Nvidia and Microsoft Partnership at GTC
Watching Nvidia partnerships has renewed importance in 2024. Anthropic seeks more funding.
Hey Everyone,
Just a little weekend note.
This Newsletter is about the intersection of BigTech and AI. At Nvidia’s GTC conference we learned a lot more about their partnership updates.
In particular due to the recent moves of Microsoft with Inflection AI, I was curious to explore how Nvidia and Microsoft work together in a bit more detail. I also identified a major upgrade of the partnership with Nvidia and Cadence Design Systems, ticker CDNS 0.00%↑.
With GPT-4 Turbo likely coming out in July, 2024, the pivot to Enterprise AI will be a major Generative AI catalyst in the second half of 2024. So Cadence Systems is interesting here particularly for its electronic design automation (EDA) tools and "digital twin" simulations in relation to Nvidia. Follow my new Twitter/X account if you like emerging tech stock inputs and general opinions on the state of Generative AI and breaking news.
The reason Nvidia’s partnership with Microsoft is important is how powerful the two have become in 2024 in the entire ecosystem. We know that Azure will be one of the first cloud platforms to deliver on GB200-based instances.
Nvidia and Microsoft also have to navigate tricky National security risks in their business. I’m satisfied to see Anthropic is taking this quite seriously, the total opposite of Sam Altman and OpenAI. Anthropic and Cohere need to up their funding, but with conditions. Sovereign wealth funds and other investors are jostling to buy into an Anthropic stake worth more than $1 billion. CNBC reports:
Anthropic has ruled out taking any Saudi money over national security concerns, sources say, despite the kingdom's ambitions to get in on the AI boom.
Existing Anthropic stakeholders, including Amazon and Google, are not expected to increase their holdings in this round.
The partnership will see Microsoft and Nvidia advance AI infrastructure.
Microsoft has worked closely with NVIDIA to ensure their GPUs, including the GB200, can handle the latest large language models (LLMs) trained on Azure AI infrastructure. Nvidia’s partnership with TSMC is so rock solid and their work with Microsoft looks impressive.
NVIDIA expanded their longstanding collaboration with powerful new integrations that leverage the latest NVIDIA generative AI and Omniverse™ technologies across Microsoft Azure, Azure AI services, Microsoft Fabric and Microsoft 365.
Anthropic’s Claude 3 Opus is now a leader
Before GPT-4.5 Turbo comes out, Opus is the real leader. There is now consensus of people using Claude 3 for coding and other tasks.
My estimates is that GPT-4.5 Turbo comes out in July, and GPT-5 comes out in late November, or early 2025.
This may have made Microsoft feel a renewed urgency for their Microsoft AI team, changing how Inflection AI is run with an influx of talent from them. Claude 3 is one of the fastest growing consumer AI chatbots.
September, 2023
Claude 2 was being used formerly mostly via Poe.
However this has changed materially.
Nvidia was one of the most important investors also of 2023 and so I’ll be watching this closely in 2024 as well. Nvidia has ramped up its activity more significantly — from backing 5 AI startups in 2022 to 32 in 2023 — than any other tech giant as it embeds itself deeper in the generative AI ecosystem.
AI Supercomputers
Nvidia also partners with Microsoft to build one of the most powerful AI supercomputers in the world, powered by Microsoft Azure’s advanced supercomputing infrastructure combined with NVIDIA GPUs, networking and full stack of AI software to help enterprises train, deploy and scale AI, including large, state-of-the-art models.
Nvidia’s Omniverse
NVIDIA’s Omniverse platform for developing 3D applications will now be available as a set of APIs running on Microsoft Azure, enabling customers to embed advanced graphics and visualization capabilities into existing software applications from Microsoft and partner ISVs.
Nvidia is becoming more diversified in the 2020s and its partnership with Azure and Azure AI is a big part of this.
Is Nvidia an Emerging Tech Company?
But Nvidia is agnostic, it’s always working with AWS. Nvidia isn’t just about AI chips and datacenters. It’s thinking about how to be on the bleeding edge of robotics, AVs, gaming, the Metaverse and even quantum computing.
It still makes the bulk of its revenue via datacenters. It’s profits enable them to do R&D a lot better than their rivals. This is also part of their moat and that the quality of their biggest customers and partners is so high.
OpenAI, Anthropic, Cohere and Character.AI all need to raise more funds in early to mid 2024, so it’s an exciting period.
2023 at a Glance in Venture Capital in Emerging Tech
Here are 15 notable investment rounds (via Crunchbase):
1. OpenAI raised $10B
2. Anthropic raised two rounds for $6B
3. Inflection AI raised $1.3B
4. Metropolis Technologies raised $1.1B
5. Databricks raised $685M
6. Aleph Alpha raised $500M
7. SandboxAQ raised $500M
8. Mistral AI raised $487M
9. Anthropic raised $450M
10. Adept AI raised $350M
11. Cohere raised $270M
12. Hugging Face raised $200M
13. Imbue raised $200M
14. AI21 Labs raised $155M
15. Enfabrica raised $125M
Also the kind of deals being done are more complex, where Anthropic with their ties to Google Cloud and Amazon are likely also very Cloud credit heavy and up to rather large amounts. That Microsoft basically acquired the talent of Inflection AI for $650 million in licensing is highly peculiar.
Since Microsoft now has 53,000 Azure AI customers, its partnership with Nvidia is more crucial than ever. Microsoft is also announcing the general availability of its Azure NC H100 v5 VM virtual machine (VM) based on the Nvidia H100 NVL platform.
NVIDIA will utilize Azure’s scalable virtual machine instances to research and further accelerate advances in generative AI, a rapidly emerging area of AI in which foundational models like Megatron Turing NLG 530B are the basis for unsupervised, self-learning algorithms to create new text, code, digital images, video or audio.
Partnerships will have Tangible Impacts on Generative AI in Healthcare, Pharma, Science and Innovation
The collaboration with NVIDIA also works to transform healthcare and life sciences through the integration of cloud, AI and supercomputing technologies. They intend to this by using Microsoft Azure alongside NVIDIA DGX Cloud and the NVIDIA Clare suite of microservices, healthcare providers, pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, and medical device developers will soon be able to innovate rapidly across clinical research and care delivery with improved efficiency.
Anthropic’s last valuation of $18.4 billion, and they have raised $7 Billion in total if you count the maximum possible from Amazon and Google. Given how good Claude 3 Opus is the timing is right for Anthropic to measurably try to build out a better pipeline of products relative to OpenAI’s GPT-4 and this requires more funding.
Anthropic founders Dario and Daniela Amodei have the right to challenge any potential investors, according to the sources. However, they are not involved in the current fundraising process, or in the discussions with potential investors in FTX’s stake. Offloading the FTX investment by Sam Bankman Friend is of course a priority now. But rejecting investors that don’t meet their trust & safety standards is also paramount. Meanwhile it’s not clear how others like Mistral or Cohere will generative meaningful revenue even as their research is world-class.
Enterprise AI is looking like the trend for the next 18-months in Generative AI. Observing Nvidia’s partnership at this critical moment in AI history is super relevant. GTC announcements and Nvidia’s pushing of “Sovereign AI” is also a very good development.
Project GR00T for humanoid robots is announced, alongside the introduction of the Jetson Thor computer and updates to the Isaac robotics platform.
The next-gen AI supercomputer DGX SuperPOD is unveiled, featuring GB200 Grace Blackwell Superchips and liquid-cooled rack-scale architecture.
The X800 series networking switches are introduced, boasting unparalleled end-to-end 800Gb/s throughput and advanced networking solutions for AI infrastructures.
Expanded collaboration between Microsoft and NVIDIA is announced, integrating NVIDIA’s AI and Omniverse tech into Microsoft Azure, Azure AI, and Microsoft 365.
Integration of the new NVIDIA Blackwell GPU platform into AWS infrastructure is announced, enhancing generative AI capabilities.
The launch of Earth-2 climate platform is announced, aiming to tackle economic losses from climate change-induced extreme weather.
Over two dozen healthcare microservices are unveiled at GTC, empowering global healthcare enterprises with generative AI advancements.
Omniverse Cloud APIs are introduced, extending its industrial digital twin platform’s reach for seamless integration into existing software applications.
DRIVE Thor, a centralized car computer, is introduced, designed for next-gen fleets, from EVs to autonomous trucks and robotaxis.
Sovereign AI solutions are delivered globally through collaboration between Oracle and NVIDIA, promoting economic growth while ensuring data sovereignty.
Enhanced partnership between Google Cloud and NVIDIA is announced to support the machine learning (ML) community.
Expanded partnership between SAP SE and NVIDIA is announced to accelerate enterprise adoption of generative AI and data transformation across SAP’s cloud solutions.
The 6G Research Cloud platform is introduced, aiming to change wireless technology through AI-driven innovation.
Contribution to Japan’s ABCI-Q supercomputer is made, facilitating high-fidelity quantum simulations across industries.
Cloud quantum computing service, NVIDIA Quantum Cloud, is launched to empower researchers and developers to advance quantum computing exploration in scientific domains.
Thanks for reading!