This March, an eager crowd of 12,000 people filled a stadium in San Jose, California. “I hope you realize this is not a concert,” joked Jensen Huang, chief executive of chip-making company Nvidia in nearby Santa Clara.
For the next half an hour, Huang prepped the crowd to hear the latest news about graphics processing units (GPUs), his company’s signature computer chip, which has been key to artificial-intelligence (AI) advances over the past decade. Huang held up the company’s 2022 model, the Hopper ‘superchip’. “Hopper changed the world,” he said. Then, after a dramatic pause, he revealed another shiny black rectangle about the size of a Post-it note: “This is Blackwell.” The crowd cheered.
Back in 2022, Hopper beat the competition in every category — from image classification to speech recognition — on MLPerf, a battery of tests sometimes referred to as the olympics of AI. As soon as it hit the market, Hopper became the go-to chip for companies looking to supercharge their AI. Now Nvidia promises that Blackwell will be, for certain problems, several times faster than its predecessor. “I think Blackwell is going to take us to this next level of performance through a combination of more horsepower and also how the chips are communicating with each other,” says Dave Salvator, director of product marketing in Nvidia’s Accelerated Computing Group.
While hopes and concerns swirl around the impact of AI, the market for AI chips continues to grow. Nvidia currently supplies more than 80% of them; in 2023, it sold 550,000 Hopper chips. Costing at least US$30,000 each, the powerful chips went to data centres, rather than personal computers. This year, the company’s market value skyrocketed to more than $2 trillion, making it the third-highest-valued company in the world, ahead of giants such as Amazon and Alphabet, the parent company of Google.
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