Nvidia announces new AI chips as market competition heats up

Nvidia unveiled its next generation of artificial intelligence chips on Sunday to succeed the previous model, announced a few months earlier in March.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced the new AI chip architecture, dubbed “Rubin”, ahead of the COMPUTEX technology conference in Taipei.

Rubin comes a few months after the March announcement of the next “Blackwell” model, which is still in production and expected to ship to customers later in 2024.

Huang’s Rubin announcement appears to accelerate the company’s already accelerating pace of AI chip advancement.

Nvidia has committed to releasing new AI chip models at a “year-long pace,” as Huang said on Sunday. The company previously operated on a slower two-year update schedule for chips.

The move from Blackwell to Rubin happened in less than three months, underscoring the competitive frenzy in the AI ​​chip market and Nvidia’s desire to maintain its dominant position.

AMD And Intel are two major competitors that are scrambling to catch up, even though their gross margins are lower than Nvidia’s in the most recent fiscal quarter. Companies like Microsoft, Google And Amazon are also vying for Nvidia’s top spot, even though they are simultaneously among Nvidia’s biggest patrons. Many startups are also working to enter the space.

“Today we are on the cusp of a major change in the field of computing,” Huang said on Sunday. “Through our innovations in AI and accelerated computing, we are pushing the boundaries of what is possible and driving the next wave of technological advancement.”

The Rubin chip platform will feature new GPUs, the crucial graphics processing technology that helps train and launch AI systems. It will have other new features, like a central processor called “Vera,” although Sunday’s announcement didn’t provide many details.

Nvidia shares were relatively flat at market close Friday, with shares trading at $1,096.