SAN JOSE, March 18 (Reuters) -

Nvidia ( NVDA ) on Monday unveiled software aimed at making

it easier for businesses to incorporate artificial intelligence

systems into their work, broadening the chipmaker's offerings.

The release highlights Nvidia's ( NVDA ) push to expand its presence

in the AI application execution sector, called inference, where

the company's chips don't dominate the market, said Joel

Hellermark, CEO of Sana, a maker of AI assistants for companies.

Nvidia ( NVDA ) is best known for providing the chips used to train

so-called foundation models like OpenAI's GPT-4. Training

involves ingesting large amounts of data and is done mostly by

AI-focused and large tech companies.

Now, companies of all sizes are scrambling to

incorporate those foundation models into their work, which can

be complicated. The Nvidia ( NVDA ) tools released on Monday are designed

to make it easier to modify and run various AI models on Nvidia ( NVDA )

hardware.

"It's like buying a ready-made meal rather than going out

and purchasing ingredients yourself," said Ben Metcalfe, a

venture capitalist who founded Monochrome Capital.

"The Googles and Doordashes and Ubers, they can do all of

this themselves, but now that Nvidia ( NVDA ) has more GPUs available

they need to enable more companies to get value out of GPUs," he

said. Those less tech-savvy companies can use the "prepared

recipes" to get their systems up, he said.

For example, ServiceNow ( NOW ), a firm that provides software

for use by technical support staff inside big businesses, said

it used Nvidia's ( NVDA ) tools to create a "copilot" to help solve

corporate IT problems.

Nvidia ( NVDA ) has some big-name partners for the new tools: Microsoft ( MSFT )

, Alphabet Inc's ( GOOG ) Google and Amazon ( AMZN )

will offer them as part of their cloud computing services, and

Google, Cohere, Meta and Mistral are among companies offering

models. But OpenAI, its financial backer Microsoft ( MSFT ) and

Anthropic, two of the largest providers of foundation models,

are notably missing from the list.

Nvidia's ( NVDA ) tools offer a potential revenue boost for the

chipmaker: They are part of its existing software suite that

costs $4,500 a year for each Nvidia ( NVDA ) chip if used on in a private

data center or $1 per hour in a cloud data center.