Germany’s top-end car manufacturers Audi, BMW and Daimler are in talks with Amazon and Microsoft that would that give the tech giants minority stakes in digital mapping service Here. The three carmakers bought the Berlin-based digital mapping service from Nokia last year for US$2.85 billion (A$3.76 billion) in a bid to build a platform for self-driving cars connected to the Internet.

“We are talking to Amazon, Microsoft and many auto makers,” Thomas Weber, a Daimler R&D exec said.

He added: “We need a cloud provider to handle the huge amounts of data created by Here and its users. We haven’t taken any decisions yet.”