"People think we make GPUs, but GPUs don't look the way they used to" — Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang sees Blackwell as the power behind the new AI age

[TechRadar]

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has unveiled his company's vision of the AI-powered future.

Speaking during his opening keynote at the Nvidia GTC 2024 event in San Jose, Huang revealed a huge range and number of announcements, covering everything from powerful new chips to the omniverse and even humanoid robots.

And with its stupendous recent rise, as the company behind powering much of the AI revolution, Huang was unsurprisingly bullish about the role Nvidia can play going forward.

The "soul of Nvidia"

"There's definitely something going on," Huang said after coming on stage to a rapturous welcome from over 10,000 keynote attendees, "the computer is the most fundamental part of society today."

Referring to the huge growth in AI innovation in recent months and years, Huang noted how, "It is a brand new category...it's unlike anything we've ever done before."

"A new industry has emerged...but we need to accelerate an entire industry."

And to power this new industry? A new kind of chip - powered by Nvidia's frankly staggering Blackwell. Boasting hugely improved computing power, efficiency and productivity, Blackwell is set to power the next generation of technology.

(Image credit: Future / Mike Moore)

“Accelerated computing has reached the tipping point — general purpose computing has run out of steam,” Huang said.

“We need another way of doing computing — so that we can continue to scale so that we can continue to drive down the cost of computing, so that we can continue to consume more and more computing while being sustainable. Accelerated computing is a dramatic speedup over general-purpose computing, in every single industry.”

"Blackwell is going to be just an amazing system for generative AI...in the future, data centers are going to be thought of as AI factories," Huang said, “Their goal in life is to generate revenues, in this case, intelligence.”

"Building foundation models for general humanoid robots is one of the most exciting problems to solve in AI today," Huang said, adding that "the enabling technologies are coming together for leading roboticists around the world to take giant leaps towards artificial general robotics.”

“The whole industry is gearing up for Blackwell," Huang concluded, “The soul of Nvidia — the intersection of computer graphics, physics, artificial intelligence...it has all come to bear at this moment.”

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