Snowflake Adopts Nvidia’s AI Computing Platform

Snowflake, a company specializing in cloud-based data analytics, has teamed up with Nvidia, a computing firm, to enable a diverse range of customers, including those in finance, healthcare, and retail, to create their own AI models using proprietary data.

The two companies announced the partnership at Snowflake Summit 2023 on Monday.

“In the old days, small computing used to transfer data to a computer,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told Reuters. “But when you have massive amounts of data, like Snowflake, and a bunch of proprietary data … data that’s so valuable to the business, you move the computation to the data.”

In this case, Nvidia is making a “fairly engineering-intensive” move to embed its NeMo platform for training and running generative AI models in the Snowflake Data Cloud, Huang said.

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

“This is significant. This is the last mile we’ve been waiting for for 40 years,” said Frank Slootman, Snowflake’s chairman and CEO. “Every industry is caught up in this. It used to be said that software is eating the world. Well, now data is eating software,” he said about the importance of information today.

Slootman said companies that use Snowflake to manage their data can now use their own data to train new AI models to gain a business advantage without risking losing control.

Financial details of the partnership were not disclosed, but Huang said Nvidia would benefit as more customers use computing for AI work.

“We sell more chips, and we have an artificial intelligence operating system called Nvidia AI Enterprise. And this operating system allows our chips to handle artificial intelligence,” Huang said. Nvidia charges customers to use its Nvidia AI Enterprise software.