Nvidia Corp chief executive officer Jensen Huang (黃仁勳), addressing crowds at the company’s biggest annual event, unveiled a variety of new products while predicting that its flagship artificial intelligence (AI) processors would help generate US$1 trillion in sales through next year.
During a two-and-a-half-hour keynote address, Huang announced plans to push deeper into central processing units (CPUs) — Intel Corp’s home turf — and introduced semiconductors made with technology acquired from start-up Groq Inc. The company even said it was developing chips for data centers in outer space.
At the heart of Huang’s speech was the message that demand for computing power continues to soar, and Nvidia is uniquely equipped to meet the challenge.
Photo: AFP
“I believe that computing demand has increased by 1 million times in the last two years,” Huang said on Monday at Nvidia’s annual GPU Technology Conference (GTC) in San Jose, California. “It is the feeling that we all have. It is the feeling every start-up has.”
Huang is contending with increasingly skeptical investors, who want more evidence that Nvidia’s booming sales growth will last. The trillion-dollar sales forecast, fueled by orders from the company’s Blackwell and Rubin chips, offered evidence that demand remains solid.
The company had previously forecast that data center gear would bring US$500 billion in sales through the end of this year. The latest forecast extends the outlook another year, doubling the cumulative amount.
New products and partnerships were a highlight of GTC.
The new Groq chip is designed to boost the responsiveness of AI systems and would be manufactured by Samsung Electronics Co, with Groq-based systems coming in the second half, Huang said.
Nvidia also showed off a computer made up of general-purpose CPUs. Such machines could be used in combination with other Nvidia-based computers or work independently.
That opportunity is “for sure” a multibillion-dollar business, Huang said.
The chipmaker also provides AI models and other software on an open-source basis, meaning that customers can tinker with the technology as they see fit. It also offers versions tailored for specific uses, aiming to help industries that it sees as ripe for disruption by AI.
Huang pointed to the rapid emergence of OpenClaw, an open-source agentic platform, and announced Nvidia’s enterprise-focused NemoClaw system, developed with enhanced security and privacy capabilities for corporate use.
Looking further ahead, Huang introduced the company’s Feynman architecture as the next step in its road map, featuring new processing and networking technologies, including co-packaged optics.
Nvidia uses GTC to announce partnerships with companies in a range of industries, aiming to show the increasing benefits of AI. It discussed new or expanded pacts with companies such as International Business Machines Corp, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co and Adobe Inc. It also strengthened ties with Uber Technologies Inc, saying it was planning a fleet of Nvidia software-driven autonomous vehicles by 2028.
Huang expected Taiwan to be a key part of the supply chain delivering Nvidia’s Vera Rubin architecture.
Three slides in his presentation showed that of the more than 60 global partners for Nvidia’s Vera Rubin platform, many were Taiwanese companies, such as Asustek Computer Inc (華碩), Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海), Quanta Cloud Technology Inc (雲達), Wistron Corp (緯創) and Wiwynn Corp (緯穎).
Additional reporting by CNA
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