Nvidia, the hardware company that makes the chips that power many of the world’s most popular AI products, has revealed what it says is the future of those processors.
The company unveiled a host of new artificial intelligence chips – including the most powerful processors made for AI ever.
The new releases are an attempt by Nvidia to hold onto its place as the market leader as the demand for hardware to power new AI tools grows.
Announcing its new Blackwell chips, which will be released later this year, Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang said they were dramatically faster and more powerful than its predecessor.
Previously, training a detailed AI model might have taken 8,000 of Nvidia’s Hopper GPUs, and 15 megawatts of power. Now it says it can do that with just 2,000 Blackwell chips and 4 megawatts.
Nvidia’s hardware is used by many of the biggest tech firms in the world – including Amazon, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and Meta – to power their AI models.
Mr Huang said the new Blackwell chips were twice as powerful when it came to training AI models as its current generation chips, and were five times faster when it came to inference – the speed at which AI chatbots can respond to queries.
Mr Huang said “the inference capability of Blackwell is off the charts”.
Nvidia has become the key player in AI chips in recent years, particularly as generative AI tools such as ChatGPT have taken off, seeing the firm’s market value skyrocket as a result – reaching two trillion dollars last month.
It is currently the third-most valuable company in the world, behind only Microsoft and Apple.
Leave a Reply