Chip giant Nvidia is digging into a wide range of healthcare specialties, from radiology to drug discovery, primarily by partnering with other healthcare companies.
Nvidia VP of healthcare Kimberly Powell told Business Insider in April that medical imaging was one of Nvidia’s entry points into healthcare. The company has notched a number of medical imaging partnerships powered by its AI platforms, most recently with GE Healthcare in March. GE Healthcare plans to use Nvidia’s tech to simulate autonomous medical imaging, including autonomous X-rays and ultrasounds, to test their application in physical medical devices.
It’s a similar collaboration to Nvidia’s existing deal with IT solutions provider Mark III to work with healthcare systems to create simulations of their hospital environments for AI development. “Physical AI,” or AI that can analyze and interact with the physical world, is a key part of Nvidia’s vision for healthcare.
“This physical AI thing is coming where your whole hospital is going to turn into an AI,” Powell told BI in November. “You’re going to have eyes operating on your behalf, robots doing what is otherwise automatable work, and smart digital devices. So we’re super excited about that, and we’re doing a lot of investments.”
Nvidia is also an investor in several healthcare startups, most notably clinical documentation startup Abridge, which raised $250 million in February from investors including Nvidia’s venture arm NVentures at a $2.75 billion valuation, and Hippocratic AI, which raised $141 million in Series B funding from NVentures and other firms at a $1.64 billion valuation.
It’s also partnered with many of its portfolio companies, such as Moon Surgical, a robotics company that uses Nvidia’s medical device AI platform Holoscan for its surgical assistant robot.