Nvidia unveils new AI platform Blackwell
Nvidia (NVDA) is making waves at its developers conference known as GTC. The chip giant announced its newest AI platform, dubbed "Blackwell." In the press release, Nvidia says Blackwell allows organizations to "build and run real-time generative AI on trillion-parameter large language models at up to 25x less cost and energy consumption than its predecessor." The company says it expects tech companies such as Google (GOOGL, GOOG), Amazon Web Services (AMZN), Meta (META), and Dell Technologies (DELL) to use the new platform. Nvidia says the chip has 208 billion transistors and that the platform will allow large language models to scale up to 10 trillion parameters.
Yahoo Finance's Madison Mills and Josh Lipton discuss the breaking announcement in the video above.
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Editor's note: This article was written by Stephanie Mikulich.
Video Transcript
JENSEN HUANG: There's no memory locality issues, no cache issues. It's just one giant chip. And so when we were told that Blackwell's ambitions were beyond the limits of physics, the engineer said, so what? And so this is what happened. And so this is the Blackwell chip.
MADISON MILLS: That was Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang unveiling the newest GPU from the chipmaker, as he just mentioned, called the Blackwell chip. Now what's interesting here, Josh, is that it's actually two chips kind of married to each other, pushed together-- it's definitely more complicated than that. But in my language, it's two chips pushed together here.
TSMC is going to use this technique that they have called the 4NP to produce that product. But because it's so big, you kind of see, Jensen Huang pointing out the size of this kind of superchip here, it's going to require a unique production technique. And I'm curious about who is going to benefit from that. Obviously, TSMC to start out, but the other players in this space are going to have to get the capabilities, the manufacturing and production capabilities to produce this chip moving forward if they want to continue to win when it comes to the chips production side of this story.
JOSH LIPTON: Yeah. And Blackwell, you remember this is the successor to Nvidia's so-called Hopper, which is just helped supercharge Nvidia's topline. The flagship from that lineup is the H100 that we've talked so much about. CEO Jensen Huang is saying that these new Blackwell chips are the engine to power this new industrial revolution.
Also, Nvidia saying here they expect Blackwell adoption by a number of-- it looks like big names. They're calling out Google and Dell and Meta and AWS. We talk a lot about Nvidia for good reason, Maddie, because it is simply the face of this boom of interest in AI. They are the number one leader in AI training chips.
And there is competition. We just talked to Dan Morgan. And obviously, when you see a stock move like this, you can expect competition. So it's Intel, it's AMD. And very importantly, Nvidia's own big customers, those big cloud giants, the hyperscalers as well.
MADISON MILLS: Right. And of course, we're going to see some of those names moving up. Already seeing Broadcom and Intel up. Just to bring it home for people, though, in terms of what this means, Jensen Huang did kind of mention what this will look like in practice, saying that instead of the AI tools kind of recognizing an image, for example, you're going to be able to potentially say to an AI tool, make me a video of Josh Lipton and I angry in Yahoo Finance, and it'll be able to do it. So just bringing that extra juice and power to these AI tools that we haven't necessarily had prior to this.
JOSH LIPTON: I think you get-- I mean, we're only one hour into this keynote. You have a whole other hour of Jensen Huang. So we'll see what other news comes. But I think already, you're kind of seeing bulls come on the show, Madison. And when they kind of pound the table for Nvidia, often what they'll talk about is some of what we're seeing right now is they'll say, listen, it's chips, it's software. What he's doing really is building a platform.
MADISON MILLS: Yeah, absolutely. Makes sense.