It’s been a busy couple days for Nvidia with an announcement of a potentially massive partnership with Foxconn to build factories and systems for AI followed by announcements related to expansions in its robotics platform.
These positive growth nuggets came amidst a decline in Nvidia stock of more than 3% over two days, following a Biden administration unveiling on Tuesday of new rules to close loopholes in sales of advanced chips to China and some other countries that are expected to hit Nvidia particularly hard with its GPUs for AI work.
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Nvidia responded to the new Biden rules with a terse message that essentially said it complies with applicable regulations and is a big global company that can absorb the impact of lost sales to China, at least in the near-term. Implied in its response is the fact that Nvidia sales of GPUs for AI work are going gangbusters as major enterprises globally are finding more ways to use ChatGPT and generative AI. The market, apparently, is less convinced, given the decline in Nvidia’s stock price.
Following the Biden announcement, Nvidia joined hands with Foxconn at the company’s Hon Hai Tech Day in Taipei, Taiwan (an arrangement worked out well ahead of time, although the locale and timing could hardly be more ironic) to announce that Foxconn and Nvidia will create entire AI factories comprised of an Nvidia GPU infrastructure, including the latest Nvidia GH200 Grace Hopper Superchip and Nvidia AI Enterprise software.
Foxconn has also selected Nvidia DRIVE Hyperion 9, including the future DRIVE Thor central computer SoC and net-gen sensor architecture. Foxconn will provide vehicles as a contract manufacturer using Hyperion 9 with Drive Thor and a suite of sensors like cameras, radar, lidar and ultrasonic.
Also, Foxconn Smart Manufacturing robotic systems will be built on Nvidia Isaac AMR autonomous mobile robot platform and Foxconn Smart City will incorporate Nvidia Metropolis intelligent video analytics.
Nvidia has had a partnership with Foxconn for a decade and terms of the latest collaboration were not announced. However, the companies announced in January a partnership to develop autonomous vehicle platforms, with Foxconn as a supplier of electronic control units for automakers using the Drive Orin SoC.
“Nvidia and Foxconn are building these [AI] factories together,” said Foxconn Chairman and CEO Youn Liu in a statement. “We will be helping the whole industry move much faster in the new AI era.”
Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, said Foxconn has the scale and expertise to build AI factories globally. Analysts have viewed the partnership as a new market for Nvidia chips as Foxconn broadens its business into the manufacturing of EVs with autonomous driving tech. Officially, the two companies said their collaboration on AI factories relates to more than EVs and includes robotics platforms, digitization of manufacturing and inspection workflows and a growing number of language-based generative AI services.
Onstage with Liu, Huang said the two companies are building an end-to-end system with the AI factory where an advanced EV car will have an AI brain inside that interacts with passengers and drivers and also drive autonomously and “complemented an AI factor that develops a software for this car. This car will go through the life experience and collect more data. The data will go to the AI factory, where the AI factory will improve the software and update the entire AI fleet.”
Huang and Liu said the AI factory concept will be applied to smart EVs, smart cities and smart manufacturing. “This is a factory that takes data input and produces intelligence as an output,” Huang said. “In the future, every industry, every company will have an AI factory.”
A day after the Foxconn event, on Wednesday Nvidia also announced an expansion of its Jetson robotics platform with the general availability of its Isaac ROS robotics framework and an expansion of Nvidia Metropolis on Jetson. Nvidia said it has 10,000 customers on the Nvidia AI and Jetson platform such as AWS, Cisco, John Deere, Medtronic, Pepsico and Siemens.
Separately, Nvidia announced updates to its Isaac Robotics platform with the release of ROS 2.0 and Sim 2023, as well as perception and simulation upgrades.
The updates to Isaac ROS are designed to make AI perception easier to use for developers, while Isaac Sim will allow developers to test and train AI robots in the virtual world before deploying them in reality.