Nvidia Unveils Gaming Chips and Desktop to Protect AI Leader

(Bloomberg) — Nvidia Corp. CEO Jensen Huang announced a series of new chips, software and services, aimed at staying at the forefront of computing artificial intelligence.

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Huang took the stage in a packed house in Las Vegas to kick off the CES show Monday and introduce new programming, offering a vision of how AI will spread through the economy. The company wants its products to be at the heart of a future technological world with a billion humanoid robots, 10 million automated factories and 1.5 billion autonomous cars and trucks.

Interest in Nvidia’s products and Huang’s predictions has exploded as companies rush to deploy new AI computing equipment. The CEO presented Nvidia’s products and strategy to hundreds of people for more than 90 minutes, including the tie-ups with Toyota Motor Corp. and MediaTek Inc. which sent their shares up more than 3%.

Even before Huang’s presentation, shares of Asian chipmaking suppliers surged on optimism about the prospects of Nvidia, whose stock had just hit a new all-time high. Microsoft Corp. had announced plans the previous week to spend $80 billion building its AI data center, much of which will be spent with Nvidia.

Before his keynote address on data center technology, Huang offered some advances to his traditional audience: gamers. Nvidia is rolling out an update to its GeForce GPUs — short for graphics processing units — which were created with the same Blackwell design the company uses in its AI accelerators, Huang said.

The new GeForce 50 series cards will leverage Blackwell’s capabilities to create even more realistic experiences for computer gamers, the company said. While traditional graphics chips construct an image by calculating the hue of each pixel in the image, the new technology will rely more on AI to anticipate what the next image should look like.

“GeForce brought AI to the masses, and now AI is coming back to GeForce,” Huang said during the presentation.

The flagship RTX 5090 model will be available later this month for $1,999, followed by less powerful cards later. The RTX 5070, priced at $549, will debut in February with better performance than the previous top-of-the-line model, the RTX 4090, Nvidia said.

As recently as 2022, gaming was Nvidia’s biggest source of sales. Now the chipmaker’s data center operations are much larger. It is on track to contribute more than $100 billion this year as the company’s accelerator chips are prized by the world’s biggest tech companies. The next step is to deploy hardware and software to more companies and government agencies, helping to diversify Nvidia’s revenue.

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