Sundar Pichai, chief executive officer of Alphabet Inc.
Kyle Grillot | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Sundar Pichai said Google‘s longstanding relationship with chipmaker Nvidia isn’t going to change any time soon — in fact, he expects it to continue over the next 10 years.
In an interview Wired published Monday, the Google CEO said the company worked “deeply” with Nvidia on Android and other initiatives for over a decade, adding that Nvidia has a “strong track record” with AI innovation.
“Look, the semiconductor industry is a very dynamic, cooperative industry,” Pichai said. “It’s an industry that needs deep, long-term R&D and investments. I feel comfortable about our relationship with Nvidia and that we are going to be working closely with them 10 years from now.”
In August, the two companies announced a partnership that will give Google’s cloud customers greater access to technology powered by Nvidia’s H100 GPUs. Nvidia’s stock closed at a record high after the announcement.
Nvidia’s business has been booming because its powerful graphics processing units, or GPUs, are being sought after by cloud companies, government agencies and startups to train and deploy generative AI models like the technology underpinning OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Google has been jostling with the likes of OpenAI and Microsoft to be at the forefront of AI innovation, and it has introduced a number of AI solutions, like its chatbot Bard, across its business units. In the interview with Wired, Pichai described AI as “one of the most profound technologies we will ever work on.”
Nvidia is reaping the benefits. As of Monday morning, Nvidia’s stock is up nearly 212% year to date. In its fiscal second-quarter earnings, the company said its quarterly revenue doubled from a year earlier, and it expects sales in the current quarter will grow 170% from the year-ago period.
—CNBC’s Kif Leswing contributed to this report