Nvidia sells Foxconn on AI factories that turn raw data into profit

Taiwanese manufacturing elephantine Foxconn plans to build alleged "AI factories" pinch nan thief of Nvidia.

The collaboration, announced during a gathering betwixt Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Foxconn CEO Young Liu this week, involves nan large-scale deployment of nan chipmaker's GPU systems to powerfulness a assortment of business applications.

"A caller type of manufacturing has emerged — nan accumulation of intelligence. And nan datacenters that nutrient it are AI factories," Huang said per a statement. "Foxconn, nan world's largest manufacturer, has nan expertise and standard to build AI factories globally."

If it wasn't clear, nan word "AI factory" is simply a metaphor for taking unstructured information from automobiles, robots, IoT sensors dotted astir a city, and different sources and turning it into a useful product, overmuch successful nan aforesaid measurement accepted factories mightiness return successful earthy materials connected 1 extremity and popular retired an automobile astatine nan different end.

AI factories are "specially built for processing, refining, and transforming immense amounts of information into valuable AI models and tokens," nan chipmaker explained successful a blog post. In different words, they're datacenters brimming pinch very costly GPU systems tailored to support nan customers' various business verticals.

In Foxconn's case, nan iPhone shaper plans to deploy a assortment of HGX, GH200 Super Chips, and OVX reference designs alongside plentifulness of Mellanox-derived networking kit.

These systems will support a assortment of products and services built atop Nvidia's endeavor package platforms. For instance, Foxconn plans to build a "Smart EV" level utilizing nan chipmaker's upcoming Drive Thor autonomous driving machine system, due out successful 2025. It's worthy noting that Foxconn already builds physics power units for automobiles utilizing Nvidia's Drive Orin platform.

Foxconn besides has its oculus connected "smart manufacturing" applications that return advantage of Nvidia's Isaac autonomous robotics platform, and a "smart city" level that incorporates nan GPU-slinger's Metropolis video analytics service. That said, smart cities talk has been astir for a while pinch very small progress.

So, not only does Nvidia person Foxconn hooked connected what's apt to beryllium a important number of GPUs, but its growing package business arsenic well.

Another usage lawsuit Nvidia has talked up successful nan past is nan usage of OVX systems developed to powerfulness its Omniverse level arsenic a instrumentality to visualize instrumentality learning and sensor information to create integer twins of existent mill floors aliases warehouses. The thought present is these integer twins and tin beryllium utilized to simulate whether operational changes will carnivore consequence earlier they're implemented successful nan existent world - deliberation Excel but stepped up a notch.

"Simulating nan full robotics and automation pipeline from end-to-end provides Foxconn pinch a way to operational ratio gains and redeeming clip and costs," Nvidia claimed.

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What happened to nan 'Industrial Metaverse?'

Nvidia has spent nan past fewer years moving to cultivate caller markets for accelerated computing, beyond those typically associated pinch hyperscale and unreality datacenters.

The thought of an "AI factory" isn't new, though nan buzzword of prime whitethorn person changed pursuing nan fervor astir generative AI apps for illustration ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, and different ample connection models.

In mid-2022, Nvidia was throwing astir position for illustration "industrial metaverse" amid a collaboration pinch German multinational Siemens to bring photorealistic integer twins to mainstream manufacture utilizing its Omniverse platform.

As we mentioned earlier, Nvidia is still pushing this thought on pinch its much graphics-optimized OVX systems. But since nan hype astir nan much-touted metaverse has seemingly fizzled, astatine slightest according to Gartner, Nvidia appears to person pivoted to AI factories instead. ®