In a challenging moment for the future of AI, technology consultancy Accenture and microchip magnate Nvidia have announced an expanded partnership. The news will see Accenture form a new Nvidia Business Group with 30,000 professionals being trained globally, to help the world’s enterprises rapidly scale their AI adoption.
“We are breaking significant new ground with our partnership with Nvidia and enabling our clients to be at the forefront of using generative AI as a catalyst for reinvention,” said Julie Sweet, CEO of Accenture. “Accenture AI Refinery will create opportunities for companies to reimagine their processes and operations, discover new ways of working, and scale AI solutions across the enterprise to help drive continuous change and create value.”
As part of the move, the new Nvidia Business Group at Accenture will help clients lay the foundation for agentic AI functionality using Accenture’s AI Refinery™️, which uses the full NVIDIA AI stack—including NVIDIA AI Foundry, NVIDIA AI Enterprise and NVIDIA Omniverse—to advance areas such as process reinvention, AI-powered simulation and sovereign AI.
According to a release from Accenture, generative AI demand drove “$3 billion in Accenture bookings” in its latest financial year, and the Accenture AI Refinery will play into meeting further such demand, being available on all public and private cloud platforms – assisting clients as they work to accelerate AI across their SaaS and Cloud ecosystem.
Pointing to how the connection with Nvidia will deliver material benefits, Accenture pointed to Indosat Group, which recently announced the first sovereign AI in Indonesia that enables businesses to securely deploy AI while ensuring data governance and adhering to regulations. It is collaborating with Accenture to build industry-specific solutions on top of Indosat’s data center, which includes Nvidia AI software and accelerated computing, to support local enterprises.
On the future of the collaboration with Accenture, Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang added, “AI will supercharge enterprises to scale innovation at greater speed. Nvidia’s platform, Accenture’s AI Refinery and our combined expertise will help businesses and nations accelerate this transformation to drive unprecedented productivity and growth.”
Nvidia
Once labelled one of the world’s most innovative companies by Boston Consulting Group, Nvidia is a software and fabless company, working to design and supply graphics processing units, application programming interfaces for data science and high-performance computing, as well as system-on-a-chip units for the mobile computing and automotive market. But amid the hype around artificial intelligence in the last two years, Nvidia has also pivoted to capitalise on excitement around that technology.
Repositioning itself as a dominant supplier of AI hardware and software, Nvidia’s market value surpassed $3 trillion earlier in 2024, fueled by the generative AI boom, and the rebounding tech sector. But looking ahead, the AI market is slightly more fraught than that. In the second half of 2024, Nvidia lost billions from its stock value in a single day. And in the autumn, the market capitalisation of Nvidia tumbled by $406 billion over the course of a week – more than 20% of its share-value – raising concerns about the possibility of a slowdown in the growth of AI chips.
This is partially because the expectations around AI have yet to be realised in any meaningful way – and many investors are beginning to get cold feet. At the same time, Nvidia itself has endured difficulties in its own production process: and in August it was reported by The Information that Nvidia told Microsoft and another unnamed cloud customer that its next-generation Blackwell chips – designed specifically for accelerating AI computing tasks – would be delayed by three months due to an unspecified design flaw, identified by the firm’s contract foundry, TSMC.