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Santa Clara County Intelligent Transportation Initiative: Advancing Safer, Smarter, and More Connected Mobility
SAN JOSE, Calif., August 20, 2026 — Network Optix and Santa Clara County today announced the Santa Clara County Intelligent Transportation Initiative, developed with key technology partners. The program applies artificial intelligence to more than 600 cameras across the County expressway network. The partners aim to reduce collisions, protect pedestrians and cyclists, and give traffic operators a live view of the road. Provisioning starts this week. The first data reaches the County on Thursday, August 20, 2026. The partners will bring the full network online over the next two months.
The County expressway network moves commuters, freight, and transit through the center of Silicon Valley. Traffic teams currently study collisions after they happen. Reports arrive weeks or months later. This Initiative changes that timeline. The cameras report each conflict as it occurs. Signal systems then respond in the same cycle.
The compute foundation
Technology partners contributed the hardware that runs the Initiative:
- Three Nx Go servers with dedicated AI accelerators. The servers hold the video archive, the event database, and the Nx Go services for the whole network. The accelerators also decode the camera streams in hardware, which keeps the processor cores free for other work.
- Roadside edge devices built for industrial and smart city environments. Each device runs AI inference locally and analyzes the cameras at its site.
Network Optix supplies the video and AI platform
The Initiative runs on the Network Optix video and AI platform. Three Nx products do the work:
- Nx AI Manager runs the AI models on the partner hardware. It detects, classifies, and tracks every vehicle, pedestrian, cyclist, and event in the camera view.
- Nx Go connects each camera site into one data platform. Nx Go calibrates every camera and publishes structured detections over MQTT and HTTP. County systems receive data, not video files.
- Nx Maps places every detection on a digital twin of the road network. Operators see one map instead of 600 video tiles.
How the two tiers work together
The Nx AI Manager runs on both tiers of hardware. At the roadside, the Nx AI Manager runs the detection models on the edge devices. Each device analyzes its local cameras and sends structured data instead of video. In the data center, the three Nx Go servers run the larger models and the network-wide analysis.
This split keeps the system efficient at County scale. More than 600 cameras produce a continuous video load. The edge devices remove most of that load before it reaches the network. The County moves kilobytes of structured data instead of gigabytes of video. Latency stays low enough to change a signal in the current cycle.
What the data makes possible
The Nx AI Manager extracts a structured record from every camera. Each record carries an object class, a track, a time stamp, and a GPS position. Together, these records form a continuous measurement of how the road network behaves.
This gives the County a foundation rather than a single application. Engineers can measure conditions as they occur instead of waiting for a study. Safety teams can examine the events that come before a collision, not only the collision itself. Planners can test a proposed change against the County record of real traffic. Operations staff can build alerts around the conditions that matter to them.
The County owns the data and decides what to build on it. Every new application draws on the same stream. Launching a new application does not require new cameras or new software. The next use case runs on the data the network already produces.
Deployment and schedule
Provisioning starts on Thursday, August 20, 2026. The first cameras begin to publish structured data to the County on the same day. The partners will connect more than 600 cameras using the three Nx Go servers and the edge devices over the next two months. A hypercare period with the County operations team follows each phase. Santa Clara County Roads and Airports Department owns the road assets and the operational data.
Statements
"Cameras are the most underutilized sensor in transportation. Modern edge compute and the Nx AI Manager turn 600 of them into one live picture of the road network. Operators see what is happening now, not what happened last quarter."
— Nathan Wheeler, CEO, Network Optix
Availability
The system reaches full operation in late 2026. The partners will report results from the first phase in 2027. Public agencies that want more information can contact Network Optix at sales@networkoptix.com.
About Network Optix
Network Optix builds video and AI software for organizations that operate large camera networks. The Nx product family includes Nx Witness, Nx Go, Nx AI Manager, and Nx Maps. Network Optix serves customers in transportation, public safety, industry, retail, and more. The company has its headquarters in Walnut Creek, California. For more information, go to NetworkOptix.com.
Media contact
Network Optix, marketing@networkoptix.com