Nvidia announces three more AI, big data investments

Nvidia is continuing to push heavily into the artificial intelligence and big data markets, announcing a trio of investments through its Nvidia GPU Ventures division in companies using hardware acceleration in a variety of markets.

Following the launch of CUDA, known at the time as the Compute Unified Device Architecture, ten years ago, Nvidia has been pushing its graphics processors as being capable of accelerating a wide range of non-graphical computational tasks with considerable success. The current boom in artificial intelligence technologies, from semi-autonomous vehicles to Go-winning self-taught deep-learning systems, has renewed the company's focus on general-purpose GPU (GPGPU) compute - and it's now putting its money where its mouth is with a series of investments in non-gaming AI-related businesses.

'AI is fundamentally changing how we interact with data,' claims Jeff Herbst, vice president of business development at Nvidia, of the company's investments. 'These three companies are all rising stars in the data science industry. Their enthusiastic participation in the GOAI [GPU Open Analytics] open source ecosystem will be instrumental to their ultimate success.'

The three companies named by Nvidia as receiving its latest investment packages are: BlazingDB, a company founded in 2015 and which uses GPGPU acceleration to speed the processing of big data; Graphistry, founded in 2014, which uses GPU acceleration and cloud-based GPU farms to provide visual analytics; and H2O.ai, founded in 2011, which recently launched Driverless AI in an attempt to make it possible for non-technical users to implement artificial intelligence technologies.

The three latest companies join a growing list of related investments Nvidia has made in the market, totalling more than 10 in the last year alone from self-driving startup JingChi to data mining platform Datalogue.