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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang talks about Project Digits personal AI supercomputer for researchers and students during a keynote address at the CES tech conference on January 6, 2025 in Las Vegas.
Patrick T. Fallon | AFP | Getty Images
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was hailed as a rock star at CES in Las Vegas this week, after a boom in artificial intelligence made the chipmaker the world’s second most valuable company.
In his nearly two-hour keynote address Monday, opening the annual tech conference, Huang drew the 12,000-seat arena, drawing comparisons to the way the late Steve Jobs displayed products. apple Events
Huang concluded with an Apple-like trick: a surprise product reveal. He presented one of Nvidia’s server racks and, using some stage magic, grabbed a much smaller version, which looked like a tiny computer cube.
“It’s an AI supercomputer,” said Huang, wearing a crocodile-skinned leather jacket. “It runs the entire Nvidia AI stack. All Nvidia software runs on it.”
The computer is called Project Digits and is powered by Grace Blackwell graphics processing units, or GPUs, a relative of the ones currently powering the latest AI server clusters, Huang said. The GPU is paired with one. arm– Based Grace Central Processing Unit, or CPU. Nvidia worked with Chinese semiconductor company MediaTek to create a system-on-a-chip called the GB10.
Formerly known as the Consumer Electronics Show, CES is usually the place to launch shiny and futuristic consumer gadgets. At this year’s show, which began on Tuesday and will wrap up on Friday, several companies announced AI integration with appliances, laptops and even grills. Other big announcements include a laptop from Lenovo with a rollable screen that can expand vertically. There were also new robots, including a Roomba competitor with a robotic arm.
Unlike Nvidia’s traditional GPUs for gaming, Project Digits isn’t targeting consumers. Instead, it’s aimed at machine learning researchers, small companies, and universities that want to develop advanced AI but don’t have billions of dollars to build massive data centers or buy enough cloud credit.
“There’s a big hole for data scientists and ML researchers and those who are actively working, who are actively building something,” Huang said. “Maybe you don’t need a big cluster. You’re just developing early versions of the model, and you’re constantly iterating. You can do it in the cloud, but it costs a lot of money.”
Nvidia said the supercomputer will cost around $3,000 when it hits the market in May, and will be available from the company itself as well as some of its manufacturing partners. Project Digits is a placeholder name, indicating that it may change until the computer goes on sale, Huang said.
“If you have a good name for it, contact us,” Huang said.
Diversifying its business
It’s a dramatically different product from the GPUs that have driven Nvidia’s historic boom over the past two years. OpenAI, which launched ChatGPT in late 2022, and other AI model creators such as Anthropic have joined major cloud providers in snapping up Nvidia’s data center GPUs because of their more rigorous models and computing workloads. It has the capacity to power the load.
Data center sales accounted for 88% of Nvidia’s $35 billion in revenue. latest quarter.
Wall Street is focused on Nvidia’s ability to diversify its business so that it becomes less dependent on a handful of customers buying large-scale AI systems.
Nvidia projects a supercomputer during the 2025 CES event in Las Vegas, Nevada, US, Wednesday, Jan. 8, 2025.
Bridget Bennett Bloomberg | Getty Images
“It was a little scary to see Nvidia come out with something so good at such a low price,” Melius Research analyst Ben Reitz wrote in a note this week. He said Nvidia may have “stolen the show” due to project numbers, as well as graphics cards for gaming, new robot chips and other announcements with the deal. Toyota.
Project Digits, which runs Linux and the same Nvidia software used on the company’s GPU server clusters, greatly expands the capabilities of researchers and universities, said David Bader, director of the Institute for Data Science at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. represents an increase.
Bader, who has worked on research projects with Nvidia in the past, said the computer appears to be able to handle enough data and information to train the largest and most sophisticated models. Anthropic, he told CNBC. Google, Amazon And others would “pay $100 million to build a supercomputer for training” to get a system with those kinds of capabilities.
For $3,000, consumers can soon have a product that they can plug into a standard electrical outlet in their home or office, Bader said. That’s especially exciting for academics, who often turn to private industry to get access to bigger and more powerful computers, he said.
“Any student who can afford one of these systems that costs roughly the same as a high-end laptop or gaming laptop will be able to do the same research and build the same models,” Bader said. “
Reitzes said the computer could be Nvidia’s first move into the $50 billion market for PC and laptop chips.
“It’s not that hard to imagine that it will be easy to do it all yourself and allow the system to run Windows someday,” Retz wrote. “But I guess they don’t want to step on too many toes.”
Huang did not rule out the possibility when asked about it by Wall Street analysts on Tuesday.
MediaTek may be able to sell the GB10 chip to other computer makers in the market, he said. He made sure to leave some mystery in the air.
“Obviously, we have plans,” Huang said.
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