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March 18, 2025
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Unleashing AI’s Potential: Why Graph Databases are the Secret Weapon

Paige Leidig
An orange gradient image with a network diagram and a small logo featuring a stylized tiger head. Text reads: Unleashing AIs Potential: Why Graph Databases are the Secret Weapon. Top left shows the TigerGraph logo.

Unleashing AI’s Potential: Why Graph Databases are the Secret Weapon

Artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming industries, but its biggest challenge remains: understanding relationships within data at scale. Traditional databases fall short, but graph databases, especially TigerGraph, bridge this gap, unlocking AI’s full potential 

Graph Databases: The Foundation for Smarter AI

Traditional databases often struggle to represent and analyze the complex connections that exist in real-world data. Graph databases, on the other hand, are designed to excel at this. They model data as nodes (entities) and edges (relationships), allowing AI algorithms to navigate and understand the interconnected nature of information.

Why Graphs are Essential for AI Training and Inferencing:

  • Enhanced Understanding: Graph databases provide a richer context for AI models, leading to more accurate and insightful results. By capturing relationships, AI can better understand the “why” behind data patterns.
  • Improved Reasoning: AI models trained on graph data can reason more effectively, making them ideal for tasks like fraud detection, recommendation systems, and knowledge graph analysis.
  • Agentic AI and Task Workflows: The rise of Agentic AI, where AI agents autonomously perform complex tasks, demands a sophisticated understanding of relationships. Graph databases are essential for managing the workflows and dependencies within these agentic systems. An agent needs to understand the relationships between tasks, resources, and actors, and graphs are perfect for this.

TigerGraph: Supercharging AI with Graph Power

TigerGraph stands out as a leader in the graph database space, offering unique capabilities that empower AI development:

  • Blazing-Fast GNN Training and Inference: Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are a powerful class of AI models that leverage graph data. However, training GNNs at scale has historically been a challenge. Thanks to the collaboration between NVIDIA and TigerGraph, this is no longer the case.
  • Significant Speed Improvements: As the only truly scalable graph database TigerGraph + Nvidia GPUs harness deep parallel processing and GPU acceleration to train GNN 200x faster. This breakthrough enables developers to train larger, more complex models in a fraction of the time, unlocking new possibilities for AI at scale.
  • GNN at Scale Breakthrough: Prior to the joint Nvidia and TigerGraph development, GNN at scale was a “big problem.” Meaning, scaling to meet time requirements for answers was not possible. The joint effort has created a high-performance, massively scalable GNN architecture that is used for both training and inference.
  • Vector as an Attribute: TigerGraph’s ability to store vectors as attributes within its graph database is a game-changer. This allows for seamless integration of vector search and similarity analysis with graph analytics, enabling powerful applications like semantic search and personalized recommendations.
  • NVIDIA & TigerGraph high-performance, massively scalable GNN architecture used for both training and inference: This point cannot be overstated, the ability to train and run inference at scale, is a key component to real world applications. Scalability improves not just performance but also prediction accuracy, as richer datasets enable AI models to capture deeper relationships and make more precise predictions.

The Future of AI is Graph-Powered

As AI continues to advance, graph databases will become indispensable for driving deeper intelligence and more accurate predictions. By providing a foundation for understanding complex relationships, graph databases like TigerGraph empower AI to reason, learn and scale like never before. Whether you’re building a fraud detection system, a recommendation engine, or an agentic AI platform, graph databases are the key to unlocking the true potential of your AI initiatives.

About the Author

Paige Leidig

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Dr. Jay Yu

Dr. Jay Yu | VP of Product and Innovation

Dr. Jay Yu is the VP of Product and Innovation at TigerGraph, responsible for driving product strategy and roadmap, as well as fostering innovation in graph database engine and graph solutions. He is a proven hands-on full-stack innovator, strategic thinker, leader, and evangelist for new technology and product, with 25+ years of industry experience ranging from highly scalable distributed database engine company (Teradata), B2B e-commerce services startup, to consumer-facing financial applications company (Intuit). He received his PhD from the University of Wisconsin - Madison, where he specialized in large scale parallel database systems

Smiling man with short dark hair wearing a black collared shirt against a light gray background.

Todd Blaschka | COO

Todd Blaschka is a veteran in the enterprise software industry. He is passionate about creating entirely new segments in data, analytics and AI, with the distinction of establishing graph analytics as a Gartner Top 10 Data & Analytics trend two years in a row. By fervently focusing on critical industry and customer challenges, the companies under Todd's leadership have delivered significant quantifiable results to the largest brands in the world through channel and solution sales approach. Prior to TigerGraph, Todd led go to market and customer experience functions at Clustrix (acquired by MariaDB), Dataguise and IBM.