With one eye on Amazon, Walmart plans to develop its own artificial intelligence networks

If artificial intelligence lives up to the hype and becomes the most important aspect of cloud computing over the next several years, Walmart wants to make sure it's prepared. The retailer is planning to build a neural network cluster based on Nvidia's AI chips over the rest of the year, according to Global Equities Research analyst Trip Chowdry, as reported by Barron's. The cluster will allow Walmart's OneOps team, which builds and maintains the company's internal application development system, to build a series of neural networks in order to train AI systems within current and future applications. AI could become a huge differentiating factor in the retail stores of the future, and it's one big reason why Amazon bought Whole Foods for $13.7 billion this year. Whole Foods gives Amazon Web Services' artificial intelligence team reams of data on shopper behavior to study and train its own AI systems, and AWS will be able to use Whole Foods stores to test drive AI-related services that could eventually become part of the core AWS product lineup.