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Justin Timberlake is slated to appear at San José’s SAP Center later this spring, but this week, a crowd of thousands filed into the home arena of the city’s NHL team to see a middle-aged man in a leather jacket talk about semiconductors.
That’s where Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced his company’s much-anticipated new generation of AI chips on Monday, aiming to prolong a hot streak for the biggest money mint in the generative AI race.
The company claims its new line of Blackwell graphics processing units (GPUs) can outperform its current top offerings, the Hopper architecture, manyfold across several metrics. The chip giant is betting that the new GPUs will extend its wide lead over competitors as the go-to source for processors that can handle giant AI models, a dominance that’s rocketed Nvidia to a $2-trillion-plus company in the past two years.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to introduce you to a very, very big GPU,” Huang told the crowd of developers.
Despite all the fanfare, investors greeted the news with a lukewarm reception, with the share price dipping around 2% in morning trading on Tuesday. The slippage perhaps reflected just how sky-high expectations were for the event.
AI fest: The keynote was part of Nvidia’s annual developer conference, running throughout this week, which some analysts are calling the “Woodstock festival of AI,” per Bloomberg (though it’s not the first event to be described that way). Among the AI luminaries slated to make an appearance are executives from OpenAI, Google, and Meta, plus representatives of a host of well-known brands across sectors.
“One-hundred trillion dollars of the world’s industries is represented in this room today,” Huang said onstage.
Nvidia also sought to underscore its value to the tech industry, padding its new chip announcement with glowing quotes from an impressive who’s who of Silicon Valley bigwigs, including Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Sam Altman. More than half of the names listed are reportedly leading efforts to challenge Nvidia’s lock on the AI chip market, but those bids are far from competitive yet.
“World’s most powerful chip”: Huang said Nvidia’s new Blackwell chip can train AI with 2.5 times the performance of Hopper, and perform five times better at inference, or the actual running of an AI model once trained. The company also claims that Blackwell will require up to 25 times less cost and energy to run than Hopper.
Huang also touched on a host of other announcements throughout his two-hour keynote, from an upgraded system for autonomous-delivery vehicles and robotaxis to climate prediction tools. In flashy Silicon Valley fashion, he ended his speech with talk of a “new industrial revolution” accompanied by sci-fi-esque robots.
“A trillion dollars worth of installed data centers will become modernized over the next several years,” Huang said. “The computer of this revolution…[will be] Blackwell.”