
In lower than two years, NVIDIA’s H100 chips, that are utilized by almost each AI firm on the planet to coach massive language fashions that energy companies 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 instances quicker than the H100 and use 25 instances much less energy.
“Blackwell GPUs are the engine to energy this new Industrial Revolution,” mentioned NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang on the firm’s annual GTC occasion in San Jose attended by 1000’s of builders, and which some compared to a Taylor Swift live performance. “Generative AI is the defining expertise of our time. Working with essentially the most dynamic firms on the planet, we’ll notice the promise of AI for each business,” Huang added in a press release.
NVIDIA’s Blackwell chips are named in honor of David Harold Blackwell, a mathematician who specialised in recreation idea and statistics. NVIDIA claims that Blackwell is the world’s strongest chip. It gives a big efficiency improve to AI firms with speeds of 20 petaflops in comparison with simply 4 petaflops that the H100 offered. A lot of this pace is made doable thanks the 208 billion transistors in Blackwell chips in comparison with 80 billion within the H100. To realize this, NVIDIA related two massive 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 price 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 at present nothing higher than NVIDIA {hardware} for AI,” Musk says within the assertion. “Blackwell gives huge efficiency leaps, and can speed up our means to ship modern fashions. We’re excited to proceed working with NVIDIA to reinforce AI compute,” Altman says.
NVIDIA didn’t disclose how a lot Blackwell chips would price. Its H100 chips at present run between 25,000 and $40,000 per chip, according to CNBC, and full techniques powered by these chips can price as a lot as $200,000.
Regardless of their prices, NVIDIA’s chips are in excessive demand. Final 12 months, supply wait instances had been as high as 11 months. And accessing NVIDIA’s AI chips is more and more seen as a standing image for tech firms seeking to appeal to AI expertise. Earlier this 12 months, Zuckerberg touted the corporate’s efforts to construct “an enormous quantity of infrastructure” to energy Meta’s AI efforts. “On the finish of this 12 months,” Zuckerberg wrote, “we could have ~350k Nvidia H100s — and total ~600k H100s H100 equivalents of compute in the event you embrace different GPUs.”
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