Nvidia has unveiled a revolutionary "superchip" to meet the needs of AI by boosting computing power and energy efficiency. Enough to galvanize the American company's actions and raise concerns about a monopoly.

The American semiconductor giant, Nvidia Corp. caused a sensation on March 18 by unveiling its latest creation in the field of electronic chips: a "superchip", in fact, called Blackwell, intended to accompany the revolution in artificial intelligence (AI) and its growing calculation needs.

At a developer conference held in a concert hall with… 18,000 seats! Jensen Huang, CEO and co-founder of Nvidia Corp, presented a new generation of GPUs (Graphics Processing Units), computing chips whose capacity far exceeds that of conventional microprocessors (CPUs).

25 times more energy efficient

Nvidia's new "superchip," dubbed "Blackwell" in homage to David Blackwell, the first black academic to enter the National Academy of Sciences, promises to be four times faster than previous generations for training existing AI models. Nvidia also claims its chips will be 25 times more energy efficient, a crucial aspect given growing concerns about AI's power requirements.

Nvidia's GPU chips are already widely recognized as key building blocks for generative AI, giving the company a leading position leader in a market where its competitors, such as Intel and AMD, struggle to compete in terms of power and efficiency.

Monopoly and suspicious practices

Blackwell's arrival risks widening this gap to the point that some already accuse them of being in a monopoly situation.

Moreover, in France, last September, the investigation services of the Competition Authority announced that they had "proceeded, after authorization from a judge of liberties and detention, to a unannounced search and seizure operation at a company suspected of having implemented anti-competitive practices in the graphics card sector." The identity of the company was quickly discovered: Nvidia.

OTHER ANNOUNCEMENTS, OTHER NVIDIA AI PROJECTS

  • A robot project with “GrOOt”

In addition to this major breakthrough, Nvidia also unveiled other innovations at this remarkable event. Among these, the "Gr00t" project, dubbed "the world's first model of a human foundation," promises to revolutionizing the interaction between robots and humansThese robots equipped with Gr00t will be, Nvidia assures, capable of understanding and imitating human movements, learning from their own experience to better interact with the world around them.

  • Nvidia chips in Apple's VR headset

Separately, Nvidia confirmed that it is working closely with Apple to integrate AI into the Vision Pro virtual reality headset, highlighting the growing importance of AI in areas such as virtual and augmented reality.

  • Supercomputers at the service of the climate

In addition, the company presented two platform projects, including Earth-2 Cloud, a platform using supercomputers capable of a throughput of 800 GB/s and which, thanks to AI, will make it possible to anticipate climate change more precisely, thus demonstrating the multiple facets of AI in diverse and crucial applications for the future of our planet.

India already appears to be a major market for Nvidia, which has reportedly already signed the sale of 16,000 of its GPUs with the company Yotta Data Services which will build one of the largest data center parks. Market invoice: a billion dollars !!

But all the GPU-hungry server vendors have already declared their love for Blackwell.

  • Blackwell, the driver of the most powerful supercomputer

In addition, Nvidia and Amazon, who joined forces in 2023 around a project called Project Ceiba, which plans to build what is expected to be one of the fastest supercomputers in the world. The arrival of the Blackwell GPU will allow Project Ceiba to increase its planned processing and calculation speeds by up to six times!

The announcement of these projects had a spectacular impact on Nvidia's stock price. Since Nvidia's projects became known, the Santa Clara (Delaware) company's stock has continued to climb, soaring by 250% over a year including 80% since the beginning of 2024. Nvidia has thus consolidated its position among the technology giants, now rivaling companies such as Microsoft and Apple in terms of market capitalization.