In lower than two years, NVIDIA’s H100 chips, that are utilized by practically each AI firm on the earth to coach giant language fashions that energy providers like ChatGPT, made it one of many world’s most valuable companies. On Monday, NVIDIA introduced a next-generation platform referred to as Blackwell, whose chips are between seven and 30 occasions quicker than the H100 and use 25 occasions much less energy.
“Blackwell GPUs are the engine to energy this new Industrial Revolution,” stated NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang on the firm’s annual GTC occasion in San Jose attended by hundreds of builders, and which some compared to a Taylor Swift live performance. “Generative AI is the defining know-how of our time. Working with probably the most dynamic firms on the earth, we are going to notice the promise of AI for each trade,” Huang added in a press release.
NVIDIA’s Blackwell chips are named in honor of David Harold Blackwell, a mathematician who specialised in sport concept and statistics. NVIDIA claims that Blackwell is the world’s strongest chip. It affords a major efficiency improve to AI firms with speeds of 20 petaflops in comparison with simply 4 petaflops that the H100 supplied. A lot of this velocity is made doable thanks the 208 billion transistors in Blackwell chips in comparison with 80 billion within the H100. To attain this, NVIDIA linked two giant chip dies that may discuss to one another at speeds as much as 10 terabytes per second.
In an indication of simply how dependent our trendy AI revolution is on NVIDIA’s chips, the corporate’s press launch includes testimonials from seven CEOs who collectively lead firms value trillions of {dollars}. They embrace OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, Oracle chairman Larry Ellison, Dell CEO Michael Dell, and Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
“There’s presently nothing higher than NVIDIA {hardware} for AI,” Musk says within the assertion. “Blackwell affords large efficiency leaps, and can speed up our capacity to ship modern fashions. We’re excited to proceed working with NVIDIA to boost AI compute,” Altman says.
NVIDIA didn’t disclose how a lot Blackwell chips would price. Its H100 chips presently run between 25,000 and $40,000 per chip, according to CNBC, and whole programs powered by these chips can price as a lot as $200,000.
Regardless of their prices, NVIDIA’s chips are in excessive demand. Final yr, supply wait occasions have been as high as 11 months. And getting access to NVIDIA’s AI chips is more and more seen as a standing image for tech firms trying to entice AI expertise. Earlier this yr, Zuckerberg touted the corporate’s efforts to construct “a large quantity of infrastructure” to energy Meta’s AI efforts. “On the finish of this yr,” Zuckerberg wrote, “we can have ~350k Nvidia H100s — and total ~600k H100s H100 equivalents of compute in the event you embrace different GPUs.”
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