Nvidia unveils new AI to fight coronavirus
Nvidia uses their AI expertise to fight COVID-19. Yahoo Finance’s Dan Howley joins the On The Move panel to discuss.
Video Transcript
JULIE HYMAN: Large tech companies, by and large, have been outperforming this year in this environment. Their earnings-- again, by and large, not universal-- have been holding up a little bit better as well.
One of these stocks is Nvidia, whose shares have actually been on a tear thus far in 2020, and now the company's chips are being used to help fight COVID. Kind of interesting here. Not what you would expect from a chip company. Dan Howley, though, is covering that for us. What exactly is Nvidia doing?
DAN HOWLEY: Yeah, this is part of their GTC conference, their GPU technology conference, and basically what they did was announced a new AI supercomputer. It's going to be used at Argonne National Laboratory. It's going to be implemented to help screen drugs for use against COVID-19.
And this is something that the laboratory says will allow them to run through drugs that would normally take them a year in far fewer months, weeks perhaps even, just based on the power of these supercomputers.
And this is part of Nvidia's strategy of pivoting not away from just gaming revenue but more towards data-center revenue. We talked about how data-center revenue is the future of that company, but they still rely heavily on gaming revenue from their GPU sales.
But Nvidia was one of the early companies that realized that GPUs could be used more effectively than regular CPUs, something that Intel might offer, in AI because of the amount of data that has to be throughput. So this is something that they're going to be using.
They also talked about improvements to their automotive offerings as well as their machine-learning capabilities. And I think, for Nvidia, this is a good time for them to announce this because, yes, we might not see sales take off right away as some companies start to pare back on their capex spending. But the idea that they're out there or coming out means that moving forward companies may then jump on Nvidia's current offerings.
JULIE HYMAN: Hey Dan, just really quickly, have we seen other chip or tech companies-- I mean, most of the news from tech has been about contact tracing in terms of how they've been helping. Are there any other companies in tech doing the kind of thing that Nvidia's announcing?
DAN HOWLEY: Some of them are, yes, but this is the first where we've really heard of them pairing with a national laboratory like Argonne. This is, again, the new Nvidia chip. It's the DGXA100. It's an AI supercomputer. That just rolls right off the tongue for the average consumer.
But, you know, it really is going to be something where Nvidia can fall back on and say, look, we do have these capabilities. Companies, if you want to get into AI machine learning, you should look to us. We can save you. And that's one of the big pitches for Nvidia is that their offerings will save in the long term as far as space and electrical capacity. So you won't end up spending as much on power to use their systems as you may something offered by an Intel on an AMD. So this is really the future for the company.
