NVIDIA Teams with Microsoft, Google on Cloud AI and Metaverse

At the virtual NVIDIA GTC conference this week, NVIDIA announced new partnerships with both Google and Microsft centered around artificial intelligence (AI) applications and its Omniverse 3D collaboration platform.

NVIDIA announced that Google Cloud is integrating the newly launched L4 GPU and Vertex AI to accelerate the work of companies building a rapidly expanding number of generative AI applications.

Google Cloud, with its announcement of G2 virtual machines, is the first cloud services provider to offer NVIDIA’s L4 Tensor Core GPU, the company said. Additionally, L4 GPUs will be available with optimized support on Vertex AI, which now supports building, tuning and deploying large generative AI models.

Developers can access the latest state-of-the-art technology available to help them get new applications up and running quickly and cost-efficiently, the company said. The NVIDIA L4 GPU has enhanced AI video capabilities that can deliver 120x more AI-powered video performance than CPUs, combined with 99% better energy efficiency.

“Surging interest in generative AI is inspiring a wave of companies to turn to cloud-based computing to support their business models,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “We are working with Google Cloud to help ensure that the capabilities they require are easily available and able to help fuel the incredible new tools and applications they will create.”

“Generative AI represents a new era of computing — one that demands the speed, scalability and reliability we provide on Google Cloud,” said Amin Vahdat, vice president of Systems & Services Infrastructure at Google Cloud. “As our customers begin to explore the possibilities of generative AI, we’re proud to offer them NVIDIA’s latest L4 GPU innovation as part of our workload-optimized Compute Engine portfolio.”

Industrial Metaverse

NVIDIA also announced a collaboration with Microsoft to provide Microsoft enterprise users with access to industrial metaverse and AI supercomputing resources via the cloud.

Microsoft Azure will host two new cloud offerings from NVIDIA: NVIDIA Omniverse Cloud, a platform-as-a-service giving instant access to a full-stack environment to design, develop, deploy and manage industrial metaverse applications; and NVIDIA DGX Cloud, an AI supercomputing service that gives enterprises immediate access to the infrastructure and software needed to train advanced models for generative AI and other groundbreaking applications.

Additionally, the companies are bringing together their productivity and 3D collaboration platforms by connecting Microsoft 365 applications — such as Teams, OneDrive and SharePoint — with NVIDIA Omniverse, a platform for building and operating 3D industrial metaverse applications.

The collaboration will accelerate enterprises’ ability to digitalize their operations, engage in the industrial metaverse and train advanced models for generative AI and other applications, the company says.

“The world’s largest companies are racing to digitalize every aspect of their business and reinvent themselves into software-defined technology companies,” said Huang. “NVIDIA AI and Omniverse supercharge industrial digitalization. Building NVIDIA Omniverse Cloud within Microsoft Azure brings customers the best of our combined capabilities.”

“The next wave of computing is being born, between next-generation immersive experiences and advanced foundational AI models, we see the emergence of a new computing platform,” said Satya Nadella, chairman and CEO of Microsoft. “Together with NVIDIA, we're focused on both building out services that bridge the digital and physical worlds to automate, simulate and predict every business process, and bringing the most powerful AI supercomputer to customers globally.”

With Omniverse connected to Azure Cloud Services Digital Twins and Internet of Things, companies can link real-time data from sensors in the physical world to their digital replicas. This will enable enterprises to build and operate more accurate, dynamic, fully functional 3D digital twins that automatically respond to changes in their physical environments, according to NVIDIA. Azure provides the cloud infrastructure and capabilities needed to deploy enterprise services at scale, including security, identity and storage.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.

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