Emma Roth
Nvidia Live with Jensen Huang starts soon.
Huang is set to share “what’s next in AI” during a CES presentation at 4PM ET. You can watch the event from the livestream embedded below or by heading directly to YouTube.
Nvidia
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.
Tom Warren
Nvidia teases GeForce announcements for later today.
Nvidia won’t be announcing its rumored RTX 50 Super GPUs at CES today, but it still has some “features, games, apps, and partner products” to unveil. A GeForce On Twitch stream will start at 9PM PT / 12AM ET tonight, and if leaks are anything to go by it sounds like DLSS 4.5 could be on the menu.
Antonio G. Di Benedetto
Richard Lawler
Nvidia pays a reported $20 billion for most of the AI chip startup Groq.
CNBC reports Nvidia isn’t buying all of Groq, which has inference AI tech that IBM’s CEO recently told us “looks like it’ll be 10x cheaper” than GPUs.
Nvidia’s getting a non-exclusive license, and members of the team, like Google TPU creator and Groq CEO Jonathan Ross, and former Autonomic CEO Sunny Madra.
Richard Lawler
Nvidia tests of Intel’s 18A chip manufacturing process “stopped moving forward.”
In the spring, Reuters broke the news that Nvidia and Broadcom were testing Intel’s 18A process for chip production, but in a profile today of Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan, the outlet now says Nvidia’s test has ended, regardless of their new $5 billion deal.
The report doesn’t say why, but in October, Intel CFO David Zinsner said 18A yields were “not where we need them to be to drive the appropriate level of margins,” and that it could be 2026 or 2027 before that changes.
Jay Peters
GeForce Now’s 100-hour cap for pretty much everyone comes into effect in January.
Active paid GeForce Now members who signed up before 2025 had been exempt, but starting January 1st, 2026, the cap is in place for them, too. Founders members will continue to have unlimited playtime, Nvidia says.
Nvidia has built an empire on circular deals for chips. Can anything knock it down?
Elizabeth Lopatto
Jess Weatherbed
Emma Roth
Nvidia may soon be able to sell its powerful H200 chips in China.
The White House is planning to give Nvidia the green light to begin exporting its H200 AI GPU chips to China, according to reports from Semafor and the WSJ. As noted by the WSJ, the H200 chip is more powerful than the scaled-down H20 GPU that China has cracked down on, but it still doesn’t rival Nvidia’s Blackwell GPUs.
Elizabeth Lopatto
Oh look, CoreWeave is issuing $2 billion more debt.
In the story I wrote about CoreWeave, analyst Gil Luria told me the company has “to keep borrowing more and more because they spend more money than they can get, structurally. They have to continue to borrow to pay interest on the last loan.” Aren’t you glad Nvidia helped them go public?
Elissa Welle
If you don’t use AI, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang asks: “Are you insane?”
Huang said this during a company meeting with employees last week, Fortune reports. Apparently some managers have told Nvidia employees to use less AI? Not on Huang’s watch. He said he wants AI to automate “every task” that can be automated with AI – and employees shouldn’t worry about AI taking their jobs in the process.
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Verge Score
Slapping an RTX 5070 onto your laptop is a big deal. It’s other parts of the Laptop 16 that falter.
Antonio G. Di Benedetto
The Nvidia-backed data center company is part of a growing ecosystem of so-called neoclouds propping up the AI industry and its insatiable hunger for compute.
Nilay Patel
Dominic Preston
The AI factory.
Samsung and Nvidia just announced a new “AI megafactory” powered by more than 50,000 Nvidia chips, where AI “analyzes, predicts and optimizes” every step of semiconductor manufacturing, from initial designs to final quality control.
The companies haven’t said where the factory will be built, but its tech will eventually be expanded to Samsung facilities worldwide, including Texas.
Andrew J. Hawkins
Andrew J. Hawkins
Tom Warren
Nvidia’s latest driver is ready for ARC Raiders.
ARC Raiders, the upcoming extraction shooters from the makers of The Finals, debuts later this month, and Nvidia is ready. Today’s Game Ready driver (version 581.57) includes support for ARC Raiders, Pax Dei, The Outer Worlds 2, and Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2. It also has fixes for Steam overlay stability issues, Black Myth: Wukong graphic glitches, and Madden 26 stability problems.
Image: Nvidia
Tom Warren
Nvidia’s latest driver is ready for Battlefield 6.
Battlefield 6 is arriving next week and Nvidia is releasing a Game Ready driver update just in time. The latest 581.42 release (download here) is optimized for both Battlefield 6 and FBC: Firebreak’s Breakpoint Update.
Battlefield 6 launches on October 10th with support for DLSS 4 Multi Frame Generation, DLSS Super Resolution, DLAA, and Nvidia Reflex.
Image: Nvidia
Dominic Preston
Rich people problems.
Still trying to figure out why Nvidia just announced it’s investing $100 billion in OpenAI? The answer’s simple: it has too much money, and nothing else to spend it on. We’ve all been there.
Why Nvidia Is Spending So Much Money
[wsj.com]
Richard Lawler
Apparently you can pay your way out of national security concerns.
National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett tries to explain why the Trump Administration allowed Nvidia to sell AI chips in China in exchange for a 15 percent cut.
Sean Hollister
Nvidia claims Trump had nothing to do with its $5B investment in Intel.
“What sort of involvement did the Trump Administration have in this agreement?” asked the FT’s Michael Acton on the call. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang:
The Trump Administration had no involvement in the partnership at all, and they would have been very supportive, of course. And today I had the opportunity to tell Secretary Lutnick, and he was very excited, very supportive of seeing American technology companies working together.
Sean Hollister
Apparently Nvidia’s CEO enjoyed drinking cognac with King Charles III.
I’m on the call where Nvidia and Intel are explaining their $5B deal, but the call began with a hot mic:
His majesty was delightful. The cognac was excellent, but just not enough of it. I guess the cognac was from 1912.
Huang joined Trump’s state visit to London this week.
Image: Nvidia/Intel
Elissa Welle
Thomas Ricker
Nvidia violated China antitrust law.
It’s just a preliminary ruling by China’s competition regulator so there’s no penalty yet as the investigation continues. The ruckus stems from Nvidia’s 2020 acquisition of Mellanox, which China approved on conditions that included guaranteed supplies to China.
