Russia’s killer Lancet drone runs on American AI

When the Ukrainians have taken apart Russian weapons, they have found them stuffed with Western electronics, mainly American.

This applies to Russia’s highly successful Lancet Kamikaze drone, also known as a loitering munition. In the Lancet-3, a key component for its alleged artificial intelligence (AI) capability is the advanced development module called the Jetson TX2, produced by US chipmaker Nvidia.

Nvidia describes the Jetson TX-2 as “the fastest, most power-efficient embedded AI computing device. This 7.5-watt supercomputer on a module brings true AI computing at the edge. It’s built around an NVIDIA Pascal™-family GPU and loaded with 8GB of memory and 59.7GB/s of memory bandwidth. It features a variety of standard hardware interfaces that make it easy to integrate it into a wide range of products and form factors.”

(GPU stands for Graphical Processing Unit. NVIDIA Pascal is a microarchitecture implemented on its GPUs.)

Nvidia has already moved on to a newer module called the Jetson Xavier NX, a much more powerful AI module. Nonetheless, the Jetson TX-2 remains available and will be until 2028, according to Nvidia.

Nvidia’s AI modules are based on highly advanced manufacturing techniques. The critical AI integrated circuit is made in Taiwan but the entire Jetson TX-2 module is assembled in China at BYD Huizhou, with a second source in Taiwan at Foxconn in Taoyuan.

The module contains a number of integrated circuits and looks like this:

Some of the other components on the TX-2 module come from different places, including China and South Korea. Other American and European products show up in the Lancet series and in drones from Iran.

One especially important component is the U-Blox Lea-m8s-0-10 GPS navigation