Nvidia’s small $3,000 computer steals the show at CES

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang was received like a rock star this week at CES in Las Vegas, following an artificial intelligence. boom That has made the chip maker the second most valuable company in the world.

In his nearly two-hour keynote speech Monday opening the annual conference, Huang packed a 12,000-seat stadium, drawing comparisons to the way Steve Jobs would unveil products at Apple events.

Huang concluded with an Apple-style stunt: a surprise product reveal. He featured one of Nvidia’s server racks and, using some stage magic, showed off a much smaller version, which looked like a small computer cube.

“This is an artificial intelligence supercomputer,” Huang said, putting on a crocodile skin jacket. “It runs the entire Nvidia AI stack. All Nvidia software runs on top of this.”

Huang said the computer is called Project Digits and is powered by a relative of the Grace Blackwell graphics processing units (GPUs) that currently power the most advanced AI server clusters. The GPU is paired with a ARMGrace-based central processing unit (CPU). Nvidia worked with a Chinese semiconductor company MediaTek to create the system on a chip called GB10.

Formerly known as the Consumer Electronics Show, CES is typically the place to launch flashy, futuristic consumer devices. At this year’s show, which began Tuesday and runs through Friday, several companies announced AI integrations with home appliances, laptops and even grills. Other major announcements included a laptop from Lenovo that has a rollable screen that can expand vertically. There were also new robots, including a Roomba competitor with a robotic arm.

Unlike traditional Nvidia gaming GPUs, Project Digits is not aimed at consumers. Instead, it is aimed at machine learning researchers, smaller 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 credits.

“There’s a big gap for data scientists and ML researchers who are actively working, who are actively building something,” Huang said. “Maybe you don’t need a giant cluster. You’re just developing early versions of the model and you’re constantly iterating. You could do it in the cloud, but it costs a lot more money.”

The supercomputer will cost about $3,000 when it becomes available in May, Nvidia said, and will be available through the company itself as well as some of its manufacturing partners. Huang said Project Digits is a placeholder name, indicating it may change when the computer goes on sale.

“If you have a good name, please contact us,” Huang said.

Data center sales accounted for 88% of Nvidia’s $35 billion in revenue in the most recent quarter.

Wall Street is focused on Nvidia’s ability to diversify its business so that it is less reliant on a handful of customers buying massive AI systems.

“It was a little scary to see Nvidia release something so good for so little price,” Melius Research analyst Ben Reitzes wrote in a note this week. He said Nvidia may have “stolen the show,” due to Project Digits and other announcements including gaming graphics cards, new robot chips and a deal with toyota.

Project Digits, which runs Linux and the same Nvidia software used in the company’s GPU server clusters, represents a huge increase in capabilities for researchers and universities, said David Bader, director of the Data Science Institute at the New Technology Institute. Jersey.

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, most cutting-edge models. He told CNBC Anthropic, Google, Amazon and others “would pay $100 million to build a supercomputer for training purposes” to obtain a system with these types of capabilities.

For $3,000, users will soon be able to get a product that they can plug into a standard outlet in their home or office, Bader said. It’s particularly exciting for academics, who have often gone to private industry to access larger, more powerful computers, he said.

“Any student who can have one of these systems that costs about the same as a high-end laptop or a gaming laptop will be able to do the same research and build the same models,” Bader said.

Reitzes said the computer may be Nvidia’s first step into the $50 billion market for PC and laptop chips.

“It’s not too difficult to imagine that it would be easy to do everything themselves and allow the system to run Windows one day,” Reitzes wrote. “But I guess they don’t want to step on too many toes.”

Huang did not rule out that possibility when asked by Wall Street analysts on Tuesday.

He said MediaTek could sell the GB10 chip to other computer makers in the market. He made sure to leave some mystery in the air.

“We obviously have plans,” Huang said.

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