FRANKFURT — Volkswagen is delving into quantum computing. BMW is building a giant new data center. And Bosch this week announced plans to construct a factory to build chips for self-driving cars.

The moves are part of an expanding effort by European carmakers and suppliers to build the computing capacity — so-called big data — they will need as vehicles digitize and become driverless.

Cars will need to constantly communicate, absorbing and analyzing information from thousands of vehicles at once, to make decisions to smooth traffic flow, save fuel and avoid hazards.

That presents a huge new challenge for companies traditionally focused on manufacturing.

“The processing power needed to deal with all this data is orders of magnitude larger than what we are used to,” said Reinhard Stolle, a vice president in charge of artificial intelligence at the German automaker BMW, which is building a data center near Munich that is 10 times the size of the company’s existing facility. “The traditional control engineering techniques are just not able to handle the complexity anymore.”