No wonder rents are so high in Silicon Valley. Companies from around the world are setting up research facilities and grabbing talent from the area. The most recent announcements are that Chinese drone maker DJI and Japanese car maker Toyota are creating large R&D centers in the area. SZ DJI Innovations , the Shenzhen, China-based tech giant with the line of successful drones, will open a new 12,000 sq ft R&D center in Palo Alto and plans to hire up to 75 engineers. The center marks DJI’s first major effort to take advantage of American engineering talent. DJI currently has around 100 employees in the U.S., but up until now they have mostly focused on customer support, marketing and business development. DJI received $75 million in funding in May from Palo Alto-based Accel Partners to help it expand globally. In an update to Toyota’s September announcement of an alliance with the AI labs at MIT and Stanford to develop auto-related sensing and perception, navigation and human-centric learning systems, automated decision making, and human-machine interaction technologies from a new facility in Silicon Valley, Toyota elaborated on their plans. Toyota will invest $1 billion over five years for their new 200-person Silicon Valley facility near Stanford University and a second R&D facility near the MIT campus in Cambridge. The two new labs will be part of Toyota Research Institute and be headed by Gil Pratt who recently headed the DARPA Robotics Challenge. Toyota said that, in addition to autonomous driving, they plan to develop AI "technologies for everyday use, delivering a safer lifestyle overall." “This is the first small step that allows us to go beyond automobiles and make use of the Toyota group’s potential by utilizing artificial intelligence,” Toyota President Akio Toyoda. International corporations like General Electric; Baidu, the Chinese […]