LAS VEGAS, Jan 6 — Nvidia chief executive officer Jensen Huang has said that the company’s next generation of chips is in “full production,” saying they can deliver five times the artificial-intelligence computing of the company’s previous chips when serving up chatbots and other artificial intelligence (AI) apps.
In a speech at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the leader of the world's most valuable company revealed new details about its chips, which will arrive later this year and which Nvidia executives told Reuters are already in the company's labs being tested by AI firms, as Nvidia faces increasing competition from rivals as well as its own customers.
The Vera Rubin platform, comprising six separate Nvidia chips, is expected to debut later this year, with the flagship server containing 72 of the company’s graphics units and 36 of its new central processors.
Huang showed how they can be strung together into "pods" using more than 1,000 Rubin chips and said they could improve the efficiency of generating "tokens" — the fundamental unit of AI systems — by a factor of 10.
However, to get the new performance results, the Rubin chips use a proprietary kind of data that the company hopes the wider industry will adopt.
"This is how we were able to deliver such a gigantic step up in performance, even though we only have 1.6 times the number of transistors," he said.
While Nvidia still dominates the market for training AI models, it faces far more competition, from traditional rivals such as Advanced Micro Devices as well as customers like Alphabet's Google, in delivering the fruits of those models to hundreds of millions of users of chatbots and other technologies.
Much of Huang’s speech focused on how well the new chips would perform for that task, including a new storage layer called “context memory storage” aimed at helping chatbots provide snappier responses to long questions and conversations.
Nvidia also touted a new generation of networking switches featuring a new connection type called co-packaged optics. The technology, which is key to linking thousands of machines into a single network, competes with offerings from Broadcom and Cisco Systems.
It said that CoreWeave will be among the first to have the new Vera Rubin systems and that it expects Microsoft, Oracle, Amazon, and Alphabet to adopt them as well.
In other announcements, he highlighted new software that can help self-driving cars make decisions about which path to take — and leave a paper trail for engineers to use afterwards.
Nvidia showed research on software called Alpamayo late last year, with Huang saying on Monday that it would be released more widely, along with the data used to train it, so automakers can evaluate it.
"Not only do we open-source the models, we also open-source the data that we use to train those models, because only in that way can you truly trust how the models came to be," he said.
Last month, Nvidia scooped up talent and chip technology from the startup Groq, including executives instrumental in helping Alphabet's Google design its own AI chips. While Google is a major Nvidia customer, its own chips have emerged as one of Nvidia's biggest threats as Google works closely with Meta Platforms and others to chip away at Nvidia's AI stronghold.
During a question-and-answer session with financial analysts after his speech, Huang said the Groq deal "will not affect our core business" but could result in new products that expand its lineup.
At the same time, Nvidia is eager to show that its latest products can outperform older chips like the H200, which United States (US) President Donald Trump has allowed to flow to China.
Reuters has reported that the chip, a predecessor to Nvidia's current "Blackwell" chip, is in high demand in China, which has alarmed China hawks across the US political spectrum.
Huang told financial analysts after his keynote that demand is strong for the H200 chips in China, and Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress said Nvidia has applied for licenses to ship the chips to China but is waiting for approvals from the US. and other governments.
