Can artificial intelligence help us defeat a leading cause of death? NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) aims to find out. In a press release issued on Monday night, the chipmaker announced that it was working with the National Cancer Institute, the U.S. Department of Energy and several national laboratories on a tech-driven plan to cure cancer.
The idea isn’t new, per se. President Barack Obama called for a “cancer moonshot” in his 2016 State of the Union address, assigning Vice President Joe Biden the task of leading a national effort aimed at “ending cancer as we know it.” NVIDIA will now be a part of that effort, contributing technology designed to produce a decade’s worth of advancements in cancer research in the space of five years or less using an advanced A.I. framework.
Dubbed “CANDLE,” for “Cancer Distributed Learning Environment,” the concept is to develop new software capable of taking advantage of the latest in supercomputing technology to amplify research and discovery. NVIDIA’s graphics processing unit (GPU) accelerators have been part of the DOE’s supercomputing infrastructure since at least 2014, and will play a role in the cancer moonshot, as well.
“GPU deep learning has given us a new tool to tackle grand challenges that have, up to now, been too complex for even the most powerful supercomputers,” said Jen-Hsun Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, in a press release. He’s talking specifically about the ability to rapidly sift through massive volumes of data and discover patterns that would remain hidden without the aid of supercomputing and “deep learning” software that adjusts to each new finding — hence the references to artificial intelligence.
Why should investors care about this? As good as NVIDIA’s recent results have been — and with record revenue, record margins, and record earnings in the third quarter of fiscal 2017, they’ve been great — this is still a company that’s driven largely by the success of the video gaming market. Cultivating a niche in supercomputing is just the sort of diversification that could be good for the business, and the stock, over the long term.
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Tim Beyers has no position in any stocks mentioned.
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