In lower than two years, NVIDIA’s H100 chips, that are utilized by practically each AI firm on the planet to coach giant language fashions that energy providers like ChatGPT, made it one of many world’s most respected corporations. 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 power this new Industrial Revolution,” mentioned NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang on the firm’s annual GTC occasion in San Jose attended by hundreds of builders, and which some in comparison with a Taylor Swift live performance. “Generative AI is the defining technology of our time. Working with the most dynamic companies in the world, we will realize the promise of AI for every industry,” Huang added in a press launch.
NVIDIA’s Blackwell chips are named in honor of David Harold Blackwell, a mathematician who specialised in recreation concept and statistics. NVIDIA claims that Blackwell is the world’s strongest chip. It affords a major efficiency improve to AI corporations with speeds of 20 petaflops in comparison with simply 4 petaflops that the H100 offered. A lot of this velocity is made attainable 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 fashionable AI revolution is on NVIDIA’s chips, the corporate’s press launch contains testimonials from seven CEOs who collectively lead corporations 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 is currently nothing better than NVIDIA hardware for AI,” Musk says within the assertion. “Blackwell affords huge efficiency leaps, and can speed up our skill 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 at present run between 25,000 and $40,000 per chip, in keeping with CNBC, and whole methods 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 occasions have been as excessive as 11 months. And accessing NVIDIA’s AI chips is more and more seen as a standing image for tech corporations seeking to appeal to AI expertise. Earlier this 12 months, Zuckerberg touted the corporate’s efforts to construct “a massive amount of infrastructure” to energy Meta’s AI efforts. “At the end of this year,” Zuckerberg wrote, “we will have ~350k Nvidia H100s — and overall ~600k H100s H100 equivalents of compute if you include other GPUs.”