AI firm G42 from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has begun a partnership with Nvidia to develop climate technology. The partnership builds on work Nvidia has already done to create a full-fledged digital twin of Earth.
Called “Earth-2,” this digital twin is intended to improve weather forecasting through AI and accurate simulations. Its functionality reaches beyond that goal, but for this new partnership, its weatherman capabilities are touted first and foremost. Together with G42, Nvidia plans to build on this project to provide high-quality meteorological forecasts for every square kilometre on Earth.
Climate tech badly needed
The call for such accurate weather forecasts is more needed than ever, according to the two parties. This is because climate change is upending familiar patterns and creating more unpredictable, severe weather conditions.
An R&D facility will be jointly built by G42 and Nvidia in Abu Dhabi, UAE. Eventually, climate and weather solutions should be created here that apply more than 100 petabytes of data assets about the earth.
“Our collaboration with G42 marks a crucial step toward deploying AI to understand and predict climate phenomena with unprecedented accuracy,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia.
Digital twins
The collaboration puts a spotlight on a somewhat lesser-known activity of Nvidia, but one it has been working on for years. While AI hardware and related developer frameworks have catapulted the company into the trillions of dollars, digital twin technology is just as much of a key investment for Nvidia. With its Omniverse solutions, it helps companies build products digitally before they end up in wind tunnels or other testing environments. Siemens and Mercedes-Benz, among others, use it, for example.
Now these Nvidia initiatives are leading to an entirely different partnership with G42. The Middle Eastern firm, as it happens, is no stranger to U.S. AI players. It has had a partnership with OpenAI since September 2023 and received $1.5 billion in investment from Microsoft in April of this year.
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