By Max A. Cherney
SAN FRANCISCO, May 13 (Reuters) – The foundation of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and his wife, Lori, is buying computing time from CoreWeave and donating it to universities and other nonprofit institutes, according to a filing that valued the donation at $108.3 million so far.
According to a filing on Tuesday, the computing resources will be used for science and artificial intelligence research. Nvidia plans to offer free engineering services to some of the grant recipients, it said in the filing.
While the gift demonstrates Huang’s largesse, it also represents another support measure from Nvidia to CoreWeave, a cloud computing company that specializes in AI applications.
Nvidia designs the graphics processing units, or GPUs, that CoreWeave offers customers. In January, Nvidia invested $2 billion in CoreWeave to become, at the time, the company’s second-largest shareholder.
Nvidia signed a $6.3 billion deal last year for cloud computing capacity with CoreWeave that guarantees the AI chip company will purchase any cloud capacity not sold to customers.
The chip giant has drawn scrutiny for investing billions of dollars into AI firms including ChatGPT maker OpenAI and neoclouds, raising investor concerns about potential circular financing.
CoreWeave raised the lower end of its capital spending forecast last week when it reported results, citing higher prices of components.
(Reporting by Max A. Cherney in San Francisco; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)