Partnership with Dell key in company's push to expand AI: Nvidia CEO Huang

By Ed Ludlow and Ian King
 

Nvidia Corp. Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang said its partnership with Dell Technologies Inc. will spread artificial intelligence to a wider range of customers, helping businesses and organisations create their own “AI factories.”
 

“We want to bring this generative AI capability to every company in the world,” he said in a Bloomberg Television interview in Las Vegas, where Dell is holding a conference. “It’s not about just delivering a box — it’s about delivering an entire infrastructure. It’s an infrastructure that’s insanely complicated.”

Dell is one of the largest providers of computing infrastructure to government agencies and businesses — a market that Nvidia doesn’t directly serve. Though Nvidia’s sales have surged in the past year, it has mostly relied on a small group of customers for that growth: the data center operators known as hyperscalers. Microsoft Corp., Meta Platforms Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and Alphabet Inc. are its biggest customers, according to data compiled by Bloomberg — though Dell is close behind. 

Nvidia’s expansion plan hinges on getting agencies and businesses to develop their own AI capabilities, spurring demand for its products. For that, they’ll need the storage, networking and computing supplied by Dell, Huang said. That’s why it’s an essential partner, he said. 

The CEO is pushing Nvidia deeper into software tools, computer design and AI models, helping spread the company’s technology into everything from drug discovery to shipbuilding. Nvidia has succeeded because it prepared for the shift toward AI and has out-innovated all of its competitors, said Michael Dell, who also spoke on Bloomberg Television.

Nvidia’s stock, up more than 90 per cent this year, rose 2.8 per cent to $951.07 in New York trading on Monday. Dell, which also has rallied about 90 per cent this year, was down 2.3 per cent at $146.06.

Nvidia — the most valuable tech company after Microsoft and Apple Inc. — is slated to report its latest earnings on Wednesday. Analysts estimate that sales grew 243 per cent last quarter. The company’s revenue has grown so quickly that Nvidia now makes nearly as much in a quarter as it did annually just two years ago.

Dell, a top maker of personal computers, unveiled a new line of PCs on Monday that are optimized for AI tasks. Nvidia, meanwhile, is the biggest seller of so-called AI accelerators — the processors that are key to development of chatbots and other cutting-edge tools.

Nvidia currently sells graphics chips for PCs, but not the central processing units, or CPUs. Huang declined to say whether the company will ultimately produce the CPU itself, a move that would put it in direct competition with Intel Corp., Advanced Micro Devices Inc. and Qualcomm Inc.

Before Huang could discuss a potential move into that area, Michael Dell interrupted and said, “Come back next year.”