Gateworks' New M.2 Card Brings GPU-Level AI to Industrial Hardware

Gateworks, a San Luis Obispo, California-based industrial single-board computer maker founded in 1998, and NXP Semiconductors announced the GW16168 AI Acceleration Card at Embedded World in Nuremberg, Germany on March 10, 2026.

NXP, headquartered in Eindhoven, Netherlands, posted $12.27 billion in revenue in 2025 and has made edge AI a growing focus, with its Industrial and IoT segment growing 24% year-on-year in Q4 2025. The company accelerated that push when it acquired Kinara in October 2025, a discrete NPU hardware maker, for $307 million.

The announcement comes roughly a year after Gateworks joined NXP's Gold Partner program in March 2025, a relationship that underpins the collaboration behind the product. The GW16168 is built around NXP's Ara240 Discrete NPU and is designed to add dedicated AI processing to existing embedded hardware without a full hardware redesign.

Adding AI acceleration to embedded systems has historically forced engineers into a difficult choice. Repurposed GPUs demanded complete system overhauls, while running inference directly on embedded processors pushed thermal and latency limits.