AI requires very powerful microchips to train. The US company Nvidia – already virtually unattainable to the competition – has presented a new Superchips, the Blackwell B100. The tech industry and stock markets are delighted.
From Christian Sachsinger
Nvidia is something like the Apple of the 2020s and CEO Jensen Huang is also somewhat reminiscent of Steve Jobs. Just as Jobs was celebrated for his new iPhones back then, Huang is celebrated for his company’s products. At Nvidia’s own GTC trade fair in San José, California, he stood in front of well over 10,000 spectators in jeans and a leather jacket to present the new processor. The video of the show has already been clicked on several million times.
Monster chip with significantly more power
Huang held up two processors during his presentation: the previous H100 from a product series called Hopper, which was about the size of a bank card; next to it, the CEO showed the successor, named after mathematician David Blackwell. The new processor is called B100, is around twice the size, and is said to be significantly more powerful when teaching artificial intelligence. Huang joked and encouraged the old Hopper chip on stage like a small child, telling it not to worry that it was now outdated, it had done a good job. The previous generation was already a huge success for Nvidia.
A turbo for AI processes
Hopper provided the hardware basis for the success of the chatbot ChatGPT from OpenAI. According to Huang, the entire ChatGPT could be trained within three months with 8,000 Hopper chips and a power consumption of 15 megawatts. With Blackwell, this would be possible with just 2,000 chips and around a quarter of the power consumption. Although these are manufacturer’s specifications, experts believe that they are likely to be achieved to some extent in practice.
So, it’s no wonder that major AI companies such as Microsoft, Amazon, and Google are already lining up for Blackwell. Huang is touting his new product as a driver for a new industrial revolution through AI. Blackwell will not necessarily lead to completely new applications. However, the new chips will enable artificial intelligence to make greater progress. Especially as Nvidia is reportedly already planning an even more powerful successor (B200) to the B100.
Blackwell is a platform
Just like its predecessor Hopper, Blackwell is not a single chip, but an entire product family. Nvidia uses the B100 chip in various products, including entire servers such as those found in data centers. Here, too, a comparison with Apple comes to mind, which sells entire products, in this case, hardware and software from a single source. Nvidia takes a similar approach to avoid having to hand over part of its profits to the manufacturers of data centers, for example.
Why is Nvidia so successful?
For a long time, Nvidia was primarily known in the gaming industry. The company produced powerful graphics cards and made computationally intensive 3D games run. Huang was one of three company founders, but soon became the central figure at Nvidia. Among other things, he was able to explain complex technology in such a way that investors in the stock markets, for example, understood it.
The company received a boost when computer games were in high demand during the coronavirus pandemic. The company took off when it became clear that the powerful graphics card chips were not only ideal for games but also training AI. Since then, Nvidia’s business has been growing rapidly and Huang has managed to exceed his own forecasts time and time again.
Nvidia shares are unstoppable
For investors in the stock markets, there is nothing better than predictions that not only come true but are also exceeded. And since Nvidia has been delivering on profits and sales for years, the share price is rising steeply. Anyone who bought a share in the company at the beginning of 2019 received it for around 30 dollars. The stock now costs over 800 dollars. An investment of 1,000 dollars, for example, would have become almost 27,000 dollars in five years.
No wonder Nvidia and its boss are currently so celebrated. Jensen Huang himself is now one of the 20 richest people in the world with a fortune of almost 80 billion dollars.