Nvidia Corp Releases New Chip That Boosts Computing Speed And Artificial Intelligence Algorithm

Nvidia, increasingly mastering chips for artificial intelligence technology. (photo: doc. pixabay)

JAKARTA - Nvidia Corp on Tuesday, March 22 announced a new chip and technology that it says will increase the computational speed of increasingly complex artificial intelligence algorithms. This chip is sure to increase competition with other chipmakers vying for the lucrative data center business.

Nvidia Corp provided details of the new graphics chip (GPU) that will be at the core of its AI infrastructure, releasing the H100 chip and a new processor chip called the Grace CPU Superchip. The chip is based on the technology of British chip company Arm Ltd. It's the first Arm-based chip from Nvidia launched since a deal to buy Arm fell through last month.

Nvidia also announced its new "Eos" supercomputer, which it says will be the world's fastest AI system when it goes into service later this year.

“Data centers become AI factories that process and refine datasets to generate intelligence,” said Nvidia Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang at Nvidia's online AI developer conference. They call the H100 chip the "engine" of the AI infrastructure.

Nvidia says the new technology together will help reduce computing time from weeks to days for some jobs that involve training AI models.

Nvidia Corp has also used AI and machine learning for many things. From making recommendations for the next generation of videos to watch on TV and mobile, to discovering new drugs.

"It is clear from recent announcements that Nvidia is becoming a more significant threat to Intel and AMD in the data center and cloud computing markets," said chief analyst Bob O'Donnell at TECHnalysis Research.

Intel Corp. has been the largest maker of central processors for data centers. However they have seen competition for space upgrades growing rapidly and lucratively.

However, Vlad Galabov, head of the cloud and data center research practice at research firm Omdia, said he was concerned about the power consumption of the H100 chip. According to him it may hinder the appeal of the processor market at large.

Nvidia's Chief Financial Officer, Colette Kress, said that with the new chips pushing AI computing forward, the company's market opportunity is about a trillion dollars, from games to chips and systems and other enterprise businesses.

Nvidia, whose open-source software has been a key driver for companies to use its chips, said it wanted to further monetize its software business in the future.

"We have sold software to our company and it is a few hundred million dollars today and we believe this is a growth opportunity for us," said Kress. She also added that going forward the software business will help increase Nvidia's gross margin over time. Especially when shortages of chip components and supply constraints have increased costs.

Software for the automotive market will also be a key driver. "Automotive is well on its way to becoming our next multi-billion dollar business," Huang said.

According to Huang, Nvidia has started shipping its autonomous vehicle computer "Drive Orin" this month. Chinese electric vehicle maker BYD Co Ltd and luxury electric car maker Lucid Motors will use Nvidia Drive for their next-generation fleet.

Danny Shapiro, Nvidia's vice president of automotive, said there was an $11 billion (IDR 157 trillion) automotive business in the "channel" over the next six years. This number is up from the 8 billion US dollars (IDR 114 trillion) estimated last year.