Nvidia's CEO Jensen Huang had emphasized some time ago that he no longer sees Nvidia as a graphics card company and he underlined that at GTC 2024. “People think that we make GPUs, but GPUs don't look like they used to.” He sees the age of AI already coming; Noting the tremendous growth in AI innovation in recent months and years, Huang said: “It's a whole new category… it's unlike anything we've done before.” Nvidia even goes so far as to offer customers custom chips if they are interested.
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“A new industry has emerged… but we need to accelerate an entire industry.” – “Accelerated computing has reached the tipping point – general computing is running out of steam,” said Huang. And Blackwell is Nvidia's answer. “We need a different way of computing so that we can continue to scale, so that we can continue to reduce the cost of computing, so that we can consume more and more data while being sustainable. Accelerated computing is a dramatic increase in speed over general computing, in every single industry.” – “Blackwell will be a great system for generative AI… in the future, data centers will be viewed as AI factories,” said Huang, “Their goal in life is to generate revenue, in this case intelligence.”
It was foreseeable that Nvidia would concentrate fully on AI products. It's the issue that's sending sales skyrocketing and the share price right behind. It will be all the more interesting to see which products Nvidia will derive from Blackwell for gamers and at what prices. The trend in the gaming industry, also influenced by the new AI possibilities, was to use less native calculations and more algorithms. Frame generation and super resolution are two appropriate keywords. The trend is likely to continue after Sony also jumps on the bandwagon and, according to well-informed rumors, equips the Playstation 5 Pro with AI image tools that will use an NPU for calculations. Have Huang's worries that Nvidia could fail have now diminished? Probably not; the height of the fall became rather higher.