 2002 and joined SRI International in 2023.

Apple is a US technology company founded in 1976 that makes the iPhone, iPad and Mac. It introduced Apple Intelligence in 2024, builds its own Apple Foundation Models, and in 2026 agreed to build its next models with Google.

Huawei is a Chinese information and communications technology company founded in Shenzhen in 1987. It designs its own Ascend AI chips and the software and large computing systems built around them.

NVIDIA Research is the research arm of the chipmaker NVIDIA, founded in 2006 with more than 200 scientists. It leads work on AI, self-driving cars, high-performance computing and graphics, and it builds the company's open Nemotron language models.

Google Brain was a deep-learning research team started inside Google's X in 2011. Its cat-recognition experiment, TensorFlow, sequence-to-sequence models and the Transformer made it central to modern AI; it merged into Google DeepMind in 2023.

Preferred Networks, Inc. is a Tokyo technology company founded in 2014 that builds AI processors, runs its own supercomputer and develops Japanese large language models, with major Japanese manufacturers among its shareholders.

A Chinese chip designer founded in 2014 that builds x86-compatible processors and DCU accelerators, listed on the STAR Market in 2022 and positioning itself around a self-developed C86 plus GPGPU product line.

A Chinese AI chip company founded in 2016 and listed on the STAR Market in 2020. It designs cloud, edge and endpoint chips, and in 2025 it turned profitable as revenue rose sharply.

Pony.ai is an autonomous driving company founded in Fremont, California, in late 2016. It runs robotaxi, robotruck and personal-vehicle businesses on a common "virtual driver" system, and operates in both California and China.

A New Jersey cloud company that began as an ethereum miner and became a large-scale GPU computing provider for AI, backed by NVIDIA and listed on Nasdaq in 2025 alongside a major OpenAI deal.

WeRide is an autonomous driving company founded in Silicon Valley in 2017 by Tony Han, formerly chief scientist of Baidu's autonomous driving unit. Its WeRide One platform spans L2 to L4 autonomy, and its vehicles run in more than 60 cities.

Chinese chip designer founded in 2019 that builds general-purpose GPU (GPGPU) chips and intelligent computing solutions on its self-developed BILI series hardware and BIRENSUPA software, for AI training and inference from cloud to edge.

Chinese GPU company Moore Threads, founded in 2020 by former Nvidia China head Zhang Jianzhong, sells AI accelerator cards, servers and clusters built on its MUSA architecture. It listed on the STAR Market in 2025 and is growing fast while still loss-making.

Kunlunxin is the AI chip company spun out of Baidu in April 2021, continuing Baidu's Kunlun chip line. It designs processors for AI workloads in data centres and is one of China's largest domestic AI chip suppliers.

xAI is an AI company founded by Elon Musk that builds the Grok models and chatbot. It was acquired by SpaceX in 2026 and has since been renamed SpaceXAI and then SpaceXSI.

Liquid AI is an MIT CSAIL spin-out that calls itself an efficiency-first foundation model company, arguing that models should run on local devices; its LFM3-Omni-2B is an omni-modal model published in October 2026.

SK hynix is a Korea-headquartered supplier of DRAM and NAND flash memory, and the company that released the first high-bandwidth memory (HBM) and says it has developed and shipped every HBM generation since.

AMD is a chip designer whose data center AI business centres on Instinct GPUs and APUs, expanded through the Xilinx and ZT Systems acquisitions and capped by a 6-gigawatt OpenAI supply deal.

Google, part of Alphabet, works on AI at several levels at once: it designs its own TPU chips, trains large language models such as PaLM and Gemini, and brought its research labs together as Google DeepMind in 2023.

Intel is a semiconductor company. Its 2017 purchase of Mobileye, later partly floated, and its decision to keep Falcon Shores as an internal test chip show how it enters and steps back from adjacent markets.

A public research university in Manchester, England, which dates its founding to 1824 and took its present form in 2004; the Manchester Baby, the first electronic stored-program computer, was built there.

A private research university in Ithaca, New York, founded in 1865. It is also where Frank Rosenblatt studied and worked, and where the perceptron — an early learning machine and the first neural network — was developed.

A Chinese consumer electronics and smart manufacturing company built around smartphones, smart hardware and its AIoT platform, listed in Hong Kong in 2018 and extending its engineering into quadruped and humanoid robots.

XPENG is a Chinese maker of smart electric vehicles founded in 2014 and headquartered in Guangzhou, which has extended its in-house AI work to humanoid robots, new driving models and robotaxi plans.

Talen Energy is an independent power producer created in 2015 from the spinoff of PPL's competitive generation business, later taken private by Riverstone, restructured through bankruptcy, and now a nuclear power supplier to Amazon.

Cerebras Systems is an American AI chip company founded in 2015 that builds wafer-scale processors — single chips made from a whole silicon wafer — and the computers around them, from the WSE and CS-1 to the WSE-3 and CS-3.

British chip company founded in 2016 in Bristol that designs Intelligence Processing Units for AI workloads; it raised large sums, reported heavy losses, and became a SoftBank Group subsidiary in 2024.

Kairos Power, founded in 2016, is an American company developing a fluoride salt-cooled high-temperature reactor using TRISO fuel. It is building the Hermes demonstration reactor in Tennessee and plans 500 MW of projects with Google by 2035.

T-Head Semiconductor is Alibaba's chip design unit, founded in 2018. It has released the Hanguang 800 AI inference chip, the Yitian 710 server CPU and the Zhenwu PPU AI processor, which Alibaba uses at scale for its Qwen models.

MetaX is a Shanghai-based GPU chip company founded in September 2020 that designs full-stack GPU chips and solutions; it is counted among China's four leading GPU startups and listed on the STAR Market in December 2025.

American energy company headquartered in Baltimore, one of the largest electricity producers in the United States, known for its 2024 agreement to restart Three Mile Island Unit 1.

A Chinese artificial intelligence infrastructure company that builds the middle layer letting many models run on many kinds of chips, and also releases the open Megrez model family.