The Six Five team discusses the NVIDIA-Snowflake partnership.
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Transcript:
Pat Moorhead: Nvidia ties up with Snowflake and pretty much everyone else. Is this just a big nothing burger or is this, you know what, what’s going on here Dan?
Daniel Newman: Yeah, you know what, it’s a little bit of both. I think Nvidia continues to hug and wrap it’s arms around every major software player in the industry. This is just the next one, Pat. I have been from event, it’s not just software, software, it’s hardware, they’re partnering up with every major SI. Look, they’re staking their claim, good for them. But the tie-up with Snowflake, it’s really all about where compute lies and historically speaking data goes to compute. The long and short story about this partnership is it’s about the compute going to the data. And so as the volume of data continues to grow, if you look at Snowflake’s recent acquisitions, it’s streamlet, Neeva, the ability to build applications. And by the way, Snowflake’s doing a little more OLTP, a little more operationally focused as opposed to just analytic focus. You’re kind of seeing this whole industry shift.
We saw last week, Pat, when we were at MongoDB Local, how they’re doing a little bit more analytical, but they’re not doing analytic, but you can do a little bit more of that there. But of course everybody’s really focused on how do you optimize these applications? How do you make them flexible in the multi-cloud? How do you handle with streaming data? How do you keep that data secure in use, in motion and at rest? And then of course, how do you optimize compute? And so really what’s happening is that the Snow Park is what they call it container services, is giving it the ability to run containerized applications on top of Nvidia GPUs, all without moving any data outside of Snowflake. So basically you can run the app and have the compute and the data altogether without ever leaving the Snowflake environment. So Pat, it’s provocative, it’s thoughtful, it’s smart.
And of course it’s a way to, Nvidia gets more lock in and as it’s a very simple ratio of how many workloads, how much data Snowflake has that’s being used, and then how much Nvidia is going to sell. So Nvidia has built NeMo right into the into container platform. It’s a pretty smart approach, Pat, and I know we’re kind of limited on time here, so I’ll just say it’s not nothing Burger, it’s truly is the convergence of compute to the data. But it is like there anybody that’s not going to be locked in with Nvidia, by the time this thing is done, everyone’s going to be so busy chasing. It’s like, wow, by the time any of these others have their platform, it’s going to be just a big rapid game of catch up. Hopefully the dollars and cents and the huge margins will create a competitive battle. And of course you never want to see margins sucked out, but maybe margin could be distributed a little bit more along that supply chain. Because as far as I know right now in AI, there’s only one company making a lot of money.
Pat Moorhead: This announcement irritates me so badly, I can’t even tell you.
Daniel Newman: Are you going to be okay?
Pat Moorhead: I’m going to be okay, but I might need to anybody have a paper bag I can bring into? So first off, snowflake doesn’t have any of their own infrastructure. Zero. They don’t have their cloud, they don’t have a cloud, they don’t have a data center. They sit on top of AWS, Azure, GCP and more. So it’s like a joke. It’s like nobody talked about this anyways, it’s like, do people not realize that? And second of all, I think the only winner here is Nvidia.
Daniel Newman: Always.
Pat Moorhead: Because you have them locked doubling down on NeMo, which again in Nvidia’s vertical and horizontal integration play, it’s huge. Nvidia wants to get to the point where, hey, you might have some competitive hardware, but we’ve got you locked into the software framework And you’re not going to move. They’ve done this in gaming and Jensen’s going to do this in the cloud. So yeah, I think this is just a big nothing burger for Snowflake. It is yet another feather in the cap for Nvidia. And yeah, Jensen was on stage, but it was local. Okay, Jensen, he had to drive down the street to get there. And Snowflake is every three to five years, the new data thing comes along and everybody jumps on it. Snowflake happens to be the merry-go-round, the circus ride that everybody is-
Daniel Newman: Flavor of the week Pat, flavor of the week. It’s just-
Pat Moorhead: It is. And you know what? There’s going to be another one in three years. And-
Daniel Newman: Well, there’s still companies like Cloudera and Teradata that are managing exponentially more data and for more well designed for hybrid than-
Pat Moorhead: Snowflake does not have an on-prem play, black and white. They’re a public cloud play. They do what they do well. They’re using their run up in valuation to go buy companies to become someday a bigger company, but they don’t do hybrid. So good luck with that strategy moving forward. We have seen with all the public clouds, there’s still room, but it’s not an ending.
Author Information
Daniel is the CEO of The Futurum Group. Living his life at the intersection of people and technology, Daniel works with the world’s largest technology brands exploring Digital Transformation and how it is influencing the enterprise.
From the leading edge of AI to global technology policy, Daniel makes the connections between business, people and tech that are required for companies to benefit most from their technology investments. Daniel is a top 5 globally ranked industry analyst and his ideas are regularly cited or shared in television appearances by CNBC, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal and hundreds of other sites around the world.
A 7x Best-Selling Author including his most recent book “Human/Machine.” Daniel is also a Forbes and MarketWatch (Dow Jones) contributor.
An MBA and Former Graduate Adjunct Faculty, Daniel is an Austin Texas transplant after 40 years in Chicago. His speaking takes him around the world each year as he shares his vision of the role technology will play in our future.
