Nvidia has unveiled a “superchip” for training artificial intelligence models, the most powerful it has ever produced. The US computing firm, which has recently rocketed in value to become the world’s third-largest company, has not yet revealed the cost of its new chips, but observers expect a high price tag that will make them accessible to only a few organisations.
The chips were announced by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang at a press conference in San Jose, California on 18 March. He showed off the company’s new Blackwell B200 graphics processing units , each of which has 208 billion transistors – the tiny switches at the heart of modern computing devices – compared to the 80 billion transistors of Nvidia’s current-generation Hopper chips. He also revealed the GB200 Grace Blackwell Superchip, which combines two of the B200 chips.
“Blackwell is just going to be an amazing system for generative AI,” said Huang. “And in the future data centres are going to be thought of as AI factories.”in 2023, Elon Musk spoke of GPUs being “considerably harder to get than drugs” and some academic researchers without access bemoaned being “GPU poor”.
Nvidia claims its Blackwell chips can deliver 30 times performance improvement when running generative AI services based on large language models compared to Hopper GPUs, all while using 25 times less energy.It says that whereas OpenAI’s GPT-4 large language model required approximately 8000 Hopper GPUs and 15 megawatts of power to perform 90 days of training, the same AI training could be done using just 2000 Blackwell GPUs consuming 4 megawatts of power.
The company has not yet revealed the cost of the Blackwell GPUs but the price tag is likely to reach eyewatering levels, given that the Hopper GPUs already cost between $20,000 and $40,000 apiece. This focus on developing more powerful and expensive chips means they “will only be accessible to a select few organizations and countries,” saysat Hugging Face, a company that develops tools for sharing AI code and data sets.
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