Much to the delight of its shareholders, the Brainchip Holdings Ltd (ASX: BRN) share price has stormed higher during trade on Tuesday.
At the time of writing the neural computing technology company's shares are almost 18% higher at 20 cents.
Why have its shares charged higher today?
This morning the company announced that it has shipped its first BrainChip Accelerator card to a major European automobile manufacturer.
The technology will be evaluated for use in Advanced Driver Assisted and Autonomous Vehicle applications by the unnamed automaker.
What is BrainChip Accelerator?
BrainChip Accelerator is an exciting piece of technology which increases the performance of object recognition provided by BrainChip Studio software and algorithms.
The low-power accelerator card can detect, extract, and track objects using its proprietary spiking neural network technology. It provides a 7x improvement in images/second/watt, compared to traditional convolutional neural networks accelerated by Graphics Processing Units.
What else does the company do?
As well as providing automakers with solutions, the company also provides services to the casino and civil surveillance industries.
The company's Game Outcome solution utilises its Spiking Neuron Adaptive Processor technology to determine cards and outcomes in real‐time, while monitoring and providing alerts for gaming operators.
Whereas BrainChip Studio uses an artificial intelligence technology to allow law enforcement and intelligence organisations to rapidly search vast amounts of video footage for identifying patterns or faces.
This can be achieved on low resolution video and requires only a 24×24 pixel image to detect and classify faces.
Should you invest?
There's no doubt that artificial intelligence is a huge market and one that will grow significantly in the future.
If Brainchip's technology is adopted by leading automakers, law enforcement agencies, and casinos, then it could be in a strong position to deliver bumper profit growth over the next decade.
But it is still early days, of course. So for this reason I would suggest investors hold off an investment and keep it on their watchlist instead.
In the meantime, tech shares such as Altium Limited (ASX: ALU) and Aconex Ltd (ASX: ACX) might be better options for investors.
