Siemens will keep working with NVIDIA, whatever the chipmaker’s board decides about Founder and CEO Jensen Huang. Siemens CEO Roland Busch said so after the NVIDIA crisis broke. Huang has since resigned as NVIDIA CEO.
The crisis followed reports of tw o extramarital affairs, one with an alleged Chinese spy. At the time, NVIDIA’s board was weighing whether to remove Huang.
A partnership between companies
Busch spoke to reporters after Siemens fourth-quarter results, Reuters reported. He said NVIDIA is a big company with a large team. Many projects will therefore go ahead whatever happens at the top.
He said Siemens has NVIDIA people working alongside its own staff, and the two have joint projects. He saw no influence from the crisis, he said. In his view, it is a partnership between companies.
Busch said recently that people focus too much on one individual. He blamed media hype for that.
How the partnership grew
The relationship began in 2022 with work on the industrial metaverse. It used digital twins of factories and products. In January this year, the two companies expanded it. They launched an industrial AI operating system at the Consumer Electronics Show.
NVIDIA provides AI infrastructure, simulation libraries, models and frameworks. Siemens contributes industrial AI experts, along with its hardware and software.
The first fully AI-driven factories were due to start this year. They begin with Siemens electronics plant in Erlangen, Germany. Siemens will use graphics processing units (GPUs) to speed up its whole simulation portfolio.
The companies plan to build a blueprint for AI factories. These are the data centres that run AI workloads. They will also add AI tools for chip design. Busch said at the time that together they are building the Industrial AI operating system.
Siemens has since tested a humanoid robot at Erlangen. Using NVIDIA chip technology, it captured tens of trillions of chip verification cycles in a few days, the company said.
Record industrial profit
Siemens reported better-than-expected fourth-quarter profit and raised its mid-term outlook. Industrial profit rose 22% to a record €3.89 billion ($4.33 billion). A company-compiled consensus had forecast €3.71 billion ($4.11 billion). Net income rose 32% to €2.43 billion ($2.69 billion). Soaring demand for AI infrastructure and data centre solutions drove much of the gain.
