Ford just announced a $200 MM investment in a transforming its Flat Rock, Michigan, assembly plant into a data center.
There is an angle here that ties into the Michigan vs. Silicon Valley competition for autonomous vehicle development, but that’s not what interests me.
What interests me is what this move says about Big Data in automotive applications. Thus far, most autonomous vehicle development work has proceeded with relatively small amounts of data, certainly compared the amount of data that companies like Google deal with.
Ford’s investment this new Flat Rock data center portends a future in which autonomous vehicle teams need to know about Hadoop and Spark, in addition to deep learning and robotics.
David Silver 