Artificial intelligence has played a crucial role in modeling weather forecasts for years, and recent breakthroughs in generative AI suggest it will become even more accurate.
This is what Spire Global is betting on in its recently announced partnership with AI Darling Nvidia.
“What deep learning, neural networks and generative AI have done is they have shifted the power a little more from those who have access to supercomputers to those who have access to superdata,” said Peter Platzer, CEO and co-founder from Spire Global. said CNBC’s Morgan Brennan in an interview on CNBC’s Manifest Space podcast.
“Because the single-model supercomputer side has been replaced by hyper-efficient GPUs [graphics processing units]“You can do something that used to take eight hours, and now you can do it in eight seconds,” he explained. “For us, it was always a vision that we knew would eventually become a reality, so when it did [Nvidia] When a partnership became possible, we jumped at it.
Twelve-year-old Spire Global is in the radio frequency sensing business, operating a constellation of satellites that collect space-based radio frequency data that can be analyzed and sold as a service. It provides information on weather, climate and ship and aircraft movements and has a space services business.
However, the opportunities of weather forecasting are enormous: According to Platzer, a third of the global economy – about $30 trillion of global GDP – from trade to agriculture to power generation is dependent on the weather.
He estimates that there are around 175 main use cases across up to 200,000 customers or customer types worldwide when it comes to weather forecasting. In other words: The need for more accurate forecasts, especially with longer lead times, is great.
Follow and listen to CNBC’s Manifest Space podcast, hosted by Morgan Brennan, wherever you get your podcasts.
What does this collaboration with Nvidia entail?
“It gives us access to their infrastructure to better serve our customers, with more valuable products and new use cases … and them access to our data to improve their modeling and their machines,” Platzer said.
Still, “there is no immediate economic flow from Nvidia to Spire or vice versa at this point,” he noted.
As with a growing list of companies partnering with the semiconductor star, investors reacted positively to the news, which was announced at Nvidia’s GTC developer conference in March.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang took to the stage to introduce a “digital twin” of Earth called Earth-2, which essentially combines the open cloud platform with Nvidia’s generative AI model CorrDiff and Spire’s satellite data to create existing weather forecasts. and improve climate prediction models.
Spire Global, a small-cap stock that went public through a SPAC merger in 2021, shot up about 40% in response.
Spire then raised $30 million through a direct offering of common stock to two institutional investors – an offering that closed last week.
“We had a number of investors competing to get into the Spire story,” Platzer said. “What this means for us is that we can deliver a balance sheet, reduce our cost of capital and create more flexibility…we will have fewer debt payments, which will increase our free cash flow and help us on the path to free cash flow profitability.”
Spire Global expects to achieve positive free cash flow this summer or by the third quarter of 2024.
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2024-04-05 15:19:51
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