(Bloomberg) — Nvidia Corp. has expanded a partnership with technology consultant Accenture as part of an effort to drive adoption of artificial intelligence within businesses and boost orders for the chipmaker’s products.
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The arrangement will see Accenture create an Nvidia Business Group dedicated to helping clients use and scale generative AI tools, the companies said in a statement on Wednesday. Accenture has trained 30,000 experts on the use of Nvidia’s technology to help their customers deploy and get benefits from it rapidly.
While Nvidia’s chips dominate deployments of AI hardware, orders are mainly coming from a handful of owners of large data centers, such as Microsoft Corp., Amazon.com Inc.’s AWS and Alphabet Inc.’s Google. Analysts and investors have expressed concern that tens of billions of dollars they’re spending on new infrastructure hasn’t yet provided a financial return that justifies the outlay.
Nvidia has responded by launching a flurry of software, services and hardware that makes the technology accessible and valuable to a broader set of customers, all aimed at perpetuating what Nvidia Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang says is a new industrial revolution.
Huang said on CNBC that he sees Accenture as the “connecting fabric” between its technology and customers. He and Accenture CEO Julie Sweet first imagined the partnership about four months ago, Huang said.
Nvidia’s CEO also gave an update on the company’s new Blackwell chip lineup, which is in full production and coming together as planned. There had been concerns that production snags might slow the product’s rollout.
“Demand for Blackwell is insane,” he told CNBC. “Everybody wants the most, and everybody wants to be first.”
Nvidia shares, up 1.6% on Wednesday in New York, rose more than 1% in extended trading following the remarks.
Accenture has already invested heavily in generative AI and launched its so-called AI Refinery using Nvidia’s technology in July. It allows clients to build custom large language models to power AI tools tailored to their industries. The company credited its most recent quarterly earnings beat to strong demand for its help in deploying generative AI.
According to Accenture’s head of AI, Lan Guan, 9 out of 10 organizations recognize the impact that generative AI is having but less than 10% have found a way to make it work for them yet.
(Updates with Nvidia CEO’s comments in fifth paragraph.)
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