The opening keynote presentation at Nvidia’s GTC conference this week featured a demonstration by Accenture of Nvidia’s Omniverse metaverse creation platform integrated with Microsoft Teams to enable real-time 3D collaboration for Teams meeting participants.
The demo was a brief glimpse at an increasingly expansive relationship between the semiconductor giant and the software giant. After announcing late last year Nvidia’s Fall GTC event that they would work together on an AI supercomputer project, Nvidia and Microsoft announced at this week’s Spring GTC event that the partners will provide hundreds of millions of Microsoft enterprise users with cloud access to Nvidia’s industrial metaverse and AI supercomputing resources.
Specifically, as the demo at GTC suggested, the partners are connecting Microsoft 365 applications, including Teams, OneDrive, and SharePoint, to Omniverse to vastly broaden the potential user base and use cases for Omniverse. Along with this move, Microsoft Azure will host Nvidia’s Omniverse Cloud full-stack, platform-as-a-service environment for supporting industrial metaverse applications; as well as the new Nvidia DGX Cloud, an AI supercomputing service also announced this week that aims to provide enterprises with easier access to the infrastructure and software they need to train advanced models for Generative AI and related applications.
DGX Cloud will be available on Microsoft Azure next quarter, while enterprises will have to wait until sometime later this year for access to Omniverse Cloud via Azure. When the latter arrives, it also will be connected to Azure Cloud Services Digital Twins and Internet of Things platform, allowing companies a more streamlined approach to linking real-time data from sensors in the physical world to their digital replicas to create more accurate and fully functional digital twins, the companies said.
Microsoft’s closer engagement with Nvidia on the industrial metaverse front is especially intriguing as it comes at a time when Microsoft might be recalibrating its metaverse aspirations. Like Nvidia, Facebook, and others, Microsoft spent a lot of time over the last two years hyping what the evolving metaverse concept could mean for companies and individuals. Its metaverse prospects figured prominently in the company’s plan to acquire Activision Blizzard. However, that deal still has not been completed 14 months after it was announced, and more recently Microsoft reportedly eliminated a team it had created to pursue industrial metaverse efforts, and laid off 100 employees associated with that team. That could translate to increasing reliance on a partner like Nvidia as it looks to make sense of the metaverse’s market potential.
A statement Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella did not mention the metaverse specifically, and cast the partnership against the broader backdrop of the AI evolution. “The next wave of computing is being born, between next-generation immersive experiences and advanced foundational AI models, we see the emergence of a new computing platform," he said. "Together with Nvidia, we're focused on both building out services that bridge the digital and physical worlds to automate, simulate and predict every business process, and bringing the most powerful AI supercomputer to customers globally.”
For Nvidia’s part, the company has not stopped hyping the metaverse concept–or Omniverse’s role in enabling it–since CEO Jensen Huang became one of the first tech sector leaders to call attention to it.
“The metaverse as we see it is the next generation of the internet,” said Richard Kerris, vice president, Omniverse Platform Development, at Nvidia, this week as he discussed the Microsoft partnership. “It's a 3D connected Internet. In much the same way today you can go from website to website to do your work collaboratively or by yourself, so will you be able to do these things with 3D. It’s already starting to change industries across the world… By connecting their existing workflows to the [Omniverse] platform, companies can extend and enhance what they currently do.”
Kerris also described Omniverse as “a network of networks, connecting different ecosystems to work together digitally.”
Such a notion needs a lot of computing power behind it to help it become a reality, and Nvidia also this week unveiled the third generation of its OVX computing system, which is the computing foundation for Omniverse Enterprise. Kerris said the latest OVX system provides the breakthrough graphics and AI required to accelerate massive digital twin simulations and other demanding applications by combining Nvidia BlueField-3 DPUs with the company’s (also new) L40 GPUs, ConnectX-7 SmartNICs, and the Nvidia Spectrum Ethernet platform.
In addition to all of the above, Nvidia announced six new NVIDIA RTX Ada Lovelace architecture GPUs for laptops and desktops that will help creators, engineers and data scientists up their game as they tap into Omniverse to build their virtual worlds and applications. The company also announced new Omniverse connectors and Generative AI services for game developers, and a range of new third-party connectors aimed at helping other Omniverse users with their simulation and Generative AI efforts.