Nvidia Collaborates with Snowflake to help Consumers Build AI Models with their own Data

Snowflake, a cloud data analytics company, is collaborating with Nvidia to enable customers ranging from financial institutions to healthcare and retail to build AI models using their own data.

On Monday, the two companies announced their collaboration at Snowflake Summit 2023.

"In the old days, in small data computing, you moved data to the computer," said Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang to Reuters. "However, when you have massive amounts of data, as Snowflake does, and a mountain of proprietary data... data that is so valuable to a company, you move the compute to the data."

Nvidia is taking a "fairly engineering intensive" step in this case by embedding its NeMo platform for training and running generative AI models into the Snowflake Data Cloud, according to the company.

The partnership comes as chatbot ChatGPT has pushed many companies to find their AI strategies and has propelled Nvidia, which provides the main hardware for AI, to becoming a trillion dollar company.

"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.

Slootman said companies that use Snowflake to manage their data will be able to now use their own data to train new AI models to gain an advantage in business without risking losing control of it.

No financial details of the 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.