Practically everyone is wading into the autonomous car space. And, collaboration between firms is just as common. Alphabet's Waymo, and GM, are buddying up with Lyft. Renault is cozying up to Nissan. And China's search giant Baidu is targeting, well, everyone. And that's just a smattering of the team-ups currently taking place. Toyota itself also recently hooked up with Mazda to build a US assembly plant for EVs and self-driving cars.

All those connected car tests are already racking up big data, which will ramp up exponentially over time. In fact, it's estimated the data volume between vehicles and the cloud will reach 10 exabytes per month by 2025, said Toyota. That's approximately 10,000 times larger than the present amount, according to the company. Pooling some of that data in the form of an alliance therefore makes a lot of sense. Especially, if Toyota and Intel intend to keep up with the competition.