Nvidia CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER Jensen Huang mentions the Project Digits individual AI supercomputer for scientists and trainees throughout a keynote address at the CES technology meeting in Las Vegas,Jan 6, 2025.
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Nvidia CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER Jensen Huang was welcomed as a rock celebrity today at CES in Las Vegas, complying with an expert system boom that’s made the chipmaker the second-most-valuable business worldwide.
At his virtually two-hour keynote on Monday beginning the yearly technology meeting, Huang loaded a 12,000-seat sector, attracting contrasts to the method the late Steve Jobs exposed items at Apple occasions.
Huang wrapped up with an Apple- like method: a shock item expose. He provided among Nvidia’s web server shelfs and, utilizing some phase magic, stood up a much smaller sized variation, which resembled a small dice of a computer system.
“This is an AI supercomputer,” claimed Huang, putting on an alligator-skin natural leather coat. “It runs the entire Nvidia AI stack. All of Nvidia’s software runs on this.”
Huang claimed the computer system is called Project Digits and escapes a loved one of the Grace Blackwell graphics refining devices, or GPUs, that are presently powering one of the most innovative AI web server collections. The GPU is coupled with an ARM– based Grace main handling system, or CPU. Nvidia dealt with Chinese semiconductor business MediaTek to develop the system-on-a-chip called GB10.
Formerly called the Consumer Electronics Show, CES is usually the place to introduce showy and advanced customer gizmos. At this year’s program, which began Tuesday and concludes Friday, numerous firms introduced AI assimilations with devices, laptop computers and also grills. Other significant news consisted of a laptop computer from Lenovo with a rollable display that can broaden up and down. There were additionally brand-new robotics, consisting of a Roomba rival with a robot arm.
Unlike Nvidia’s conventional GPUs for video gaming, Project Digits isn’t targeting customers. Instead, it’s targeted at machine-learning scientists, smaller sized firms, and colleges that intend to create innovative AI yet do not have billions of bucks to construct substantial information facilities or acquire adequate cloud credit reports.
“There’s a gaping hole for data scientists and ML researchers and who are actively working, who are actively building something,” Huang claimed. “Maybe you don’t need a giant cluster. You’re just developing the early versions of the model, and you’re iterating constantly. You could do it in the cloud, but it just costs a lot more money.”
The supercomputer will certainly set you back regarding $3,000 when it strikes the marketplace in May, Nvidia claimed, and it will certainly be offered from the business itself in addition to a few of its producing companions. Huang claimed Project Digits is a placeholder name, showing it might transform by the time the computer system takes place sale.
“If you have a good name for it, reach out to us,” Huang claimed.
Diversifying its organization
It’s a significantly various type of item from the GPUs that have actually driven Nvidia’s historical boom in the previous 2 years. OpenAI, which released ChatGPT in late 2022, and various other AI version developers such as Anthropic have actually accompanied big cloud suppliers in buying Nvidia’s information facility GPUs as a result of their capacity to power one of the most extensive versions and calculating work.
Data facility sales represented 88% of Nvidia’s $35 billion in income in the most recent quarter.
Wall Street is focused on Nvidia’s ability to diversify its business so that it’s less reliant on a handful of customers buying massive AI systems.
The Nvidia Project Digits supercomputer during the 2025 CES event in Las Vegas, Nevada, US, on Wednesday, Jan. 8, 2025.Â
Bridget Bennett | Bloomberg | Getty Images
“It was a little scary to see Nvidia come out with something so good for so little in price,” Melius Research analyst Ben Reitzes wrote in a note this week. He said Nvidia may have “stolen the show,” due to Project Digits as well as other announcements, including graphics cards for gaming, new robot chips and a deal with Toyota.
Project Digits, which runs Linux and the same Nvidia software used on the company’s GPU server clusters, represents a huge increase in capabilities for researchers and universities, said David Bader, director of the Institute for Data Science at New Jersey Institute of Technology.
Bader, who has worked on research projects with Nvidia in the past, said the computer appears to be able to handle enough data and information to train the biggest and most cutting-edge models. He told that Anthropic, Google, Amazon and others “would pay $100 million to build a super computer for training” to get a system with these sorts of capabilities.
For $3,000, users can soon get a product they can plug into a standard electrical outlet in their home or office, Bader said. It’s particularly exciting for academics, who have often left for private industry in order to access bigger and more powerful computers, he said.
“Any student who is able to have one of these systems that cost roughly the same as a high-end laptop or gaming laptop, they’ll be able to do the same research and build the same models,” Bader said.
Reitzes said the computer may be Nvidia’s first move into the $50 billion market for PC and laptop chips.
“It’s not too hard to imagine it would be easy to just do it all themselves and allow the system to run Windows someday,” Reitzes wrote. “But I guess they don’t want to step on too many toes.”
Huang didn’t rule out that possibility when asked about it by Wall Street analysts Tuesday.
He said MediaTek may be able to sell the GB10 chip to other computer makers in the market. He made sure to leave some mystery in the air.
“Obviously, we have plans,” Huang said.
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