AI Daily: Nvidia to invest $5B in Intel’s common stock

Catch up on the top artificial intelligence news and commentary by Wall Street analysts on publicly traded companies in the space with this daily recap compiled by The Fly:

NVIDIA, INTEL COLLABORATION: NVIDIA (NVDA) and Intel (INTC) announced a collaboration to jointly develop multiple generations of custom data center and PC products that accelerate applications and workloads across hyperscale, enterprise and consumer markets. The companies will focus on seamlessly connecting NVIDIA and Intel architectures using NVIDIA NVLink – integrating the strengths of NVIDIA’s AI and accelerated computing with Intel’s leading CPU technologies and x86 ecosystem to deliver cutting-edge solutions for customers. For data centers, Intel will build NVIDIA-custom x86 CPUs that NVIDIA will integrate into its AI infrastructure platforms and offer to the market. For personal computing, Intel will build and offer to the market x86 system-on-chips that integrate NVIDIA RTX GPU chiplets. These new x86 RTX SOCs will power a wide range of PCs that demand integration of world-class CPUs and GPUs. 

Nvidia also said it will invest $5B in the chipmaker as part of a deal to co-develop multiple generations of custom data center and PC products that accelerate applications and workloads across hyperscale, enterprise and consumer markets. Nvidia is investing its stake at a price of $23.28 a share, according to a press release. The statement says the companies will focus on “seamlessly connecting NVIDIA and Intel architectures using NVIDIA NVLink – integrating the strengths of NVIDIA’s AI and accelerated computing with Intel’s leading CPU technologies and x86 ecosystem to deliver cutting-edge solutions for customers.”

For data centers, Intel will build Nvidia-custom x86 CPUs that Nvidia will integrate into its AI infrastructure platforms and offer to the market, while for personal computing, Intel will build and offer to the market x86 system-on-chips that integrate Nvidia RTX GPU chiplets. “AI is powering a new industrial revolution and reinventing every layer of the computing stack – from silicon to systems to software. At the heart of this reinvention is NVIDIA’s CUDA architecture,” said Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang. “This historic collaboration tightly couples NVIDIA’s AI and accelerated computing stack with Intel’s CPUs and the vast x86 ecosystem – a fusion of two world-class platforms. Together, we will expand our ecosystems and lay the foundation for the next era of computing.”

AI CHIPS: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says he was “disappointed” after The Financial Times reported that China has banned Chinese companies from using Nvidia’s RTX Pro 6000D AI chips, CNBC’s Ryan Browne reports. The Trump administration in August agreed a deal under which Nvidia would receive export licenses for its H20 AI chips in exchange for 15% of its China sales, but the FT reported Wednesday that China has urged its domestic tech firms not to use Nvidia’s AI chips. “We probably contributed more to the China market than most countries have. And I’m disappointed with what I see,” Huang told reporters Wednesday at a press briefing in London. “But they have larger agendas to work out between China and the United States, and I’m understanding of that.”

NEW DATACENTER: Microsoft (MSFT) CEO Satya Nadella said via X, “If intelligence is the log of compute… it starts with a lot of compute! And that’s why we’re scaling our GPU fleet faster than anyone else. Just last year, we added over 2 gigawatts of new capacity – roughly the output of 2 nuclear power plants. And today we’re going further, announcing the world’s most powerful AI datacenter, located in southeastern Wisconsin. Fairwater is a seamless cluster of hundreds of thousands of NVIDIA GB200s, connected by enough fiber to circle the Earth 4.5 times. It will deliver 10x the performance of the world’s fastest supercomputer today, enabling AI training and inference workloads at a level never before seen. For AI training workloads, you need compute at exponential scale. That’s why we designed the datacenter, GPU fleet, and network together as one integrated system. This ensures a single job can run from day 1 at exponential scale across thousands of GPUs. Fairwater uses a liquid-cooled closed-loop system for cooling GPUs that requires zero water for operations after construction. And we’re matching all of the energy that is consumed with renewable sources. And of course, it is just one of several similar sites we’re lighting up across our 70+ regions. We have multiple identical Fairwater datacenters under construction in other locations across the US, in addition to our AI infrastructure already deployed in over 100 datacenters around the world, powering model training, test-time compute, RL tuning, and real-time inference at global scale.”

LICENSING: Meta (META) has discussed licensing articles from media companies, including Axel Springer, Fox Corp. (FOX), and News Corp. (NWS), for use in its AI tools, Alexandra Bruell and Jessica Toonkel of The Wall Street Journal report. Some of the discussions are early and may not lead to new deals, people familiar with the matter told the Journal.