Snap processes more than 10 petabytes of experimentation data every single morning—and with NVIDIA GPU-accelerated Apache Spark on Google Cloud, Snap cut job costs by 76%, reduced memory usage by 80%, and eliminated 120 terabytes of disk spill from its pipelines.

Prudhvi Vatala, head of engineering platforms at Snap, joins the NVIDIA AI Podcast to break down how he and his team completely modernized data infrastructure for a social platform serving nearly a billion monthly active users—using NVIDIA cuDF plugin (formerly referred to as NVIDIA RAPIDS plugin) for Apache Spark on Google Kubernetes Engine, with zero application code changes.

🔬Topics covered:

How Snap runs A/B tests at planetary scale using rigorous statistical methods like heterogeneous treatment effect detection and variance reduction

Why Snap reuses idle inference GPUs between 1–5 a.m. for batch data processing—and how it built a Kubernetes-based platform to do it

How NVIDIA cuDF delivered 3x+ speedups on join-heavy Spark jobs with no code rewrites

The full business impact: 76% cost reduction, 62% fewer cores, 80% less memory, 120 TB of spill eliminated

How a three-way partnership between Snap, NVIDIA, and Google Cloud made it possible in just 8–9 months

Chapters:

0:00 Introduction and Snap overview

3:35 What is Snap’s experimentation platform?

4:05 Why experimentation, safety, and privacy are core at Snap

4:52 How A/B testing works at billion-user scale

8:14 Discovering NVIDIA cuDF plugin

9:06 Benchmarking results: join, union, and aggregation jobs

12:00 Reusing idle GPUs overnight via GKE

13:24 Building a bottom-up GPU data platform at Snap

17:48 Results: 76% cost reduction and partnership impact

20:56 Snap’s evolution and what’s next

Learn more:

NVIDIA cuDF: https://developer.nvidia.com/topics/ai/data-science/cuda-x-data-science-libraries/cudf#accel-apache

LangChain has surpassed 1 billion downloads—and the framework that started as a weekend project is now the harness powering the next generation of production-grade AI agents. In this episode, Harrison Chase, co-founder & CEO of LangChain, breaks down the architecture behind deep agents, explains why systems like Claude Code, Manus, and Deep Research all share the same foundational pattern, and lays out what it actually takes to deploy autonomous agents responsibly in the enterprise.

🔬Topics covered:

What is a "deep agent," and why does architecture matter more than ever?

How enterprises are (and aren't) embracing autonomous agents

LangSmith: observability, tracing, and evaluation-driven development

Mixing frontier and open models (NVIDIA Nemotron) in multi-agent systems

What's next: async subagents, proactive/always-on agents, agent memory, and agent identity

Chapters:

00:00 – LangChain origin story and the deep agent architecture

01:46 – What is a deep agent?

03:31 – Enterprise trust: risk, autonomy, and iteration

04:38 – LangSmith: observability and evaluation-driven development

13:30 – Frontier vs. open models and the Nemotron Coalition

18:10 – What's next: async subagents, agent memory, and agent identity

Generative AI can predict whether a plane takes off—but does it know why? Nicolas Cerisier, VP of 3DEXPERIENCE Platform R&D at Dassault Systèmes, explains how industrial world models go beyond pattern recognition to embed the actual laws of physics, chemistry, and engineering. In this episode of the NVIDIA AI Podcast, he also breaks down Dassault's three virtual companions (AURA, LEO, and MARIE), their 25-year collaboration with NVIDIA, and a stunning real-world use case: helping NIAR rebuild aircraft designs part by part, using AI.

What if one AI brain could run every robot on the planet—a humanoid, a warehouse arm, and a dog-like inspection bot—all at once?

That's not a thought experiment. That's what Skild AI is building right now.

Deepak Pathak (CEO and Co-Founder) and Abhinav Gupta (President and Co-Founder) of Skild AI join the pod to break down Skild Brain—a universal, general-purpose AI model designed to power robots of any form factor, tackling any task, from a single shared intelligence.

What happens when you combine AI with quantum computing? NVIDIA's Nic Harrigan joins the AI Podcast to break down the state of quantum, explain why error correction is the pivotal challenge, and reveal how NVIDIA Ising—the world's first open AI model family for quantum—is changing the game.

🔗 Resources mentioned:

► Read our NVIDIA Ising announcement 

► Learn more about NVIDIA Ising 

► Learn more about NVIDIA Quantum Computing

Chapters:

0:00 Intro

0:55 What is quantum computing?

4:00 Qubits, noise, and error correction

5:26 How AI helps quantum error correction

10:57 Applications: drug discovery and materials

15:33 NVIDIA Ising announcement

20:35 Scaling quantum hardware

27:31 Algorithm development with generative AI

Enterprises are moving from AI pilots to full‑scale AI factories that turn data into trusted digital intelligence. Red Hat CTO Chris Wright and NVIDIA’s Justin Boitano unpack the "five‑layer cake" AI factory stack, from accelerated hardware and hybrid cloud infrastructure to models, agents, and production‑grade governance.

AI is reshaping electricity demand. What does increased demand, and the shape of that demand, mean for the electric grid? Ben Sooter, Director of R&D at EPRI joins the podcast to explain why most of an AI model’s lifetime energy use comes from inference rather than training, and how micro data centers located near underutilized substations can help deliver low‑latency AI services while strengthening grid resilience.

Alibaba.com president Kuo Zhang discusses how AI agents like Accio are reshaping global trade. He shares insights on automating complex B2B sourcing, compressing weeks of work into minutes, lowering barriers for solo entrepreneurs and SMEs, and what AI-native commerce will mean for the next decade.

Transit agencies are using AI and edge computing to keep bus lanes and bus stops clear — boosting on‑time performance, accessibility, and safety for riders. AC Transit CTO Ahsan Baig and Hayden AI CEO Marty Beard explain how bus‑mounted cameras and NVIDIA-powered edge AI automatically detect vehicles blocking bus lanes and stops, protect rider privacy by design, and are helping change driver behavior in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Explore the next wave of AI innovation at NVIDIA GTC. Learn more.

How can AV teams stop drowning in petabytes of data and actually ship safer autonomy faster? Fortellix’s Rohan Bhasin and Voxel51’s Dan Gural explain how neural reconstruction, scenario-driven data curation, and NVIDIA-powered pipelines turn ordinary drive logs into high-fidelity simulations that close the last-mile gap in AV performance.

GTC is the premier global AI conference. Learn more at nvidia.com/gtc

How are real‑time 4K holograms that look, sound, and respond like people changing fan engagement? Jia Li, co‑founder, president, and chief AI officer of LiveX AI, shares how human‑like AI agents bridge the digital and physical worlds—from greeting travelers at airports to guiding fans through fan zones and supporting wayfinding at major sports events.

Join the world's premier AI conference: NVIDIA GTC