Equating NVIDIA chief Jensen Huang to ‘Don Corleone of AI’ may sound silly, but it’s probably not a stretch to do so (minus the mafia bit). Besides all the cool things unveiled at NVIDIA GTC, the biggest takeaway from Huang’s keynote was how indispensable NVIDIA is to all tech companies in the world. 

Source: X

A Syndicate of AI Companies

Huang’s two-hour keynote speech not only disproved Moore’s law, but also showcased the various domains NVIDIA is impacting, including healthcare and humanoid robotics. The underlying theme of all these announcements was that every tech company needs NVIDIA.

The company’s strategic partnership with major big tech firms was further fortified at the conference. The display of the exhaustive list of NVIDIA partners could hardly fit on the screen, and you could probably play Bingo to identify every known player!  

Partner list displayed on screen. Source: NVIDIA Keynote  

With the announcement of the latest Blackwell GPU, NVIDIA also unveiled another list of all the companies lined up to use the same. “Blackwell will be the most successful product launch in our history, and I can’t wait to see that,” said Hunag, in his keynote.  

Apart from the ‘big four’, which have been mentioned right at the top of the list, AI players such as Recursion, Cohere, Together AI, and others are there too. Elon Musk’s Tesla and X are also on the list. Interestingly, Indian data centre company Yotta, which recently received India’s first cluster of 4000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs, will receive Blackwell GPUs in October this year. 

Companies that will use the newly unveiled Blackwell GPU. Source: NVIDIA Keynote  

NVIDIA’s Four Horsemen 

As highlighted on the top of the chart, NVIDIA’s big-four partners AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Oracle Cloud had a separate mention. 

Huang spoke about AWS gearing up for Blackwell, and how they are going to build the first GPU with secure AI. “NVIDIA and AWS engineers are also joining forces to co-develop an AI supercomputer, built exclusively on AWS for NVIDIA’s own AI R&D. It will feature 20K+ GB200 superchips, capable of processing a massive 414 exaflops,” said Adam Selipsky, the CEO of AWS.

Big-tech rivals, Google and Microsoft have ensured that they are not left behind. 

Source: X

Google announced its adoption of the new NVIDIA Grace Blackwell AI computing platform, alongside the integration of the NVIDIA DGX Cloud service into Google Cloud. Furthermore, the NVIDIA H100-powered DGX™ Cloud platform is now universally accessible on Google Cloud.

“Together with NVIDIA, our team is committed to providing a highly accessible, open and comprehensive AI platform for ML developers,” said Thomas Kurian, the CEO of Google Cloud.

AI opportunist Microsoft, has been on a recent spree of expanding their AI efforts through strategic partnerships with emerging AI startups. The company even roped in Inflection AI’s founding team members, including Mustafa Suleyman to head Microsoft’s AI division, a position briefly given to Sam Altman during the OpenAI fiasco. 

Microsoft Corp and NVIDIA enhanced their enduring partnership with new integrations, utilising the cutting-edge NVIDIA generative AI and Omniverse technologies across Microsoft Azure, Azure AI services, Microsoft Fabric, and Microsoft 365.

Tech giant Oracle, which is actively integrating generative AI capabilities into its OCI’s tech stack, has partnered with NVIDIA to provide accelerated computing and generative AI services. “Oracle is a great partner of ours for the NVIDIA DGX cloud and we’re also working together to accelerate something that’s really important to a lot of Oracle database companies,” said Huang. 

Enabling enterprise solutions, NVIDIA even mentioned their growing support to SAP labs.  

While big-tech service providers are taken care of, product companies are not left behind. Huang announced the availability of Omniverse on Apple Vision Pro headsets. Further, he even showed NVIDIA’s prowess with almost all major robotics companies for providing infra for their humanoid robots. Interestingly, the Tesla humanoid was not part of it. 

Next Phase? 

When the world is built on NVIDIA GPUs, symbiosis partnerships come as no surprise. Last month, the company hit a $2 trillion market value, and the growth is predicted to be on an upward trajectory. However, what’s interesting to note is that the pace at which NVIDIA is rising serves as an indicator of how other big tech companies, the so-called partners now, will also rise. 

The CEO of Abacus AI, Bindu Reddy, has different levels of predictions for NVIDIA. Reddy believes that NVIDIA will likely diversify to other businesses. With the rise of alternatives and with ‘AMD becoming usable’, GPU prices will drop. “As with everything, compute will become a commodity where margins tend to be zero,” said Reddy. 

With Amazon’s silicon innovation already on the way with AI chips, it is possible that the reliance on the tech giant can be reduced in the future. Google and Microsoft are also not far behind with their AI chip venture. 

In the future, these big tech companies can rely on their chips for self-sustenance. This could change the course for NVIDIA, and partnership strategies can vary. Until then, NVIDIA will see all other companies allying with them. After all, you have to play ball with Don Corleone if you want to stay in the game.”