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.
Sales jumped 262 percent in Q1 2025 to hit a record $26B in revenue, of which nearly three-quarters ($19.4B) was data center compute — especially its Hopper GPUs for training LLMs and generative AI apps, says Nvidia. Gaming only accounted for $2.6 billion revenue this quarter.
Nvidia’s expecting record revenue again next quarter — $28B. Shovels in a gold rush, people.
Microsoft mentioned yesterday that in addition to all the Snapdragon-powered PCs announced, we would also see those AI PC experiences ship in computers powered by Intel, AMD, and Nvidia as well. Now Nvidia suggests it won’t be a long wait:
In the coming months, Copilot+ PCs equipped with new power-efficient systems-on-a-chip and RTX GPUs will be released, giving gamers, creators, enthusiasts and developers increased performance to tackle demanding local AI workloads, along with Microsoft’s new Copilot+ features.
Mozilla Firefox now supports Nvidia’s AI upscaling, and, in joining Chrome and Edge, it’s become the first non-Chromium browser on the list. Nvidia’s tech taps into your Windows PC’s RTX GPU to enhance low resolution video and add HDR.
CEO Sundar Pichai just announced new Trillium chips, coming later this year, that are 4.7 times faster than their predecessors, as Google competes with everyone else building new AI chips. Pichai also highlighted Axion, Google’s first ARM-based CPU, which the company announced last month.
Google will also be “one of the first” cloud companies to offer Nvidia’s Blackwell GPU starting in 2025.
Correction: Axion was announced last month, not last year. Also, corrected the spelling of Axion.
60 Minutes ran a segment last night on Nvidia’s ascent. It’s a solid look at how the company has become a dominant force in the AI industry.
But also, just check out this photo. Nvidia’s top boss and 60 Minutes’ Bill Whitaker know how to get after it with their Denny’s order, which I have no choice but to respect.
Don’t know how I missed this the other week: Nvidia’s quietly pointing its board partners towards small GPUs again! I sincerely hope this means blower cards are back on the menu to exhaust hot air from my case. Nvidia cracked down on those years back, allegedly to avoid cannibalizing workstation GPU sales. It’s one way GPUs might head back in the right direction.
The WSJ reports that Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and Google’s Sundar Pichai also have a seat on the board, which the Department of Homeland Security formed to promote AI safety and security. Other members include academics, civil rights leaders, and government officials, according to the WSJ.
Run:ai’s software lets users share computing power and easily manage GPUs running on cloud and on-premises data centers. It will be part of Nvidia’s DGX Cloud platform, which sells access to Nvidia’s GPUs for a monthly fee. TechCrunch reports the deal cost $700 million.
Intel first introduced its Gaudi 3 AI accelerator last year, but now the company has revealed more details on performance. When compared to the H100 GPU, Intel says its Gaudi 3 accelerator can deliver “50% faster time-to-train on average across the Llama2 models” with better efficiency.
The company also says the Gaudi 3 AI Accelerator will be a “fraction of the cost” of Nvidia’s pricey H100. It will become available to companies like Dell, HPE, and Lenovo in the second quarter of this year.
The home to some of the world’s most advanced chip factories suffered its biggest earthquake in the last 25 years, temporarily halting production at display makers like Innolux and AUO, and contract chipmakers like United Microelectronic.
But it’s also home to TSMC — the world’s top chipmaker favored by Apple and Nvidia, among others — which has many supply-chain watchers concerned.
Here’s TSMC’s statement following the magnitude-7.2 quake:
“Preventative measures were initiated according to procedure and some fabs were evacuated. All personnel are safe, and those evacuated are beginning to return to their workplaces. The company is currently confirming the details of the impact.”
The free no-cloud chatbot can now pull up photos based on your queries thanks to CLIP integration. Google Photos hooked me in 2015 with free unlimited photo storage, but now that’s gone, photo search is the biggest reason I stay. Maybe I’ll just hook up a future Chat with RTX to a photo-filled NAS and call it a day?
Also, it now does voice chat: I asked it a sentence in basic spoken Japanese and it knew what I meant. Both features are coming “soon,” says Nvidia’s Kedar Potdar.
Will the ‘world’s most powerful chip’ for AI actually cost up to 25 times less than the H100? Maybe not per part: Huang told CNBC that the B200 chip costs between $30,000 and $40,000.
That was the going rate for H100 cards on eBay, so it doesn’t sound like they’ll be cheaper. (But maybe he meant you get two? Nvidia is selling them in pairs as the GB200 “Superchip.”)
He’s expected to show a new high-end AI chip dubbed the B100, Reuters reported last week; apparently the new server-grade Blackwell GPUs can consume 1,000 watts each. Nvidia’s GTC keynote kicks off at 1PM PT / 4PM ET — just 15 minutes after I first published the words you’re reading.
Diablo IV is getting a ray tracing upgrade later this month. Armor, water, windows, and other reflective surfaces will all have ray-traced reflections for more detail and lighting accuracy. Shadows throughout the game will also feature ray tracing.
Nvidia is also bringing DLSS 3.5 to Portal with RTX. This should improve the fidelity of full ray tracing in the game, and you can enable Frame Generation on 40-series RTX cards to boost frame rates.
Nvidia updated the service’s status page around 4PM ET to say it had identified the issue and is working on a fix.
The authors, Brian Keene, Abdi Nazemian, and Steward O’Nan, allege that Nvidia trained natural language aspects of its NeMo platform on a massive training dataset containing their work, according to Reuters. Their class-action suit, if certified, would cover anyone in the US with work involved in NeMo’s training.
Although Reuters doesn’t specify, the suit may be referencing the “Books3” dataset that other author lawsuits against OpenAI and Meta are based on.
JEDEC Solid State Technology Association has released details about its new standard, which it says is better positioned to handle the demands of gaming, networking, and AI.
JESD239 GDDR7 is the first JEDEC standard DRAM to use the Pulse Amplitude Modulation (PAM) interface for high frequency operations. Its PAM3 interface improves the signal to noise ratio (SNR) for high frequency operation while enhancing energy efficiency. It also says GDDR7 has double the bandwidth over GDDR6, up to 192 GB/s per device, and double the number of channels.
We don’t expect to see GDDR7 out in the world until Nvidia and AMD release next-gen GPUs, which could come before the end of 2024 but is a long way from being confirmed.
[www.jedec.org]
As we saw at CES last month, Asus’ G16 and G14 latops are sleeker and thinner for 2024, featuring a new aluminum build, OLED screens, larger trackpads, and Intel Core Ultra 9 Meteor Lake chips to go with Nvidia 40-series GPUs.
The G16 price goes from $1,999.99 to $3,299.99 and it’s available directly from Asus or Best Buy. We haven’t reviewed this one yet, but hopefully, that new look hasn’t ruined this iteration of one of our most recommended gaming laptops.
Note: If you buy something from these links, we might get affiliate revenue.
As Nvidia reports its Q4 2023 earnings, CEO Jensen Huang says:
Accelerated computing and generative AI have hit the tipping point. Demand is surging worldwide across companies, industries and nations
That demand, and Nvidia’s dominance in AI chips, powered the company’s record earnings of $60.9 billion for the full year 2023 — a 126 percent increase from last year. Its Q4 revenue of $22.1 billion is an increase of an astounding 265 percent over the same period last year.
The open-source Gemma models are optimized for “the installed base of over 100 million Nvidia RTX GPUs,” installed in PCs around the world, in addition to Nvidia’s ubiquitous AI chips like the H100.
The models will also be part of Nvidia’s Chat with RTX demo, which lets AI models run locally and access users’ files to generate answers to prompts.
The Information reports Microsoft’s server network cards, which are currently in development, could replace the ones offered by Nvidia and save the company cash. Server cards move data quickly between servers. These new server cards should not only improve the performance of Nvidia chips, but Microsoft’s upcoming Maia AI chips as well.
[The Information]
Reuters reports on Nvidia’s new unit that will design custom AI chips, even as its customers plan for a future less reliant on Nvidia’s dominant H100 AI chips. Those can start at $16k each, and power the majority of large language models in use today, which has pushed its market value well beyond $1 trillion.
Nvidia officials reportedly met with OpenAI, Meta, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft to offer its “bespoke” AI chip services, as well as businesses in other industries like gaming and telecom.
For context, here’s how the Wall Street Journal describes OpenAI’s once-again leader’s trillion dollar effort to “reshape the global semiconductor industry:”
Such a sum of investment would dwarf the current size of the global semiconductor industry. Global sales of chips were $527 billion last year and are expected to rise to $1 trillion annually by 2030.
The money is needed to fuel AI’s growth and solve the scarcity of expensive AI chips required to train the large language models that underpin systems like ChatGPT. According to the WSJ, Altman is pitching a chip-making partnership to investors from the UAE, SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son (again), and TSMC.
Technically, it began a voluntary recall in December — “STOP USING THEM IMMEDIATELY,” it wrote — but now the US Consumer Product Safety Commission is involved. Full refunds or $60 store credits are available. 25,300 units were sold, with 272 reports of loose, overheated, and melted adapters. Nvidia’s own adapter had a similar issue in 2022.
Nvidia has issued a hotfix GPU driver to address micro-stuttering with V-SYNC and stutter when scrolling in web browsers for some systems. The patch also fixes some stutter in Red Dead Redemption and stability issues with Immortals of Aveum. If you’re not experiencing issues then it’s probably best waiting for Nvidia’s next WHQL driver, but if you’re eager for the fixes you can download the latest driver from Nvidia’s website.
Nvidia has launched its RTX 4080 Super GPUs today, and Asus is ready with an update to last year’s RTX 4080 Noctua Edition. The Super model includes a four slot cooler with 120mm Noctua fans on top. Asus hasn’t confirmed pricing just yet, but given the $450 premium on the previous RTX 4080 model it’s probably going to be a lot more than the $999 starting price of the RTX 4080 Super.
Nvidia powers most of the AI projects from Microsoft, OpenAI, Amazon, and Meta, but they’re also trying to lessen their dependence on its limited supply. The New York Times explains they want to make switching between Nvidia chips and others (including their own) “as simple” as possible.
As The Verge reported, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is interested in building chips. Microsoft’s AI-focused chip Maia 100 is expected to arrive this year, and Amazon announced the latest version of its Trainium chip.
