Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Nvidia has unveiled its latest artificial intelligence chips, which the company claims are far more powerful than its existing market-leading hardware, as it sets its sights on extending its domination of the burgeoning industry.
Chief executive Jensen Huang on Monday said Nvidia’s new Blackwell graphics processing units will massively increase the computing power driving large language models. The Blackwell GPU has 208bn transistors, compared with last year’s H100, which has 80bn, a measure of its increased power.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to introduce you to a very, very big GPU,” Huang told a packed audience at the SAP Center in San Jose, California, where Nvidia is holding its annual developer conference.
Huang said the chip was twice as powerful when it came to training AI models as its current generation of GPUs, and had five times their capability when it came to “inference” — the speed at which AI models such as ChatGPT can respond to queries.
“The inference capability of Blackwell is off the charts,” he said, adding that there was “unbelievable excitement” about it.
Huang said Nvidia’s GB200 “superchip” will combine two of the new Blackwell GPUs with the company’s existing “Grace” central processing unit.
All the major cloud service providers, which include Google, Amazon and Microsoft, were “lined up as customers” for what would be “the most successful product launch in our history”, he said. “The whole industry is gearing up for Blackwell.”
Nvidia’s chips have become the commodity that has underpinned the generative AI revolution, and the company’s rocketing stock has fuelled share price rallies across the globe.
Companies including OpenAI, which is backed by Microsoft, and other entities have spent billions of dollars to acquire Nvidia’s chips, which offer the computing power behind generative AI technology that can produce humanlike text, video and code within seconds.
At the same time, Google, Amazon and Microsoft are racing to develop their own generative AI chips, in an attempt to reduce their dependence on Nvidia and to lock customers more closely into their own hardware and software systems.
Nvidia’s market capitalisation has grown to $2.2tn, overtaking Google and Amazon to become the third most-valuable company in the world after Microsoft and Apple. Nvidia shares were down slightly in after-hours trading.