Nvidia unveils flagship AI chip aiming to extend dominance
SAN JOSE, California — Nvidia Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Jensen Huang on Monday kicked off his company’s annual developer conference with a slew of announcements designed to keep the chip maker in a dominant position in the artificial intelligence (AI) industry.
On a hockey arena stage in the heart of Silicon Valley, Mr. Huang introduced Nvidia’s latest chip, which is 30 times speedier at some tasks than its predecessor.
Tom Plumb, CEO and portfolio manager at Plumb Funds, whose largest holdings include Nvidia, said the Blackwell chip was not a surprise.
“But it reinforces that this company is still at the cutting edge and the leader in all graphics processing. That doesn’t mean the market is not going to be big enough for AMD and others to come in. But it shows that their lead is pretty insurmountable,” said Mr. Plumb.
Nvidia said major customers including Amazon.com, Alphabet’s Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Oracle, are expected to use the new chip in cloud-computing services they sell, and also for their own AI offerings.
Nvidia also is shifting from selling single chips to selling total systems. Its latest iteration houses 72 of its AI chips and 36 central processors. It contains 600,000 parts in total and weighs 3,000 pounds (1,361 kilograms).
Many analysts expect Nvidia’s market share to drop several percentage points in 2024 as new products from competitors come to market and Nvidia’s largest customers make their own chips.
“Rivals like AMD, Intel, startups, and even Big Tech’s own chip aspirations threaten to chip away at Nvidia’s market share, particularly among cost-conscious enterprise customers,” said Insider Intelligence analyst Jason Bourne.
Though Nvidia is widely known for its hardware offerings, the company has built a significant battery of software products as well.
The new software tools, called microservices, improve system efficiency across a wide variety of uses, making it easier for a business to incorporate an AI model into its work, just as a good computer operating system can help apps work well.
In addition to AI software, Nvidia dived deeper into software for emulating the physical world with 3-D models. For work on designing cars, jets, and products, Mr. Huang also announced partnerships with design software companies Ansys, Cadence, and Synopsys. Shares of the three companies jumped around 3% in extended trade following Mr. Huang’s comments.
Huang also said that Nvidia’s software would be able to stream 3-D worlds to Apple’s new Vision Pro headset.
Nvidia also introduced a new line of chips designed for cars with new capabilities to run chatbots inside the vehicle. The company deepened its alreadyextensive relationships with Chinese automakers, saying that electric vehicle makers BYD and Xpeng will both use its new chips.
Toward the end of his keynote speech, Mr. Huang also outlined a new series of chips for creating humanoid robots, inviting several of the robots made using the chips to join him on the stage. —