Image: © Askar/Stock.adobe.com
The chipmaker made a number of big AI-related announcements aimed at industries and individual consumers.
CES, one of the world’s biggest annual tech events, kicked off in Las Vegas yesterday (6 January) with a number of major announcements from industry giants including Sony, Honda and Dell.
However, chipmaker Nvidia made a particular splash with a suite of wide-ranging product announcements and collaborations including the world’s smallest AI supercomputer and a partnership with automaker Toyota.
Here’s a breakdown of what Nvidia brought to the table.
World’s smallest supercomputer
The chipmaker announced Project Digits, which it claims is the world’s smallest AI supercomputer, available from May, selling for a hefty retail price of $3,000. Digits will feature the new Nvidia GB10 Grace Blackwell Superchip, giving developers the ability to run up to 200-bn-parameter large language models.
According to Nvidia, the supercomputer, which comes with 128GB of unified, coherent memory and up to 4TB of non-volatile memory express storage, will allow users to develop and run inference on models using their own desktop systems and deploy the models on data centre infrastructures.
“AI will be mainstream in every application for every industry,” said Jensen Huang, the founder and CEO of Nvidia. “With Project Digits, the Grace Blackwell Superchip comes to millions of developers. Placing an AI supercomputer on the desks of every data scientist, AI researcher and student empowers them to engage and shape the age of AI.”
Generative physical AI
Nvidia has announced that it is expanding Omniverse, its 3D graphics collaboration platform, providing more physical AI applications for warehouses and factories.
According to Huang, physical AI will “revolutionise” the $50trn manufacturing and logistics industries. “Everything that moves – from cars and trucks to factories and warehouses – will be robotic and embodied by AI,” he said.
Nvidia’s generative AI models are set to accelerate the creation of 3D worlds for physical AI simulation by letting developers use text prompts to generate OpenUSD (universal scene description) assets and automatically label them, enabling developers to “process 1,000 3D objects in minutes”.
Moreover, at CES yesterday, Nvidia announced Mega, an Omniverse blueprint for developing, testing and optimising physical AI and robot fleets in a digital twin form before they are deployed into real-world facilities.
According to Nvidia, Mega will offer enterprises a suite of Nvidia tech, including the Omniverse to develop digital twins for testing AI-powered robot brains that drive robots, video analytics AI agents and equipment for handling complexity and scale.
Automotive giants partner with Nvidia
Expanding on AI’s physical applications, automakers Toyota, Aurora and Continental have announced partnerships with Nvidia to develop and build their consumer and commercial vehicle fleets on Nvidia’s accelerated computing and AI.
Toyota has announced plans to build its next-generation vehicles on Nvidia’s safety-certified Drive platform and operating system (OS), with the aim of offering vehicles functionally safe and advanced driving assistance capabilities, while Aurora and Continental announced long-term strategic partnerships with Nvidia to deploy driverless trucks at scale, also powered by Nvidia’s Drive platform.
“The autonomous vehicle revolution has arrived, and automotive will be one of the largest AI and robotics industries,” Huang said
“Nvidia is bringing two decades of automotive computing, safety expertise and its Cuda AV platform to transform the multitrillion-dollar auto industry.”
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