Artificial intelligence has played a major role in weather forecast modeling for years, and recent breakthroughs in generative AI herald the possibility of it becoming even more accurate.
That’s what Spire Global is betting on in its latest investment. declare Collaboration with Artificial Intelligence Darlings Nvidia.
“What deep learning, neural networks and generative artificial intelligence do is shift power from those who have access to supercomputers to those who have access to superdata,” said Peter Platzer, CEO and co-founder of Spire Global. “Morgan Brennan said in an interview with CNBC CNBC’s “Manifest Space” podcast.
“Because the supercomputer side of the model has been replaced by ultra-efficient GPUs (graphics processing units), you can run tasks that used to take eight hours now in eight seconds,” he explains. “For us, this has always been a vision that we knew would eventually come true, so when the partnership with Nvidia became a possibility, 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, ship and aircraft activity, and has a space services business.
Still, the opportunities for weather forecasting are huge: From trade to agriculture to power generation, one-third of the global economy (global GDP is about $30 trillion) is affected by weather, Plazer said.
He estimates that in weather forecasting, there are about 175 major use cases around the world, involving up to 200,000 customers or customer types. In other words, there is an urgent need for more accurate forecasts, especially over longer lead times.
Follow and listen to CNBC “List Space” Podcasthosted by Morgan Brennan, wherever you get your podcasts.
So what does a partnership with Nvidia mean?
“It allows us to access their infrastructure to better serve customers, deliver more valuable products and new use cases… and they can access our data to improve their modeling and machines,” Platzer said. . ”
Still, “there’s no immediate economic flow from Nvidia to Spire or vice versa,” he noted.
Investors reacted well to Nvidia’s revelations at March’s GTC developer conference, as has the growing number of companies partnering with the semiconductor giant.
Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang took the stage to launch a “digital twin” of Earth called Earth-2, which essentially pairs an open cloud platform with satellite data from Nvidia’s generative AI models CorrDiff and Spire to improve existing weather and Climate prediction models.
Spire Global is a small-cap stock that went public through a SPAC merger in 2021, and its stock price rose by about 40% in response.
Spire subsequently raised $30 million through a direct offering of common stock to two institutional investors, which closed last week.
“We have a lot of investors vying to be part of the Spire story,” Platzer said. “For us, it means we can deliver our balance sheet, we can lower our cost of capital, we can create greater flexibility… We will reduce debt payments, which increases our free cash flow , which helps us on our path to free cash flow profitability.”
Spire Global forecasts positive free cash flow this summer or by the third quarter of 2024.
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