How Nvidia Is Taking ‘This AI Revolution By Storm:’ WWT CEO

Jim Kavanaugh, the longtime CEO and technology guru of $20 billion IT powerhouse World Wide Technology, believes Nvidia is holding a winning hand in the new AI era as WWT is placing a “significant investment” in its partnership.

“Nvidia is just an amazing company that’s doing amazing things that are literally taking this AI revolution by storm,” said WWT’s CEO.

“What they have had in place today—the technology, the chips, the platforms, the software, the integrated platform—and what they’re building, is quite impressive to say the least. That’s creating an incredible opportunity for Nvidia, but also Nvidia partners,” said Kavanaugh. “Nvidia is partnering with a lot of different organizations and making a lot of different connections. So that’s a big opportunity for us.”

Kavanaugh said the AI chipmaker superstar is continuing to take the market by storm in 2024 by forming partnerships with cloud hyperscalers such as Microsoft and Amazon Web Services as well as AI infrastructure players.

“Nvidia Cloud Providers are new, emerging organizations that are funded by private equity and venture capital around building out their own AI-as-a-Service capabilities and data centers,” Kavanaugh said. “We have been actively working with Nvidia and with those different companies who are building out data centers to provide AI as a Service.”

WWT Driving AI Enterprise Wins With Nvidia

WWT won Nvidia’s Americas AI Enterprise Partner of The Year Award for 2024.

The St. Louis-based company won the newly introduced AI enterprise award for its expertise in advancing the adoption of AI and increasing AI sales alongside Nvidia’s portfolio.

“We’re really leaning in very, very aggressively around AI and leveraging AI as a major go-to-market initiative for World Wide [Technology]. We’re placing significant investment in our partnership with Nvidia,” said Kavanaugh. “Nvidia really hit this inflection point and what they’ve been building behind the scenes was brought to life with generative AI. We are in a very nice position with them.”

From helping customers build out AI data center infrastructure to AI software development and data science, WWT is providing Nvidia customers with services and solutions that solve the complexity of building and managing an AI environment.

In March, WWT committed $500 million over the next three years to spur AI development and customer adoption. The investment included a new AI Proving Ground lab environment, which is a collaboration ecosystem that leverages solutions from partners like Nvidia.

An Elite partner inside Nvidia’s Partner Network, WWT provides joint customers with AI, machine learning, virtual desktop infrastructure and networking solutions.

For example, WWT’s Data Analytics and AI team has earned 80 deep learning certifications from Nvidia.

However, being a top partner for one of the hottest AI companies in the world isn’t easy.

“We are working very collaboratively with Nvidia in many ways: the engineering side of it, the technical side of their business units, the implementation side, and then the sales side in industry verticals. A partner like WWT that has 10-plus-years of experience in data science, big data, AI, generative AI and software development fits quite well with them,” Kavanaugh said. “If you don’t have that kind of experience and expertise to bring that value to them, you’re probably not going to be as relevant to their go-to-market. So we’re in a very good spot because of the investments we’ve made in our software development teams, in our application development teams, in our data science team, our data consulting and advisory teams.”

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang Doesn’t Take Success ‘For Granted’

Lastly, Kavanaugh highlighted Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang as a big reason why Nvidia currently has a market capitalization of over $3 trillion.

“It’s a really interesting company led by Jensen, who from my view has—with all the success that they’ve had and the people that we work are really smart, ambitious and passionate people—he has taken a pretty humble approach to how they go to market,” said WWT’s CEO.

“They don’t take for granted all the success that they’re having—and that starts with Jensen and cascades throughout that company,” he added. “So it’s been a real joy to work with them.”

WWT has more than 10,000 employees worldwide in over 55 locations across the globe.

“There’s a massive opportunity around AI with us and Nvidia. It’s a massive opportunity that we feel very fortunate to have a really strong and long relationship—nine years—with Nvidia,” he said. “They are truly doing some amazing things.”