NVIDIA (NVDA) and Snowflake (SNOW) the Data Cloud Company have announced a new partnership that will allow around 8,000 customers of the cloud services company to build their own generative AI assistants. This was announced at Snowflake Summit 2023. NVIDIA and Snowflake are partnering to provide businesses of all sizes with an accelerated path to create customized generative AI applications using their own proprietary data, all securely within the Snowflake Data Cloud.
How is this collaboration beneficial
Snowflake and NVIDIA data partnership will allow customers ranging from financial institutions to healthcare and retail to build AI models using their own data. That’s a big deal for businesses that want to take advantage of large language models and generative AI, and need to get specific, company centric answers to their own queries.
That means Snowflake’s customers will, among other things, will be able to build their own generative AI chatbots to pull information from their vast information databases. “In the old days, in small data computing, you moved data to the computer,” Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang told Reuters. “But when you have giant amounts of data like Snowflake does, and the pile of proprietary data. data that’s so valuable to a company, then you move the compute to the data.”
In this case, NVIDIA is taking a “fairly engineering intensive” move of embedding its NeMo platform for training and running generative AI models into the Snowflake Data Cloud, said Huang. The news was announced during a fireside chat between Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman at the Snowflake Summit on Monday.
“Snowflake’s partnership with NVIDIA will bring high performance machine learning and artificial intelligence to our vast volumes of proprietary and structured enterprise data, a new frontier to bringing unprecedented insights, predictions and prescriptions to the global world of business,” said Frank Slootman, chairman and CEO, Snowflake.
NVIDIA will also provide the infrastructure, including graphics processing units that customers will need to train their generative AI models.
Other partnerships
In May, the graphics chipmaker announced a somewhat similar partnership with ServiceNow (NOW). Here the ServiceNow trained the models itself. The idea is to give customers a quick means of taking advantage of generative AI capabilities without necessarily having to train the platforms on their own data.
This isn’t the first type of program to allow companies to build out their own generative AI apps.
In May, Microsoft (MSFT) announced the launch of its Azure AI Studio, which allows the customers to create custom AI powered apps called copilots. Copilots, like Snowflake can take a number of forms including running as chatbots.
“This is significant. This is the last mile that we’ve been waiting for 40 years,” said Frank Slootman, Chairman and CEO of Snowflake. “Every industry is on this. They used to say software is eating the world. Well, now data is eating software,” he said about the importance of data today.
No financial details of the NVIDIA and Snowflake partnership were disclosed, but Huang said NVIDIA would benefit as more customers use computing for AI work.
“We sell more chips, and we have an operating system for AI called Nvidia AI Enterprise. And that operating system makes it possible for our chips to process AI,” said Huang. NVIDIA charges customers for the use of its NVIDIA AI Enterprise software.
Competition
Generative AI exploded onto the scene when OpenAI released ChatGPT in Nov. 2022. Since then companies ranging from Microsoft to Google (GOOG, GOOGL) to Meta (META) and Amazon (AMZN) have released products or discussed working on the technology.
NVIDIA has been investing in developing both chips designed to run AI systems and the software that powers them, has easily been one of the biggest beneficiaries of the boom. Even NVIDIA’s stock performance is fantastic. Its shares are up 159% over the last 12 months, and 189% till date 2023. NVIDIA is the most popular AI chips company.
Sure, AMD has its own graphics capabilities, and Intel is building out its AI offerings, but NVIDIA is at the top of the lot and it seems like it’s going to stay there.
