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.
Nvidia is returning to Gamescom this week and it’s holding a “community update” stream today that promises new GeForce features, some “major GeForce Now news,” and the chance to see some “highly anticipated PC games.” No new hardware will be announced, though. Nvidia’s stream kicks off at at 12PM PT / 3PM ET on YouTube and Twitch.
Look at this thing. According to Videocardz and Tom’s Hardware, it’s a custom 12.5-inch 4K handheld with Intel i9-14900HX and Nvidia RTX 4090 chips from a gaming laptop. There are pics and a video of it playing games, but none showing the build or internals.
Obviously, I want it.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said the details of Trump’s plan to take a 15 percent cut of Nvidia and AMD’s chip sales to China are “being ironed out by the Department of Commerce,” CNBC reports. Leavitt also added that the charge “could expand in the future to other companies.”
Amid reports that Nvidia and AMD will be given permission to sell AI chips to Chinese companies only if they pay the US government a 15 percent cut, some ask how exactly the money solves the national security risks.
oghowie:
So it’s a national security issue unless you give us a cut?
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The Financial Times first reported on this “highly unusual” arrangement that is part of reopening the gate for Nvidia and AMD to sell previous-gen AI chips to companies in China:
The US official said Nvidia agreed to share 15 per cent of the revenues from H20 chip sales in China and AMD will provide the same percentage from MI308 chip revenues. Two people familiar with the arrangement said the Trump administration had not yet determined how to use the money.
After years of the US casting doubt on Huawei tech for alleged security threats, now China gets a turn. The country’s Cyberspace Administration reportedly called Nvidia execs in to explain “loopholes and backdoor” vulnerabilities in the H20 AI chips designed specifically to sell in China. It follows an antitrust investigation opened last year.
Then again, this could all be posturing — China wants its own chip industry to thrive, and Nvidia’s dominance makes that difficult.
[asia.nikkei.com]
Nvidia is releasing a new GeForce Game Ready Driver today, designed to improve performance in Wuchang: Fallen Feathers and Valorant’s Unreal Engine 5 upgrade. Valorant is moving to Unreal 5 on July 29th, which Nvidia says will introduce “additional content and changes.”
You can download the new 577.00 driver right here.
Nvidia has created yet another Cyberpunk 2077 graphics card. A special edition RTX 5090 has a Cyberpunk 2077 theme and it’s being given away as part of Nvidia’s GeForce RTX summer event. As VideoCardz points out, this is at least the sixth time that Nvidia has created a Cyberpunk-themed GPU, with a custom RTX 2080 Ti first appearing in 2020 at the game’s launch. Nvidia has Cyberpunk’d every GPU generation since then.
The company has been “assured” by the US government that licenses to sell its H20 GPU will be granted, and hopes to resume deliveries “soon” — along with launching a new RTX Pro GPU for China too.
Nvidia has been lobbying for the right to sell the H20 to Chinese customers, since that’s what it was designed for — it’s a stripped back chip built to match US export controls.
[blogs.nvidia.com]
When Nvidia’s share price rose beyond $164 on Wednesday morning, it was the first company to have a market cap of over $4 trillion. It closed the day up 1.8 percent at $162.88, leaving its current total at $3.97 trillion, leading Microsoft ($3.7 trillion) and Apple ($3.1 trillion).
The AI boom and demand for its chips have quickly increased the company’s value in the last few years, which only passed $1 trillion two years ago.
In a video posted by Nintendo, Huang highlights some of the capabilities brought to the Switch 2 through its custom Nvidia chip:
It brings together three breakthroughs: the most advanced graphics ever in a mobile device, full hardware ray-tracing, high dynamic range for brighter highlights and deeper shadows, and an architecture that supports backward compatibility.
Huang adds that the chip also offers “dedicated AI processors to sharpen and enhance gameplay in real time.”
There’s a native app for SteamOS now, and it’s pretty great.
Too early to see whether the RTX 5060 review debacle will wake gamers up, but blackscreens and melting power cables didn’t have a huge impact — Nvidia just reported record gaming revenue of $3.76 billion in Q1 2026 (aka February thru April).
Trump did slash Nvidia’s overall profits by restricting H20 exports to China, yet Nvidia still made another $18.7 billion in pure profit in Q1. Even though gaming is booming, Nvidia’s networking is still bigger: it grew to $5 billion in revenue this past quarter.
In a 22-minute video, Gamers Nexus talks about “Nvidia’s last several months of pressure to talk about DLSS more frequently in reviews, plus [Multi Frame Generation] 4X pressure from the company” and how “Nvidia has repeatedly made comments to GN that interviews, technical discussion, and access to engineers unrelated to MFG 4X and DLSS are made possible by talking about MFG 4X and DLSS.”
Its recent updates addressed a slew of problems that have emerged following the launch of Nvidia’s RTX-50 series cards in January. But today’s 576.40 driver just includes a fix for some Asus displays booting to black screens, a stutter on LG TVs with G-Sync enabled, and “random stability issues” in Monster Hunter Wilds.
Nvidia’s new Game Ready driver also optimizes your PC for Doom: The Dark Ages, which will support idTech8 ray tracing and DLSS 4 with Multi-Frame Generation when it launches on May 15th.
YouTuber Geekerwan has obtained what appears to be a Switch 2 motherboard component for about $150 on Xianyu, which he describes as a Chinese eBay equivalent.
Even without being able to power it up, microscopic evaluation suggests that the “T239” chip was taped out in 2021 with Nvidia’s Ampere tech. Combined with leaked clockspeed specs, they were able to demonstrate some performance estimates on current games, but maybe we’ll get even more hardware details soon.
In response to US restrictions on chip exports, Chinese companies have been trying to develop their own hardware to power generative AI, but so far, have trailed behind. Now the Wall Street Journal reports that Huawei is not only preparing to ship more of its existing Ascend 910B and 910C chips, but also to start testing a new 910D AI processor.
It’s reportedly aiming to surpass the popular H100 chip Nvidia launched in 2022, although the 910D is reportedly “less power-efficient.”
[wsj.com]
This week’s two big new RPG releases are now both available on Nvidia’s GeForce Now cloud streaming service. The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered has been added to GeForce Now today, alongside Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. Both are on PC Game Pass, so you can even access them on GeForce Now through Microsoft’s subscription service.
The US government told Nvidia on April 9th that the company would need a license to export its H20 AI chip to China, Reuters and CNBC report.
The charges are “associated with H20 products for inventory, purchase commitments, and related reserves,” according to an Nvidia SEC filing.
CEO Jensen Huang will deliver the first keynote for the expo, kicking off at 11PM ET on May 18th. Computex takes place in Taipei between May 20th and 23rd with the theme “AI Next,” a space that Nvidia has unquestionably dominated these last few years as global AI developers scramble to obtain its advanced training chips.
Just look at VideoCardz’s homepage right now.
