Welcome back to the latest episode of “The Future of Automotive” on CBT News, where we put recent automotive and mobility news into the context of the broader themes impacting the industry.
I’m Steve Greenfield from Automotive Ventures, and I’m glad that you could join us this week.
This week, I’m very excited to announce Automotive Ventures’ newest investment out of our Mobility Fund II: Skygrid.
At Automotive Ventures, we back founders building the infrastructure, tools, and platforms shaping the future of mobility. Our investment in Skygrid reflects this mission.
As vehicles become increasingly software-defined, they are also becoming powerful compute platforms. Modern vehicles ship with high-performance processors designed for autonomy, perception, and AI workloads. Yet for the vast majority of their lifecycle, this compute capacity sits idle.
At the same time, the AI industry is facing a growing compute crisis. AI inference demand is expected to reach hundreds of billions of dollars in annual spend, while the cost, energy consumption, and carbon footprint of traditional data centers continue to rise.
Skygrid is building a new category of computing infrastructure to address both challenges.
AI adoption is accelerating across industries, driving explosive demand for compute. Traditional data centers require enormous capital investment, long deployment timelines, and significant energy consumption. As AI workloads scale, these centralized facilities are becoming increasingly expensive and carbon-intensive.
At the same time, millions of vehicles are being equipped with high-performance computing systems capable of running advanced AI workloads. These systems are designed for peak autonomy and safety use cases, but in practice, they remain underutilized for most of the day.
This creates a structural inefficiency: Massive, underused compute capacity embedded in vehicles; Rising costs and environmental impact from centralized data centers; No orchestration layer to connect these two realities
The market is wide open for a distributed, software-defined alternative.
Skygrid is building an intelligence orchestration layer that turns idle vehicle GPUs into a distributed AI compute network.
Rather than constructing new data centers, Skygrid’s software taps into the dormant computing capacity already installed in electric vehicles. These vehicles act as compute nodes, forming a virtual data center capable of running AI inference workloads.
We believe this represents a fundamental extension of computing infrastructure: complementing, rather than replacing, traditional data centers.
Just as the energy grid evolved from a single source to a diversified mix of generation technologies, the future of compute is likely to include a blend of centralized data centers and distributed, edge-based infrastructure.
How will Automotive Ventures help SkyGrid to grow? Beyond capital, Automotive Ventures will leverage our network of OEMs, mobility startups, and industry partners to support Skygrid’s early deployments and strategic partnerships. We will work closely with the founding team as they validate their initial use-cases and expand OEM relationships.
We believe the next decade of mobility will be defined not just by electrification and autonomy, but by the emergence of new applications for software-defined vehicles. Skygrid is building the orchestration layer that can unlock this latent capacity and turn it into a new class of AI infrastructure.
We’re excited to partner with the Skygrid team on this journey.
If you’d like to learn more about Skygrid, you can check them out at www.skygrid.ai.
So that’s it for this week’s Future of Automotive segment.
If you’re an AutoTech entrepreneur working on a solution that helps car dealerships, we want to hear from you. We are actively investing out of our new Mobility Fund.
Don’t forget to check out my two books, “The Future of Automotive Retail” and “The Future of Mobility,” both available on Amazon.com.
Thanks (as always) for your ongoing support and for tuning into CBT News for this week’s Future of Automotive segment. We’ll see you next week!
