Artificial intelligence has played a key role in modeling weather forecasts for years, and recent breakthroughs in genetic AI hold the potential for it to become more accurate.
This is what Spire Global is betting on recently was announced cooperation with AI my love Nvidia.
“What deep learning and neural networks and genetic AI have done is they’ve shifted the power from those who have access to supercomputers a little bit more to those who have access to super data,” Peter Platzer, CEO and co-founder of Spire Global. CNBC’s Morgan Brennan said in an interview on CNBC’s “Manifest Space” podcast.
“Because the single-model supercomputer side has been replaced with ultra-efficient GPUs [graphics processing units]you can run something that used to take eight hours and now you can run it in eight seconds,” he explained. “For us, this was always a vision that we knew would eventually come, so when this [Nvidia] The collaboration became possible, we jumped at it.”
Twelve-year-old Spire Global is in the RF sensing business, operating a satellite constellation that collects space-based RF data that can be analyzed and sold as a service. It offers information on weather, climate and ship and aircraft movements, and also has a space services business.
The opportunity in weather forecasting, however, is huge: One-third of the world’s economy — about $30 trillion of global GDP — ranging from trade to agriculture to power generation is subject to weather, according to Platzer.
It estimates that there are about 175 major 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, particularly with longer lead times, is in high demand.
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So what does this partnership with Nvidia entail?
“It allows us access to their infrastructure to better serve our customers, with more valuable products and new use cases … and access to our data to improve their modeling, their machines,” Platzer said.
However, “there is currently no direct financial flow from Nvidia to Spire or vice versa,” he noted.
As with a growing list of companies working with the stable semiconductor, investors reacted positively to the news, which was revealed at Nvidia’s GTC developer conference in March.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang unveiled a “digital twin” of Earth called Earth-2 on stage, which essentially combines the open cloud platform with Nvidia’s genetic AI model CorrDiff and Spire’s satellite data to improve of existing weather and climate prediction models.
Spire Global, a small-cap stock that went public through a SPAC merger in 2021, rose 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. “For us, it means we can deliver the balance sheet, we can reduce our cost of capital, we can create more flexibility … we will have fewer debt payments, which increases our free cash flow and that helps us on this path to profitability of free cash flows”.
Spire Global expects to achieve positive free cash flow this summer or by the third quarter of 2024.