Nvidia announces new superchip to consolidate leadership in AI – 03/18/2024 – Tech

Nvidia announced this Monday (18) chips aimed at artificial intelligence that are more powerful than their predecessors, which already lead the market, as it seeks to extend its leadership in a still nascent sector.

The company’s CEO, Jensen Huang, said that the Blackwell graphics processing units (GPU) will significantly increase the computing power behind large language models (LLMs).

The Blackwell GPU has 208 billion transistors, more than double the 80 billion in last year’s H100.

“I’d like to introduce you to a very, very large 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 is twice as powerful at training AI models as the current generation of GPUs, and has five times the capacity for “inference” — the speed at which AI models like ChatGPT can answer questions.

Major cloud service providers Google, Amazon and Microsoft are “in line as consumers” for what will be “the most successful launch in our history,” Huang said. “The entire industry is preparing for Blackwell.”

The arrival of Blackwell architecture — named in honor of David Blackwell, the first black academic to be elected to the US National Academy of Sciences — is surrounded by expectations. Its predecessor, Hopper, boosted Nvidia’s revenue by developing the field of AI accelerator chips.

The main product in this line, the H100, has become one of the most prized items in the world of technology — costing tens of thousands of dollars per chip.

Nvidia’s chips became the raw material that sustained the generative AI revolution, and the rise in the company’s shares boosted stock markets around the world in recent months.

Companies like Microsoft-funded OpenAI, among others, have spent billions of dollars to acquire Nvidia chips, which offer the computing power needed to run generative AI, which can create text, videos and programming code in seconds. .

The company’s market value reached US$2.2 trillion, surpassing Google and Amazon and becoming the third most valuable company in the US, behind Microsoft and Apple. Nvidia shares were little changed in the post-market.