Nvidia Reportedly Aiming to Expand AI Business Beyond 'Hyperscalers'

Chipmaker Nvidia is reportedly working to lessen its dependency on Big Tech.

The company is doing this by forging new partnerships to sell artificial intelligence (AI) to national governments, corporations and challengers to companies like Google, Amazon and Microsoft, the Financial Times (FT) reported Sunday (May 18).

The report came days after Nvidia announced a multibillion-dollar U.S. chip deal with Saudi Arabia’s Humain, while the United Arab Emirates announced plans to build one of the world’s largest data centers in partnership with the American government, as the Gulf states work to construct massive AI infrastructure.

According to the FT, these “sovereign AI” deals make up a key part of the $3.2 trillion tech giant’s strategy of attracting customers far beyond Silicon Valley. 

Company executives, industry insiders, and analysts tell the FT that Nvidia aims to boost its business beyond “hyperscalers,” or large cloud computing companies that make up more than half its data center revenue.

That means boosting burgeoning rivals to the likes of Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud, companies that include such as CoreWeave, Nebius, Crusoe, and Lambda.

Nvidia announced in February that CoreWeave was “the first cloud service provider to make the Nvidia Blackwell platform generally available,” referring to its newest generation of processors for AI data centers.

The company has also forged collaborations with suppliers such as Cisco, Dell and HP, to help sell to enterprise customers, which manage their own corporate IT infrastructure rather than outsourcing to the cloud. 

“I’m more certain [about the business opportunity beyond the big cloud providers] today than I was a year ago,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told the FT in March. 

Meanwhile, Nvidia said earlier this month that it is advancing what it calls “embodied intelligence,” or AI that can perceive, reason and act in industries that include manufacturing, biotechnology and transportation. 

Per a Fast Company report, the company sees these capabilities as critical to future breakthroughs in robotics, drug development and autonomous navigation.

“For AI to be truly useful, it must engage meaningfully with real-world use cases,” Bryan Catanzaro, vice president of applied deep learning, told that magazine.

At a tech conference in Singapore last month, Nvidia presented company-authored papers, covering healthcare, robotics, autonomous vehicles and large language models, continuing a collaborative push into AI that has seen partnerships with Google, GE Healthcare and GM.