Nvidia (NVDA) is still the AI chip player to beat, says Salesforce (CRM) CEO Marc Benioff, who has long had a close relationship with Jensen Huang.
“He [Jensen] only has a limited set of customers who are just building these enormous data centers that are material to his business. … What’s exquisite about Nvidia is that they have the product for the moment. And there’s just nothing like this. We’ve never seen anything quite like this in our industry. It’s really incredible,” Benioff said on Yahoo Finance’s Opening Bid from inside Salesforce’s annual Dreamforce this week.
At Dreamforce, Salesforce and Nvidia unveiled Koa, a domain-specific reasoning model engineered for Salesforce’s Agentforce ecosystem.
By hosting Koa directly on Salesforce’s private infrastructure, enterprise clients maintain full control over model weights and sensitive data while achieving lower token inference costs.
The partnership underscores a broader move toward domain-tailored AI agents, with Huang joining Benioff on stage at the Dreamforce keynote to detail the partnership.
“At this juncture in Salesforce’s AI journey, we find the decision to create a proprietary model interesting, as many application vendors have postured away from the model race for multiple years now. We see this announcement as playing into more task-specific/open-source models becoming a key theme for enterprise deployments as customers look to save on token costs without sacrificing performance. In addition, we see this as similar to how large enterprises (CRM in this case) will leverage AI with proprietary data,” said Guggenheim analyst John Difucci.
Benioff and Salesforce have just wrapped one of the better-received Dreamforce events in recent years.
The company clearly showed how it’s playing a key role in AI development through Benioff’s closely watched keynote and gobs of product demos, almost putting to bed fears that model builders would crush software players.
Several important product announcements have been dropped from the one with Nvidia to a new platform called AIforce.
“The announcements and the participation of Jensen Huang, Dario Amodei, and Sam Altman at Dreamforce underscores the open approach the company is taking on both the model and UI layers, as the company leans in on its data/context layers as its core moat in the Agentic Era,” Stifel analyst J. Parker Lane said.
Brian Sozzi is Yahoo Finance’s Executive Editor, host of the ‘Power Players With Brian Sozzi’ podcast and a member of Yahoo Finance’s editorial leadership team. Follow Sozzi on X @BrianSozzi, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Tips on stories? Email brian.sozzi@yahoofinance.com.
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