Why Nvidia and Meta Platforms are Partnering Up on Hardware

Nvidia (NVDA 4.01%) is gaining some of the largest possible customers for its graphics accelerators. 

In this clip from "The Virtual Opportunities Show", recorded on Jan. 25, Fool analyst Asit Sharma and Fool contributors Rachel Warren, Demitri Kalogeropoulos, and Jose Najarro discuss the new chip giant's partnership with Meta Platforms (META -0.30%) and what it might mean for several stocks in the tech world. 

Asit Sharma: Do you happen to know, Jose, are any of the other companies that develop -- I won't call them supercomputers, but these really big conglomeration of processing units -- are they big customers of Nvidia? Or is this better news for Nvidia? Facebook says, "We want to make one of these computers in 2023." Because we've discussed on the show, they've got the cash. [laughs] They want to do this.

Jose Najarro: I think this is pretty much just good news for the overall tech market. To some extent it's showing that, big players are still focusing on investing a lot of money on these big players. I personally think it's better news for Nvidia. It shows that their product is in high demand. At the moment, there's only really two main companies that focus in high-performance accelerators, which are these graphics cards, and that's Nvidia and AMD. Intel is entering the race in the future, but at the moment it does seem like we're seeing a lot bigger companies using Nvidia, but who knows, the overall semiconductor market is very innovative market.

This year could be Nvidia, but next year or two years from now, engineers can develop something impressive that it might be some other player. They did mention though, one thing that Meta Platforms is also using this supercomputer to accelerate its augmented reality tools. That's a new process that they're going to be using this supercomputer, opposed to the other one that they have. We've known that Facebook, Meta Platforms is focusing in that metaverse, so these supercomputers is one that's going to help them accelerate into whatever that means for them.

Demitri Kalogeropoulos: That's cool. I'll just add, ever since we've been talking with Asit the last couple of weeks about this war for talent for engineers, these big different companies are trying to steal away the best engineers for the next round of all this investment that we're seeing. I can't help but hearing when I see articles like this filtered through that prism a little bit, because I think Meta is trying to attract some great engineers there, and of course you're going to say, we're going to build the world's fastest supercomputer, and if you want to work on that stuff, you might want to come to work here. I see it like that and that's just another little twist there. Just interesting that a lot of the other companies, Microsoft and Amazon making similar announcements, but that's a game that Apple really doesn't play either. You almost think they're almost too quiet in that way.

Rachel Warren: Yeah, it's interesting. There were a couple of things that stuck out to me from this story. One I was just thinking about, no matter what the naysayers may have to say about Meta, and I count myself [laughs] among one of them, looking at the business and people wondering, "Could Meta survive the most recent PR crisis?" This is a company that's just not going anywhere, and its ability to constantly innovate, and grow, and surprise both consumers and investors, I think it's really a testament to whatever the criticisms there are of management, which I have made and believe are valid, there are so much innovation and so much vision there, and I think that's one of the things that keeps investors coming back for more.

Another thing that I thought was really interesting when I was reading a little bit about this is obviously, the supercomputer is such an integral part of Meta's vision to expand within the metaverse. But another thing I thought was interesting, they said in a blog post that they're hoping that it will,

"Help us build entirely new AI systems that can, for example, power real-time voice translations to large groups of people each speaking a different language, so they can seamlessly collaborate on a research project or play an AR game together." There's obviously this very metaverse aspect, but there's also a very real-world utilitarian aspect to this technology that could be really meaningful in a lot of spaces outside of the metaverse.

I actually thought this was pretty exciting. I haven't seen a lot of things come from Meta Platforms over the recent months that I've been too thrilled about, but this I found actually really quite fascinating, so I'm excited to see what more they tell us about it in the coming months.