Dive Brief:
- Snowflake joins an expanding list of providers to tap Nvidia's accelerated computing to support generative AI workloads as enterprise demand for the emerging technology grows.
- A new partnership will let customers use proprietary data to build generative AI-powered chatbots, search and summarization services within the Nvidia NeMo platform, the two companies announced Monday.
- The partnership is aimed at enterprise customers that want to build custom generative AI models, Manuvir Das, head of enterprise computing at Nvidia, said in a Friday briefing. Snowflake brings the data from its cloud platform, while Nvidia delivers the engine and computing power, Das said.
Dive Insight:
Snowflake, a leading data cloud company, is banking on generative AI to accelerate cloud data usage and industry verticals to expand its customer base, chairman and CEO Frank Slootman said during an earnings call in May.
“The Snowflake mission is to steadily demolish any and all limits to data, users, workloads, applications and new forms of intelligence,” said Slootman.
Data science, machine learning and AI services grew during Q1, with more than 1,500 customers running these types of workloads. Use cases in those categories were up 91% year over year, according to Slootman.
The company is also working to offer additional industry cloud solutions, such as its public sector data cloud and manufacturing industry solution, and through its partnership with accelerated computing powerhouse Nvidia.
Microsoft, Dell, Oracle, AWS and Google have also partnered with Nvidia to leverage its computing power as the company positions itself as a dominant player in the generative AI wave of development and deployment.
Nvidia has benefited from the growing use and interest in generative AI workloads. Its data center revenue hit a record high of $4.28 billion in Q1 2024 for the period ending April 30 as a result of generative AI adoption. That growth is an increase of 18% from the previous quarter and 14% year-over-year, according to the earnings call in May.
Despite early signs of opportunity, the company is mindful of competition from existing semiconductor companies, well-funded startups and cloud providers with internal projects, Jensen Huang, CEO and president at Nvidia, said during the May earnings call.
“We have competition from every direction,” Huang said, according to a Seeking Alpha transcript.
The three cloud providers dominating the cloud infrastructure market — Microsoft, AWS and Google — have made efforts to ready systems for growing AI use while also facing emphasis from customers regarding cloud spend optimization.
Snowflake is experiencing similar headwinds as the hyperscalers, but it is closest to AWS.
“Amazon is such a large percentage of our overall deployments that they are a proxy,” Slootman said during the company’s Q1 2024 earnings call. “What they experience, we experience.”
