The BrainChip Holdings Ltd (ASX: BRN) share price has been among the best performers on the ASX on Friday.
At one stage today the artificial intelligence company's shares were up as much as 15% to 56.5 cents.
This latest gain means the BrainChip share price is up over 55% since this time last month.
Why is the BrainChip share price zooming higher?
While there hasn't been any news out of the company this week, investors appear to be still responding to a couple of major announcements released at the end of December.
The first announcement the company released was in relation to its agreement with NASA in the United States.
According to the release, BrainChip has received an order for its Akida Early Access Evaluation Kit from NASA. The space agency will use the evaluation kit within its shared service centre at the NASA/Ames research centre (ARC) in California.
This is expected to allow NASA to evaluate the Akida technology for potential use in programs with a neuromorphic processor that meet spaceflight requirements.
Management believes the processor is suitable for spaceflight and aerospace applications due to the device being a complete neural processor. This means it does not require an external CPU, memory, or Deep Learning Accelerator.
Given that reducing component count, size, and power consumption is a big concern in spaceflight and aerospace applications, this is a big positive.
However, it is worth noting that there's no guarantee that NASA will take things further once it has evaluated the technology. Furthermore, there are other companies with deep pockets with similar technologies.
What was the second announcement?
The other announcement that got investors excited was an agreement with global semiconductor manufacturer Renesas Electronics America. It specialises in microcontroller and automotive system-on-chip products.
This agreement will see BrainChip deliver its Akida technology for use as a system-on-chip licensed product and includes a single-use design license, implementation support services, royalty payments per unit, and software maintenance services for two years.
Management believes the technology is also well suited for advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), autonomous vehicles, drones, vision-guided robotics, surveillance, and machine vision systems. These are areas which Renesas has a specialty in.
