Nvidia and Palantir want to speed up the AI buildout. Nvidia is first in line

Nvidia has begun running its own supply chain on Palantir software, making the chipmaker at the center of the AI boom the first customer of a product the two companies built together and now plan to sell across industry and government. The collaboration, which builds off a partnership that began last October, turns Palantir’s platform into a shared command center for Nvidia’s global supply chain, deploying Nvidia’s own open-weight models to fix its bottlenecks. “We’re really at the center of the world’s largest infrastructure buildout in human history,” says Justin Boitano, Nvidia’s vice president of enterprise AI. Few supply chains are as complex, or consequential. The speed of Nvidia’s governs how quickly AI infrastructure gets built anywhere in the world. The company has said it plans to produce up to $500 billion of AI infrastructure in the U.S. through partnerships and federal initiatives, alongside building supercomputers and secure AI factories for the government. The first focus is materials allocation, the decisions that determine which parts move where, and how fast. Each Vera Rubin rack requires Nvidia to coordinate thousands of suppliers and roughly 1.3 million components across compute, memory, networking, power, cooling and mechanical systems. “Any single [piece] could essentially break the whole system,” Boitano tells Fast Company, “so how you allocate those materials really matters.” Nvidia’s aim is to cut the time that inventory sits idle, he says. “Our North Star is time of ownership, making sure that we’re not carrying all this inventory on our books through our supply chain, and minimizing that time.” Amid a chip shortage, a power shortage, years-long grid interconnection queues, and a national pushback against data center construction, every minute gained counts. The CEOs of both companies and the Trump administration say the stakes of that buildout are existential, and with roughly 1.5 percent of US GDP now tied to AI data centers and hardware, the economy depends on it too. Boitano says Nvidia’s open-weight models and Palantir’s software can help streamline every level of AI deployment, including, through a preexisting partnership, the construction of the data center itself. “When does power come online, how does the building get constructed, when do I have different cooling show up, when does the physical compute infrastructure show up, and then automating everything to allocation of compute in tokens through that infrastructure.”