In May, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said that “the next industrial revolution has begun” and AI will lead to “significant productivity gains.” It looks like he's right – industry demand for Nvidia's next-generation AI chip, Blackwell, is skyrocketing.
“Blackwell is in full production, Blackwell is running as planned and demand for Blackwell is insane,” Huang told CNBC on Thursday. “Everyone wants to have the most and everyone wants to be first.”
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Nvidia first announced Blackwell in March, saying it was the world's most powerful AI chip with advanced security features, better performance and more memory. The biggest names in AI, including OpenAI, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon and Google, will use Blackwell to power their AI efforts.
Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, shows off the new Blackwell GPU chip (left) and the Hopper GPU chip (right) in March 2024. Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images
“There is nothing better than NVIDIA hardware for AI right now,” Tesla and xAI CEO Elon Musk said at the time.
Since the initial announcement, Blackwell has had some issues in production that led to delays. Nvidia CFO Colette Kress said in late August that the company had fixed the problem and expected to ship the chip in the fourth quarter of 2024, worth “several billions of dollars.”
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The chip costs between $30,000 and $40,000 and took $10 billion to develop.
Huang said Nvidia has significantly updated its platform with Blackwell and intends to continue updating it. Nvidia has increased performance by two to three times from its 2022 Hopper chip to its Blackwell chip, which Huang says increases revenue for Nvidia's customers by two to three times.
“What we are seeing now is the beginning of the next wave of AI, the biggest wave of AI,” Huang told CNBC. “This is really about companies around the world using AI to be more productive as their digital employees and AI agents and co-pilots, and however people describe them, and using AI more generatively AI to revolutionize the way they make their products and the products they make.”
Huang said last month that strong demand for Nvidia's technology and software keeps him sleeping at night. On Wednesday, Nvidia partnered with Accenture to train 30,000 Accenture employees on Nvidia's technology.
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