AWS at NVIDIA GTC 2024: Accelerate innovation with generative AI on AWS

AWS was delighted to present to and connect with over 18,000 in-person and 267,000 virtual attendees at NVIDIA GTC, a global artificial intelligence (AI) conference that took place March 2024 in San Jose, California, returning to a hybrid, in-person experience for the first time since 2019.

AWS has had a long-standing collaboration with NVIDIA for over 13 years. AWS was the first Cloud Service Provider (CSP) to offer NVIDIA GPUs in the public cloud, and remains among the first to deploy NVIDIA’s latest technologies.

Looking back at AWS re:Invent 2023, Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, chatted with AWS CEO Adam Selipsky on stage, discussing how NVIDIA and AWS are working together to enable millions of developers to access powerful technologies needed to rapidly innovate with generative AI. NVIDIA is known for its cutting-edge accelerators and full-stack solutions that contribute to advancements in AI. The company is combining this expertise with the highly scalable, reliable, and secure AWS Cloud infrastructure to help customers run advanced graphics, machine learning, and generative AI workloads at an accelerated pace.

The collaboration between AWS and NVIDIA further expanded at GTC 2024, with the CEOs from both companies sharing their perspectives on the collaboration and state of AI in a press release:

“The deep collaboration between our two organizations goes back more than 13 years, when together we launched the world’s first GPU cloud instance on AWS, and today we offer the widest range of NVIDIA GPU solutions for customers,” says Adam Selipsky, CEO of AWS. “NVIDIA’s next-generation Grace Blackwell processor marks a significant step forward in generative AI and GPU computing. When combined with AWS’s powerful Elastic Fabric Adapter networking, Amazon EC2 UltraClusters’ hyper-scale clustering, and our unique AWS Nitro System’s advanced virtualization and security capabilities, we make it possible for customers to build and run multi-trillion parameter large language models faster, at massive scale, and more securely than anywhere else. Together, we continue to innovate to make AWS the best place to run NVIDIA GPUs in the cloud.”

“AI is driving breakthroughs at an unprecedented pace, leading to new applications, business models, and innovation across industries,” says Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “Our collaboration with AWS is accelerating new generative AI capabilities and providing customers with unprecedented computing power to push the boundaries of what’s possible.”

Joint announcements and keynote

On the first day of the NVIDIA GTC, AWS and NVIDIA made a joint announcement focused on their strategic collaboration to advance generative AI. Huang included the AWS and NVIDIA collaboration on a slide during his keynote, highlighting the following announcements. The GTC keynote had over 21 million views within the first 72 hours.

• AWS will offer the new NVIDIA Blackwell platform as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances and NVIDIA DGX Cloud to accelerate performance of building and running inference on multi-trillion parameter large language models (LLMs). Blackwell’s secure AI capabilities integrated with the AWS Nitro System and AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) will provide customers end-to-end control of their training data and model weights.
• AWS will provide the cloud infrastructure for Project Ceiba, an AI supercomputer built exclusively on AWS with NVIDIA DGX Cloud, which will feature 20,736 NVIDIA GB200 Grace Blackwell Superchips capable of 414 exaflops for NVIDIA’s own AI R&D.
• The Amazon SageMaker integration with NVIDIA NIM inference microservices will help customers further optimize price-performance of foundation models running on GPUs. (To learn more, see Optimize price-performance of LLM inference on NVIDIA GPUs using the Amazon SageMaker integration with NVIDIA NIM Microservices.)
• AWS HealthOmics with the NVIDIA BioNeMo platform will accelerate generative AI in biology and drug discovery. (To learn more, refer to NVIDIA BioNeMo Expands Computer-Aided Drug Discovery With New Foundation Models, Protein language model training with NVIDIA BioNeMo framework on AWS ParallelCluster, and Find the Next Blockbuster with NVIDIA BioNeMo Framework on Amazon SageMaker.)
• Amazon Robotics and NVIDIA’s long-standing collaboration regarding innovations in advanced simulations was also highlighted.

Media coverage

By March 22, AWS’s announcement with NVIDIA had generated 104 articles mentioning AWS and Amazon. The vast majority of coverage mentioned AWS’s plans to offer Blackwell-based instances. Adam Selipsky appeared on CNBC’s Mad Money to discuss the long-standing collaboration between AWS and NVIDIA, among the many other ways AWS is innovating in generative AI, stating that AWS has been the first to bring many of its GPUs to the cloud to drive efficiency and scalability for customers.

Project Ceiba has also been a focus in media coverage. Forbes referred to Project Ceiba as the “most exciting” project by AWS and NVIDIA, stating that it “should accelerate the pace of innovation in AI, making it possible to tackle more complex problems, develop more sophisticated models, and achieve previously unattainable breakthroughs.” The Next Platform ran an in-depth piece on Ceiba, stating that “the size and the aggregate compute of Ceiba cluster are both being radically expanded, which will give AWS a very large supercomputer in one of its data centers” and NVIDIA will use it to do AI research, among other things.

Live from GTC

“Live from GTC” was an on-site studio at GTC for invited speakers to have a fireside chat with tech influencers like VentureBeat. Chetan Kapoor, Director of Product Management for Amazon EC2 at AWS, was interviewed by VentureBeat at the Live from GTC studio, where he discussed AWS’s presence and highlighted key announcements at GTC.

The AWS booth and sessions

The AWS booth showcased generative AI services, like the LLMs with Anthropic and Cohere on Amazon Bedrock, PartyRock, Amazon Q, Amazon SageMaker JumpStart, and more. Highlights included:

• AWS AI Chess Robots – Two robotic arms playing chess against each other, with each move generated in the cloud with LLMs on Amazon Bedrock and powered by the NVIDIA Jetson platform and NVIDIA GPUs
• Wormhole – An alien robot from Media.Monks, who was busy having intelligent conversations with booth visitors powered by NVIDIA and a serverless Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) model using Claude 3 on Amazon Bedrock, along with other AWS services – Including SageMaker, Amazon Polly, and more
  
  Additionally, AWS had 10 GTC sessions showcasing how the latest technologies from AWS and NVIDIA can drive business outcomes using generative AI. Some highlights include:
• How Genius Sports Transforms NFL Game Viewing with Accelerated Computing on AWS (Presented by Amazon Web Services)
• Accelerate Time to Train Your Largest Generative AI Models With SageMaker HyperPod (Presented by Amazon Web Services)

AWS presence with partners and customers

During GTC, AWS invited 23 partner and customer solution demos to join its booth with either a dedicated demo kiosk or a 30-minute in-booth session. Such partners and customers included Ansys, Anthropic, Articul8, Bria.ai, Cohere, Deci, Deepbrain.AI, Denali Advanced Integration, Ganit, Hugging Face, Lilt, Linker Vision, Mavenir, MCE, Media.Monks, Modular, NVIDIA, Perplexity, Quantiphi, Run.ai, Salesforce, Second Spectrum, and Slalom.

Among them, high-potential early-stage startups in generative AI across the globe were showcased with a dedicated kiosk at the AWS booth. The AWS Startups team works closely with these companies by investing and supporting their growth, offering resources through programs like AWS Activate.

AWS Generative AI Competency

NVIDIA was one of the 45 launch partners for the new AWS Generative AI Competency program. The Generative AI Center of Excellence for AWS Partners team members were on site at the AWS booth, presenting this program for both existing and potential AWS partners. The program offers valuable resources along with best practices for all AWS partners to build, market, and sell generative AI solutions jointly with AWS.

Additional resources

Watch a video recap of the AWS presence at NVIDIA GTC 2024. For additional resources about the AWS and NVIDIA collaboration, refer to the AWS at NVIDIA GTC 2024 resource hub.

About the Author

Julie Tang is the Senior Global Partner Marketing Manager for Generative AI at Amazon Web Services (AWS), where she collaborates closely with NVIDIA to plan and execute partner marketing initiatives focused on generative AI. Throughout her tenure at AWS, she has held various partner marketing roles, including Global IoT Solutions, AWS Partner Solution Factory, and Sr. Campaign Manager in Americas Field Marketing. Prior to AWS, Julie served as the Marketing Director at Segway. She holds a Master’s degree in Communications Management with a focus on marketing and entertainment management from the University of Southern California, and dual Bachelor’s degrees in Law and Broadcast Journalism from Fudan University.