Nvidia’s $3,000 minicomputer for AI developers steals the show at CES

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was hailed as a rock star at CES in Las Vegas this week following an artificial intelligence boom this has made the chip maker the second most valuable company in the world.

In a nearly two-hour speech Monday, kicking off the annual technology conference, Huang packed the 12,000-seat arena, drawing comparisons to the way the late Steve Jobs unveiled products. the apple the events

Huang ended with an Apple-like trick: a surprise product reveal. He presented one of Nvidia’s server racks and, using stage magic, held a much smaller version that resembled a small cube of a computer.

“This is an AI supercomputer,” said Huang, wearing an alligator-skin leather jacket. “It runs the full Nvidia AI stack. All Nvidia software runs on it.”

Huang said the computer is called Project Digits and runs a relative of the Grace Blackwell graphics processing units, or GPUs, that power the most advanced AI server clusters today. It is paired with a GPU the armbased Grace central processing unit or CPU. He worked with the Chinese semiconductor company Nvidia MediaTek To create a system-on-a-chip called GB10.

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

Unlike Nvidia’s traditional gaming GPUs, Project Digits isn’t aimed at consumers. Instead, it’s aimed at machine learning researchers, smaller companies, and researchers who want to develop advanced AI but don’t have billions of dollars to build massive data centers or buy enough cloud credit.

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

The supercomputer will cost around $3,000 when it hits the market in May, Nvidia said, and will be available from the company and some of its manufacturing partners. Huang said Project Digits is a placeholder name, and noted that it may change at the time the computer is sold.

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

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

Wall Street is focused on Nvidia’s ability to diversify its business so that it becomes less dependent on a few customers who buy massive AI systems.

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

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

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 and most sophisticated models. Anthropic told CNBC, google, Amazon and others “would pay $100 million to build a training super computer” to get a system with these capabilities.

For $3,000, users can soon have a product that they can plug into a standard electrical outlet in their home or office, Bader said. It’s especially exciting for academics, who have often turned to private industry to acquire bigger, more powerful computers, he said.

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

Reitzes said the PC could be Nvidia’s first move into the $50 billion market for PC and laptop chips.

“It’s not too hard to imagine that it would be easy to do everything themselves and let the system run Windows at some point,” Reitzes wrote. “But I think they don’t want to step on too many toes.”

Huang did not rule out the possibility when asked about it by Wall Street analysts on Tuesday.

He said MediaTek may be able to sell the GB10 chip to other PC makers in the market. He made sure to leave some mystery in the air.

“Obviously, we have plans,” Huang said.

SEE: Nvidia pulling back on CES expectations