Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang delivers a keynote address during the Nvidia GTC Artificial Intelligence Conference at SAP Center on March 18, 2024 in San Jose, California.
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Nvidia on Monday announced a new generation of artificial intelligence chips and software for running artificial intelligence models. The announcement, made during Nvidia’s developer’s conference in San Jose, comes as the chipmaker seeks to solidify its position as the go-to supplier for AI companies.
Nvidia’s share price is up five-fold and total sales have more than tripled since OpenAI’s ChatGPT kicked off the AI boom in late 2022. Nvidia’s high-end server GPUs are essential for training and deploying large AI models. Companies like Microsoft and Meta have spent billions of dollars buying the chips.
The new generation of AI graphics processors is named Blackwell. The first Blackwell chip is called the GB200 and will ship later this year. Nvidia is enticing its customers with more powerful chips to spur new orders. Companies and software makers, for example, are still scrambling to get their hands on the current generation of “Hopper” H100s and similar chips.
“Hopper is fantastic, but we need bigger GPUs,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said on Monday at the company’s developer conference in California.
The company also introduced revenue-generating software called NIM that will make it easier to deploy AI, giving customers another reason to stick with Nvidia chips over a rising field of competitors.
Nvidia executives say that the company is becoming less of a mercenary chip provider and more of a platform provider, like Microsoft or Apple, on which other companies can build software.
“Blackwell’s not a chip, it’s the name of a platform,” Huang said.
“The sellable commercial product was the GPU and the software was all to help people use the GPU in different ways,” said Nvidia enterprise VP Manuvir Das in an interview. “Of course, we still do that. But what’s really changed is,…
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