Asa Fitch of The Wall Street Journal reports that beyond its chips, Nvidia is playing a growing role in shaping the server farms where AI is produced and deployed. Fitch writes:
Nvidia NVDA dominates the chips at the center of the artificial-intelligence boom. It wants to conquer almost everything else that makes those chips tick, too.
Chief Executive Jensen Huang is increasingly broadening his company’s focus—and seeking to widen its advantage over competitors—by offering software, data-center design services and networking technology in addition to its powerful silicon brains.
He is trying to build Nvidia into more than a supplier of a valuable hardware component: a one-stop shop for all the key elements in the data centers where tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT are created and deployed, or what he calls “AI factories.” […]
With its next-generation Blackwell AI chips, set to ship out late this year or early next year, it is offering a design for an entire rack of computing equipment for the first time—a cabinet about 2 feet wide and 6 feet high. But Nvidia itself won’t make them.
“We know how to design the AI infrastructure, provide it the way that customers would like it and let the ecosystem integrate it,” Huang said.
Read more here.
