At a recent tech event, Nvidia (NVDA -0.79%) CEO Jensen Huang quoted himself regarding his company's work in chips that power AI development: "The future is accelerated computing, and the more you buy, the more you save."
In other words, Nvidia chips accelerate the development of AI, which will ultimately result in cost savings over the use of traditional chips (like the CPU) for new AI applications.
The investing community went crazy over AI this year, and it's becoming increasingly clear that Nvidia's GPUs (or graphics processing units, which help "accelerate" the computing of massive amounts of data) have assumed technological leadership of the semiconductor industry. For companies that want to make use of AI, Nvidia has become an indispensable hardware supplier.
But not everyone can "buy to save," since Nvidia's high-end GPU units cost tens of thousands of dollars right now. Nvidia and machine learning (a subfield of AI) platform Hugging Face just announced a potential solution.
Wait -- what is Hugging Face?
With the heightened attention on AI chatbots like ChatGPT since late 2022, perhaps you've heard the name Hugging Face. It's a fast-growing start-up business (founded in 2016) that acts as an open-source hub (meaning anyone can work on it) for AI and machine learning software code, training models, and data sets. Developers can share their AI work, access other open-source algorithms and datasets, and ask for help from the community -- all via a simple subscription. Additionally, computing infrastructure can be rented to help train, test, and deploy this AI work.
These capabilities led some to declare Hugging Face the GitHub or GitLab of AI and machine learning.
The name Hugging Face comes from the company's emoji logo of a smiling face with open hands, resembling a hug. Appropriate, given that Hugging Face wants developers to "embrace" machine learning as the future of computing technology development.
The Nvidia and Hugging Face logos. Image source: Nvidia.
Two pioneers team up to make life easier for AI development
OK, so Nvidia pioneered the GPU as the infrastructure of all things AI, and Hugging Face created a platform chock-full of algorithms developers can use to start training AI. But for companies large or small to tap into the power of AI, they're going to need both the hardware and the AI training know-how.
Well, Nvidia announced a big breakthrough earlier this year with the launch of DGX Cloud, initially available on Oracle Cloud. DGX Cloud gives businesses the ability to "rent" all those expensive GPUs for use in training AI -- in a way democratizing access to those really expensive, top-of-the-line chips. But can things get even easier?
Nvidia and Hugging Face think so, and thus just announced that developers will soon have access to DGX Cloud directly on the Hugging Face platform. The new service on Hugging Face will be called Training Cluster as a Service.
Hugging Face co-founder and CEO Clément Delangue said in a prepared statement:
People around the world are making new connections and discoveries with generative AI tools, and we're still only in the early days of this technology shift. Our collaboration will bring Nvidia's most advanced AI supercomputing to Hugging Face to enable companies to take their AI destiny into their own hands with open source and with speed they need to contribute to what's coming next.
What's it to investors?
Nvidia has already declared itself the new leader in semiconductor technology, and has some proof to back it up. Customers are scrambling to add GPUs into their computing infrastructure, leading to Nvidia's wild $4 billion quarter-to-quarter sales increase outlook from Q1 of this year to Q2. Suffice it to say, a new collaboration with start-up Hugging Face alone isn't going to move the needle, nor is it alone enough to justify the premium valuation Nvidia stock fetches right now.
Nevertheless, Nvidia continues to cement itself into the fabric of the emerging AI movement, and thus into the functioning of the global economy itself. Don't underestimate the company's ability to continue growing at a rapid pace from here.
This doesn't automatically make Nvidia stock a buy right now. Indeed, a solid case can be made that there are other better buys in the chip stock universe at the moment. But Nvidia is the secular leader among these businesses and continues to chart its path forward in a new AI era.
