Tag: Nvidia

Nvidia’s CEO Declares War on AI Costs

In a high-stakes battle for supremacy, Nvidia’s Chief Executive Officer, Jensen Huang, has predicted that reducing the costs of AI chips using faster chips could shake up the industry.

Huang, who presides over the self-proclaimed “world’s most advanced AI platform,” told the World Government Summit in Dubai of his cunning plan to harness technology’s relentless march and slash the cost of AI development.

Huang warned that companies could not just throw money at AI and expect miracles.

He said that the secret lies in faster and cheaper chips.

Nvidia’s mega deal with TD SYNNEX

Nvidia has struck a UK distribution deal with TD SYNNEX for its full enterprise software and computing range.

Channel partners can now get Nvidia products or platform needs, such as Nvidia AI Enterprise and Nvidia Omniverse Enterprise software licences for developers, through the distribution giant.

TD SYNNEX is one of only two total enterprise distributors in the UK for Nvidia and the company said it will support partners with both technical and commercial help so they can understand where accelerated computing can and is being used today and how they can boost their Nvidia offering.

TD SYNNEX is planning joint go-to-market plans with NVIDIA but with its OEM partners, such as Dell, HPE, Lenovo, NetApp, Supermicro and VMware/Broadcom, to “support resellers finding the right solution with their favourite vendor”.

Nvidia gets enthused about AI

Nvidia supreme leader Jensen Huang unveiled a raft of new AI-related products and claimed the world was at a tipping point for this sort of thing.

The US outfit, which has been making a fortune out of the artificial intelligence boom, saw its value surge to nearly $1 trillion last week, after the company announced better-than-expected results.

Nvidia chips are a central ingredient to the generative AI revolution, capable of delivering the computing heft needed to churn out complex content in just seconds from data centres worldwide.

Nvidia claims it is navigating through macro environmental challenges

Nvidia claims it is “navigating its way through macro environmental challenges” which have caused a challenging second quarter.

Its second-quarter results were dire. While it reported a three percent year on year increase in revenue of $6.70 billion, this was down 19 percent from the previous quarter.

Operating income also fell sharply, down 80 percent year on year to $499 million, while net income dropped 72 percent to $656 million in the same period.

Nvidia warns its results will be rubbish

Nvidia has warned that sales in its second quarter results will fall short.

Second quarter revenue is expected to come in at $6.7 billion, down 19 percent from the previous quarter, according to a US Securities and Exchange Commission filing Monday. The company previously said it expected $8.10 billion in sales for the quarter.

Nvidia, which is named after a Roman vengeance daemon,  said the problem was gaming revenue which was $2 billion, down 44 percent from Q1 and a drop of 33 percent from the prior year.

Nvidia’s stock sank more than eight percent on the back of the news.

Once considered recession-proof, the gaming industry is weakening as consumers reconsider purchases of discretionary items such as video-game consoles when faced with a choice of it being either that or the power bill or food.

Nvidia expects slowdown

The chipmaker Nvidia has warned of trouble ahead and that it is pulling back on new hiring.

The move lines up with its comments during its latest earnings release when it said that it expects sales of GPUs for gaming consoles and PCs to decline in the current quarter.

CEO Jensen Huang said that while Nvidia had a solid previous quarter, with revenue up 46 per cent over last year to $8.29 billion and was “gearing up for the largest wave of new products in our history” with new GPU, CPU, DPU and robotics processors coming online in the second half of the year, it is expecting to see lower revenue.

Word on the street is that the company appears to be bracing for a slowdown and the leaders want to want to take a pause to onboard the “thousands of new hires we’ve recently made”.

Nvidia is not the only one – Lyft, Uber and Snap, have announced hiring slowdowns. Nvidia was expected to weather events due to continued strong demand in the GPU market that has kept prices high and supply short.

Nvidia-Intel alliance could scare rivals

Yesterday’s news that Nvidia and Intel are snuggling up for a glorious alliance could cause some major headaches for the industry.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said during a press briefing that he was in talks to use Intel foundries to produce GPUs, a development that could see the dogged rivals join forces.

Data centre tech is based around GPUs and Nvidia holds an 81 percent market share.

All this could be problems for others in the industry especially AMD’s data centre supercomputing ambitions and TSMC’s foundry business.

AMD and Nvidia use TSMC’s foundry. AMD’s strategy so far has been to produce cheaper GPUs with a slightly better performance than Nvidia.

Nvidia buys Excelero

Nvidia has snapped up Tel Aviv-based high-performance software-defined storage provider Excelero.

The GPU maker was after Excelero’s core NVMesh offering which software-defined block storage using networked NVMe SSDs.

It said most of Excelero’s team of engineers – including co-founders CEO Yaniv Romem, engineering vice president Ofer Oshri and chief scientist Omri Mann – will join the business, bringing their specialist expertise in block storage.

Writing in his bog, Nvidia’s Senior Director of Engineering for NGC Storage and Data platform services, Suresh Ollala, said the mission will be to help expand support for block storage in Nvidia’s enterprise software stack such as clusters for high performance computing.

“Block storage also has an important role to play inside the DOCA software framework that runs on our DPUs.”

Intel wants ARM now

While it is unlikely to happen, it seems that Intel is considering snapping up British chip manufacturer ARM.

Nvidia officially announced the termination of its $40 billion acquisition from owners SoftBank Group (SBG) earlier this month due to “significant regulatory challenges”.

Shortly after its collapse, ARM confirmed it was preparing for an IPO within the fiscal year ending March 31, 2023.

Now, Intel is weighing up its own offer for ARM. Kicking Pat Gelsinger has said Intel would be interested in participating if a consortium emerges to own the UK semiconductor company.

Tech Data signs a European distribution agreement with Nvidia

Tech Data announced a European distribution agreement with Nvidia.

The new agreement extends an existing agreement, in which Tech Data offers Nvidia Networking solutions across the region, to now include Nvidia hardware, the AI Enterprise software suite and DGX systems, as well as the Omniverse Enterprise platform.

The agreement also adds Nvidia DGX systems, enabling businesses to scale AI development with solutions purpose-built for enterprise.

Tech Data said it will reinforce its Nvidia offerings with a comprehensive range of professional and managed services and will leverage its own Solution Factory methodology to develop customised solutions with Nvidia products at the core for a variety of vertical use cases.

Iguazio teams up with Boston

Iguazio, a data science & MLOps platform build firm, announced a partnership with Boston Limited, an Nvidia Elite Partner and leading provider of high‐performance, mission-critical server and storage .

The partnership enables both companies to extend their offerings to enterprises across industries looking to bring data science into real-life applications, regardless of the size or skill set of their internal teams.

Iguazio CEO and co‐founder Asaf Somekh said that companies need better ways to implement their AI solutions in real‐world environments, to help them cut costs, work more efficiently, and accelerate the rollout of new AI services and products for customers.

“This radical shift to transforming business models with AI typically requires highly customisable infrastructure, as well as a streamlined data science workflow to navigate the transformation effectively and efficiently”, he said.

Avaya integrates Nvidia’s cloud AI

Avaya is integrating what it describes as powerful cloud AI solutions from Nvidia to increase the impact and value of visual, audible and collaborative experiences through the Avaya Spaces app.

Avaya Spaces is an all-in-one video collaboration app for the digital workplace and is used by businesses, schools, governments and organisations in nearly 100 countries to bring together distributed groups of people.

Nvidia enhances partner programme

GPU maker Nvidia has announced a number of enhancements to its partner programme.

The new additions to the Nvidia Partner Network, which is apparently is comprises 1,500 members have been designed to boost opportunities for training, collaboration and sales, the firm says, while also ensuring the possibility of future expansion.

Alvin Da Costa, Vice President of Nvidia’s Global Partner Organisation, said that the new programme enhancements enable future expansion as Mellanox and Cumulus partner programmes are set to be integrated into NPN throughout 2021.

Boston distributes Nvidia Rapids

Boston announced the first European offering for Nvidia Rapid test drives.

The move brings Nvidia Rapids, a suite of open-source software libraries giving data scientists the freedom to execute end-to-end data science and analytics pipelines entirely on GPU. The result is a cluster of Nvidia T4 GPU-optimised servers running a variety of Rapids frameworks available to customer and data scientists looking to accelerate and scale out their frameworks working in Python.

Nvidia spruces up AI channel

nvidia-gangnam-style-330pxGraphics card maker Nvidia has been quietly making changes to its AI channel over the last three years and has lately been increasing its partners.

Word on the street is that most of the hard work has been done with significant resellers, distributors, SIs and developers already made, but Nvidia has its work cut out establishing its brand in the datacentre.

Fortunately, it has considerable publicity in the growth of interest in AI, and the money it has invested setting up its channel is apparently paying off.

Nvidia confirms that AI datacentres are one of its fastest-growing parts of the business

Nvidia claims to have struck up relationships with hundreds of emerging AI players to ensure their apps run on its platform. There are scales opportunities around storage and other services that the channel can add to a datacentre sale.

Nvidia has put together some sale playbooks around some of the vertical markets that are embracing AI, including health, and is helping the channel make the correct sales pitches.