The company's Silicon Valley Lab now became one of four owned by Intel. Others are located in Arizona, Germany and Oregon. The labs were created with one clear purpose, which is "to explore and better understand the various requirements related to self-driving vehicles and the future of transportation, including sensing, in-vehicle computing, artificial intelligence (AI), connectivity, and supporting cloud technologies and services."

According to Intel's press release, cameras, LIDAR, RADAR and other sensors will gather a plethora of various information. Autonomous cars are said to generate "approximately 4 terabytes of data every 90 minutes of operation." Processing, filtering and analysis of all this data will be performed in the car and used for the car's operation. The most important pieces of gathered information will be transferred to the data center, where vaulable data will be used to, for example, update maps and enhance data models.

Intel's Autonomous Garage Labs were set up to connect customers and partners, encouraging them to think and come up with innovative ideas about how to deal with "the data challenge inside the vehicle, across the network and in the data center."  Next to dedicated autonomous driving data center and other things, the lab also offers autonomous test vehicles that practice real-world driving, with partner vehicles and teams that are collaborating with Intel's research efforts.

During the first workshop themed "the data-driven journey" that featured Intel, BMW, Delphi, Ericsson and HERE, there were several demonstrations, explaining the autonomous driving data challenge from car-to-cloud and how artificial intelligence needs to process, understand, manage, move, share, store and learn from the data. BMW showed one of the first of approximately 40 highly automated vehicles, Delphi provided rides in its fully autonomous vehicle, while Intel and Ericsson showed a live, over-the-air demonstration of data moving across a 5G network between the car and the cloud.