Nvidia is one of the world’s biggest computer chip companies, best known for its line of graphics processing units or GPUs. Although the firm had its start in the world of consumer gaming, in recent years it’s grown into a true tech titan with diverse investments in self-driving cars, cloud computing, supercomputing, and artificial intelligence. The parallel processing power of Nvidia’s GPUs has proven to be particularly good at machine learning tasks, and its chips are in high demand not only from AI researchers but any business with an interest in artificial intelligence. From 2015 onwards, Nvidia’s share price grew sharply, allowing the company to make some key acquisitions, including UK chip designer ARM, which it announced it would purchase in September 2020 for $40 billion. Nvidia was founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang, who is currently the firm’s CEO. Known for his leather jackets and upbeat corporate presentations, Huang is a familiar figure to anyone interested in tech.
ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent have reportedly collectively ordered more than 3 million of Nvidia’s RTX Pro 5500 GPUs, among the most powerful still compliant with US export controls. Those orders far exceed planned production, however, and Reuters reports that Nvidia has warned customers they might only get 5 to 10 percent of what they requested.
Nvidia’s new Arm-based laptop chip is an exciting new challenger, but exclusively for the high-end.
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A beautiful laptop built for an AI future that hasn’t quite arrived.
Nvidia’s new laptops will run all your apps and games, the company claims.
Confusingly, both options are called the “RTX Spark N1X,” but the lite version has 5120 GPU cores, 18 CPU cores and up to 32GB of RAM, while the other has 6144 GPU cores, 20 CPU cores, and up to 128GB.
There’s a huge difference in price: a Surface Laptop Ultra starts at $2,600, but the the 6144-core model costs $3,700 and up. If you’re buying for local AI, that means opting for lots of pricy RAM, too.
In May, Nvidia claimed it was “the most efficient PC chip ever built,” and Nvidia now says it’s the fastest too: “it’s going to be a good 3-5x faster than any Windows SoC ever made,” the company told journalists.
Our early impressions are that it’s impressive for thin and light; in raw performance, we’re not necessarily seeing it beat Macs or laptops with discrete GPUs. Stay tuned for reviews.
The company’s unsecured debt due in 2032 is now trading below 80 cents on the dollar, Bloomberg reports. “Yikes” is right, Elon — if CoreWeave crumbles, other debt-laden neoclouds might be in trouble, too.
CoreWeave is in many ways the poster child of the current AI buildout, which may have disastrous consequences if things don’t go as planned.
“For gamers, DLSS 5 is a simple on-or-off toggle,” Nvidia told us in September, claiming DLSS 5 would “preserve artistic intent” behind games instead of just aging characters’ faces. But modders will have access to the same tools as developers, Nvidia now says — on October 23rd, it’s adding DLSS 5 to its RTX Remix tool for modding older DX8 and DX9 games. Used properly, it doesn’t look bad?
As reported by Reuters, Trump bought up to $1.6 million in Nvidia stock and sold up to $1 million in August. Trump also disclosed an investment of as much as $5 million in SpaceX debt, according to CNBC.
On Thursday, Trump presented Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk with the National Medal of Science.
The company announced the investment at the Science: A New Golden Age event in DC, but didn’t specify what shape the investments would take, only saying they were “valued at” $1 billion and would focus on “super intelligence” and quantum computing.
Over the next five years, NVIDIA will commit $1 billion to the advancement of super intelligence for science and quantum computing across the U.S. through support of the nation’s higher-education research institutions, investments in accelerating American quantum leadership and support for cloud service providers bolstering U.S. government mission needs.
[GlobeNewswire News Room]
Tomorrow’s event will announce more than $1 billion in commitments for the Trump admin’s “Genesis Project” AI push and investments from the NSF and Energy Department, reports Axios, including $100 million in credits from something called National Compute.
Meanwhile, Fox News and Bloomberg report Trump will award the National Medal of Science to Elon Musk, Jensen Huang, Sergey Brin, and Lisa Su, while Michael Dell and Satya Nadella are in line for the National Medal of Technology and Innovation. It’s the first time Trump has ever given out the awards, which usually don’t go to well-known tech execs, judging by previous recipients.
Inside the secret lab where Microsoft tortures laptops.
The DOJ has charged Greg Lui with conspiracy, money laundering and smuggling over an alleged years-long scheme to sneak export-controlled Nvidia GPUs into China by re-exporting them from other countries, like Malaysia or Singapore. Four people were arrested last year for similar Nvidia smuggling allegations.
[U.S. Department of Justice]
A pair of Nvidia-branded trailers stolen from autonomous trucking company PlusAI weren’t packed with the pricey Nvidia chips the thieves must have been expecting. Business Insider reports the trucks were found hours later with their cargo seemingly intact: sand used to simulate cargo for test drives. That’s one way to thwart scalpers.
However, talks fell through “in the early stages,” according to CNBC. Nvidia agreed to acquire Hugging Face earlier this month for nearly $13 billion, and OpenAI’s offer “got the attention of” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. AMD and Salesforce also apparently had discussions with Hugging Face.
Nvidia is releasing a new Game Ready driver today, in preparation for the release of AION 2, Control Resonant, Gears of War: E-Day, and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Remastered. The driver includes optimizations for all four games, as well as enabling DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction in Control Resonant.
Nvidia’s CEO has been taking calls from the president recently, including two days ago when he put Trump on speakerphone on a conference stage. Now CNBC reports Huang is expected to attend Trump’s state dinner next week with Chinese President Xi Jinping. Someone may be getting pretty nervous about AI and data center regulation!
Nvidia’s Jensen Huang says AI safety is important, but agrees with Trump — the “STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT” that removed the word “safety” from the AI Safety Institute — that capitalism’s invisible hand is enough to protect us:
“The fact that we need new laws, new antitrust laws, or new regulations, so that these companies could do their fundamental engineering and do it properly before they release products, that is just completely unnecessary. We have plenty of laws. We have plenty of regulations that govern the reliability and the functionality of products.”
007 First Light is getting a major visual overhaul next week, thanks to path tracing and DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction. Nvidia is releasing a new Game Ready driver (616.92) today that’s fully optimized for the First Light update, as well as adding support for PUBG’s DLSS Super Resolution update. The driver is also Game Ready for Active Matter, Aniimo, and Wardogs.
HP is adding to the impending deluge of RTX Spark computers due in October with the OmniBook X 14, OmniBook Ultra 16, and the small form factor OmniDesk. My colleague Dom saw the Ultra among other Nvidia-powered laptops at IFA, but we still don’t know any prices.
Considering HP’s specs show both OmniBooks will start with 32GB of unified memory and 1TB of storage, signs point to them being expensive.
Only one of them switched on, and apparently it wasn’t even meant to, so I’ve got no deep performance insights about the first laptops powered by Nvidia’s RTX Spark chip. But Dell, Lenovo, MSI, Asus, HP, and Microsoft are all on board with hardware already — hopefully we’ll get the details on them all before too long.
