Nvidia unveils its most powerful AI platform named Blackwell

By Ovunc Kutlu

ISTANBUL (AA) - Nvidia unveiled its most powerful artificial intelligence (AI) graphics platform and software for running AI models at its developer conference Monday in San Jose, California.

The US chipmaker's new AI computing platform is named Blackwell, the successor to Hopper, and the platform's first chip is called the GB200, which will ship later this year.

"Hopper is fantastic, but we need bigger GPUs," Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told the conference. "Accelerated computing has reached the tipping point — general-purpose computing has run out of steam."

"We need another way of doing computing so that we can continue to scale, so that we can continue to drive down the cost of computing...Accelerated computing is a dramatic speedup over general-purpose computing, in every single industry," he said.

"The amount of energy we save, the amount of networking bandwidth we save, the amount of wasted time we save will be tremendous," he added. "The way we compute is fundamentally different. We created a processor for the generative AI era."

Huang said generative AI changes the way applications are written, adding Nvidia's new software NIM is built from the company's accelerated computing libraries and generative AI models.

He added that customers can use NIM microservices off the shelf, or Nvidia can help build proprietary AI and copilots -- teaching a model specialized skills.