Nvidia unveils B200 flagship AI chip, new AI software tools at annual conference

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on Monday kicked off his company’s annual developer conference with a slew of announcements designed to keep the chipmaker in a dominant position in the artificial intelligence industry.

On stage at the hockey arena in the heart of Silicon Valley, Huang unveiled Nvidia’s latest chip, which is 30 times faster at some tasks than its predecessor.

It also details a new set of software tools to help developers more easily sell AI models to companies that use technology from Nvidia, whose customers include most of the world’s biggest technology firms.

Nvidia’s chip and software announcements at GTC 2024 will help determine whether the company can maintain its 80 percent share of the AI ​​chip market.

“I hope you understand that this is not a concert,” said Huang, wearing his signature leather jacket and joking that the day’s keynote would be full of dense math and science.

It was a nod to how Nvidia, once best known among PC gaming enthusiasts, has gained recognition on a par with tech giants such as Microsoft and become a Wall Street juggernaut, with sales more than doubling in its last fiscal year, surpassing 60 billion dollars (approximately Rs. 4,97,665 crores).

Nvidia’s new flagship chip, called the B200, takes two squares of silicon the size of the company’s previous offering and combines them into a single component.

Although the B200 “Blackwell” chip is 30 times faster at tasks such as providing answers from chatbots, Huang did not give specific details about how well it performs when crunching huge amounts of data to train those chatbots – which is the kind of work, which has driven most of Nvidia’s growing sales. He also did not give details on the price.

Overall, Huang’s announcements failed to provide new fuel for a rally that has seen Nvidia shares jump 240 percent over the past 12 months, making it the third most valuable company on the U.S. stock market, behind only Microsoft and Apple. Nvidia shares were down 1.4 percent in extended trading, while Super Micro Computer, which makes AI-optimized servers with Nvidia chips, fell 4 percent. Shares of Advanced Micro Devices fell nearly 3 percent during the keynote.

Tom Plumb, CEO and portfolio manager at Plumb Funds, whose largest holdings include Nvidia, said the Blackwell chip was no surprise.

“But it confirms the fact that this company is still at the top and a leader in all graphics processing. That doesn’t mean the market won’t be big enough for AMD and others to enter. But it shows that their lead is pretty insurmountable,” Plumb said.

Nvidia said major customers, including Amazon.com, Alphabet’s Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and Oracle, are expected to use the new chip in the cloud computing services they sell and also for their own AI offerings.

Nvidia is also moving from selling single chips to selling complete systems. Its latest iteration contains 72 of its AI chips and 36 CPUs. It contains a total of 600,000 parts and weighs 3,000 pounds (1,361 kg).

Many analysts expect Nvidia’s market share to drop a few percentage points in 2024 as new products from competitors come to market and Nvidia’s biggest customers make their own chips.

“Rivals like AMD, Intel, startups and even Big Tech’s own chip aspirations are threatening to chip away at Nvidia’s market share, especially among cost-conscious enterprise customers,” said Insider Intelligence analyst Jason Bourne.

Although Nvidia is widely known for its hardware offerings, the company has also created a significant battery of software products.

New software tools called microservices improve system performance across a wide variety of applications, making it easier for businesses to incorporate an AI model into their work, just as a good computer operating system can help applications run well.

In addition to AI software, Nvidia has delved deeper into software for emulating the physical world with 3-D models. For work on car, jet and product design, Huang also announced partnerships with design software companies Ansys, Cadence and Synopsys. Shares of the three companies jumped about 3 percent in after-hours trading after Huang’s comments.

Huang also said that Nvidia’s software will be able to stream 3-D worlds to Apple’s new Vision Pro headset.

Nvidia also introduced a new line of chips designed for cars with new capabilities to run chatbots in the car. The company deepened its already extensive relationship with Chinese automakers by saying that electric vehicle makers BYD and Xpeng will use its new chips.

Towards the end of his keynote, Huang also outlined a new series of chips for creating humanoid robots, inviting several of the robots made using the chips to join him on stage.

© Thomson Reuters 2024