Industrial PC maker Neousys Technology Inc (宸曜科技) expects strong growth in its edge artificial intelligence (AI) business from this year, driven by rising demand across manufacturing, transportation, semiconductors, defense and healthcare. Edge AI computers account for about 40 percent of its product mix, said Neousys, whose edge AI portfolio includes fanless industrial computers, graphics processing unit (GPU)-enabled AI systems and mission computers designed for harsh environments. The company expects edge AI-related revenue to grow 10 to 20 percent year-on-year this year, Neousys vice president Bryan Lan (藍林忠) said in an interview with the Taipei Times on Thursday. Photo: Meryl Kao, Taipei Times “This year, we’ve seen growing demand for computers with AI computing or expansion capabilities, even for applications that previously required only data collection or human-machine interaction,” he said. High-performance AI systems are used mainly in autonomous driving and defense applications, but customers are increasingly demanding basic AI inference capabilities even in smaller industrial computers, Lan said. In view of growing demand for edge AI, Neousys is preparing products based on Intel Corp’s next-generation Nova Lake platform, with a launch possible as early as the first quarter of next year, he said. The platform’s integrated neural processing unit would allow smaller, task-specific AI models to run at the edge without significantly increasing system costs, he added. The company’s edge AI products are largely deployed in factory safety control, traffic enforcement and semiconductor optical inspection, Lan said. At the Taiwan Automation Intelligence and Robot Show in Taipei last week, Neousys and its partners demonstrated its latest factory safety-monitoring system based on Nvidia Corp’s Jetson platform that can detect workers who have entered hazardous areas and issue real-time alerts. The company is seeing growing demand from the semiconductor sector, with products used in wafer fabrication equipment accounting for about 10 percent