The Antigravity A1 bills itself as “the world’s first 8K all-in-one 360 drone,” but what’s really interesting isn’t just the 360-degree capability (though that certainly is). The real standout for me though is the American silicon running the show. At a moment when the FCC just banned all future foreign-made drones and components, Antigravity’s choice to build its highly-anticipated A1 drone around Ambarella’s CV5 AI chip looks either prescient or perfectly timed.
I spoke with Jerome Gigot, VP of Marketing for Edge Products at Ambarella, ahead of CES 2026 (where Ambarella has a strong presence this year) to understand what makes the A1 different from every other consumer drone on the market.
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What makes the Antigravity A1 drone unique
Prior to the launch of the Antigravity A1 drone, most drones that capture 360-degree footage do so through external camera attachments (think of the Insta360 modules that mount on DJI drones). The A1 integrates that capability directly into the airframe as a sub-250-gram package, meaning no FAA registration required for recreational use.
The drone captures 8K 360-degree video with what Antigravity calls a “fly first, frame later” workflow. You fly the drone, capture everything around it, and then choose your framing in post-production. It’s the same concept Insta360 and other action cameras have popularized, now built into a drone from the ground up.
Flight time is listed as 24 minutes (normal mode) or 39 minutes (long endurance mode), which is competitive for a sub-250-gram drone, especially one processing 360-degree footage in real-time.
And then there’s the tech inside, which is the CV5 chip made by Ambarella, Inc., a publicly-traded semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, Calif.
Why the Ambarella CV5 chip matters
The CV5 is a chip that combines video processing with artificial intelligence capabilities, all running locally on the device rather than relying on cloud processing.
“For the A1, our CV5 Edge AI SoC seamlessly fuses multiple fisheye sensor inputs to enable real-time 360° VR-style tracking, flight capture, and immersive experiences,” Gigot said in an interview with The Drone Girl. “It also runs multiple AI algorithms that are integral to the A1’s overall architecture.”
In short, the A1 uses multiple fisheye cameras to capture the full sphere around the drone. Then, Ambarella’s CV5 chip takes those separate camera feeds and stitches them together in real-time to create the 360-degree view. It’s doing this fusion and processing during the flight, not afterward on your computer.
“What makes our SoC especially well-suited to A1 is its combination of low-power operation, robust computer vision capabilities, and advanced image signal processing,” Gigot said.
The CV5 includes Ambarella’s CVflow AI architecture, which accelerates computer vision and deep learning tasks. For the A1, that means the drone can handle the computational load of stitching multiple fisheye camera feeds, running tracking algorithms, and potentially doing scene understanding — all while staying under 250 grams and maintaining respectable flight times. It also means the drone can handle AI workloads without draining batteries or overheating.
An American-made chip
Antigravity is a Chinese drone maker using American chip tech. It made me wonder: Is Antigravity using American chip technology to distance itself from Chinese hardware concerns?
“From our perspective, Antigravity chose the CV5 primarily for delivering high-performance 8K video and AI in a low-power package,” Gigot said. “Geopolitical factors may have played a role, though we don’t view them as the main driver for this drone generation.”
But it’s likely a good time to be an American drone component maker.
“Looking ahead, drone makers targeting the US market will face increasing scrutiny over component origins,” Gigot said.
That scrutiny arrived faster than anyone expected. On December 22, 2025, the FCC banned all foreign-made drones and components from receiving equipment authorizations in the United States. New drones using foreign chips, motors, batteries, or flight controllers can’t enter the U.S. market — at least not without specific exemptions from the Department of Defense or Department of Homeland Security.
There’s still a lot we don’t know about the ban, and many in the drone industry have expressed outrage in how this may kill American innovation. Even for drone (and drone component makers) there is extreme uncertainty about next steps.
“The recent FCC ban is too new for full clarity on its implications for new drones, including any available exceptions,” Gigot said. “Legacy models, from authorized vendors, face no issues and can ship uninterrupted.
But then he added what might be the most important line for anyone following the drone industry.
“Moving forward, we expect strong incentives for drone makers to prioritize U.S.-sourced components when targeting the US market,” he said.
Ambarella, based in Santa Clara, California, has a long history in drone technology. Their chips have powered aerial imaging for over a decade. And lately, they’re positioning themselves as more than just a camera chip company, but a company leaning into the AI craze. That means its marketing uses terms like “edge AI semiconductor company” that enables drones to be “intelligent robotic platforms.”
“Drones are quickly transforming into intelligent edge aerial robots, capturing, processing and understanding the world in real time,” said Fermi Wang, Ambarella’s President and CEO in a prepared statement. “Ambarella’s heritage in high-quality imaging, combined with our CVflow AI roadmap, enables drone makers to push more autonomy and more insight onto the drone itself, where every millisecond and every milliwatt matters.”
American manufacturing in a post-FCC-ban world
To be clear, the Antigravity A1 drone is certainly a Chinese-made drone that uses at least one American-made part. That illustrates challenges most drones have: few are entirely made in one country. Most American-made drones rely on at least a few parts that come from other countries, whether that’s motors, batteries, sensors or flight controllers.
As the FCC ban plays out, all drone companies will have to grapple with getting compliant. After all, even if the main processor is American, does the rest of the supply chain comply with what the FCC ban requires?
Ambarella’s chips are designed in California but manufactured on Samsung’s 5nm process. Samsung is a Korean company. Does that count as “foreign-made” under the FCC ban? Even Ambarella’s Gigot acknowledged as much when he said the ban is “too new for full clarity.”
The bigger picture: Edge AI comes to drones
Zoom out from the geopolitics, and what’s interesting about the A1 is what it represents for consumer drones broadly. We’re seeing a shift from “dumb” cameras that record video to “smart” devices that understand what they’re seeing.
“Across the industry, drones are rapidly incorporating AI ‘on the edge’ inside these edge-endpoint devices to reduce latency, improve reliability, enhance safety and enable real-time understanding of the environment,” according to an Ambarella press release.
The benefits of edge AI for drones include:
- Lower latency (no round-trip to the cloud)
- Improved reliability (works without constant connectivity)
- Better privacy (video doesn’t leave the device)
- Enhanced safety (can make decisions in milliseconds)
- Reduced bandwidth requirements (only send relevant data, not raw video)
For commercial applications like infrastructure inspection, precision agriculture or public safety, these capabilities matter. An inspection drone that can identify defects in real-time and flag them for review is vastly more useful than one that just records video for later analysis.
For consumer drones like the A1, it means benefits like real-time subject tracking without lag, intelligent composition assistance and automatic highlight detection.
What comes next for Ambarella: The CV7
Ambarella isn’t stopping with the CV5. The company announced the CV7 chip at CES 2026, which it describes as offering “2.5x AI performance over the previous-generation CV5 SoC” with “20% less power consumption.”
The CV7 is built on Samsung’s 4nm process (versus 5nm for the CV5) and can handle 8Kp60 video or dual 8Kp30 streams simultaneously. It’s designed for applications ranging from security cameras to automotive systems to, yes, drones and robotics.
For drone manufacturers thinking about their next generation of products, the CV7 represents significantly more AI horsepower in a similar power envelope. That could enable more sophisticated autonomy, better object avoidance, more intelligent flight modes and potentially even swarm coordination capabilities.
Expect to see that chip in drones going forward. Of course, for recreational pilots or small businesses that rely on low-cost drones, that assumes American drone companies start building consumer drones that fit the demand. Otherwise, that assumes the U.S. government will let Americans import foreign-made drones — some way, some how.
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