Nvidia late Monday previewed its next-generation artificial intelligence computing platform, Blackwell, and highlighted how it is helping to infuse AI technology into industries spanning health care, manufacturing and more. Nvidia stock rose ahead of the news.
In a two-hour keynote presentation at the Nvidia GTC 2024 conference in San Jose, Calif., Chief Executive Jensen Huang touted the enhanced capabilities of the Blackwell platform.
Blackwell will allow organizations to build and run real-time generative AI on trillion-parameter large language models at up to 25-times less cost and energy consumption than its predecessor, the Hopper platform. Blackwell can enable AI training and inference for models scaling up to 10 trillion parameters, he said.
Plus, Blackwell graphics processing units, or GPUs, will deliver four times the AI training performance of Hopper and 30 times the inference performance.
"For three decades we've pursued accelerated computing, with the goal of enabling transformative breakthroughs like deep learning and AI," Huang said in a news release. "Generative AI is the defining technology of our time. Blackwell GPUs are the engine to power this new industrial revolution."
Nvidia Stock Rises Ahead Of Keynote
Organizations planning to adopt Blackwell include Amazon Web Services, Alphabet's Google, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, OpenAI, Oracle and Tesla, Nvidia said.
"The excitement for Blackwell is really off the charts," Huang said.
Blackwell-based products will be available from Nvidia's hardware partners starting later this year. Those partners include Cisco Systems, Dell Technologies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Super Micro Computer.
On the stock market today, Nvidia stock rose 0.7% to close at 884.55. In after-hours trading, Nvidia stock declined 0.8% to 877.13.
Nvidia also announced its next-generation AI supercomputer: the Nvidia DGX SuperPOD powered by Nvidia GB200 Grace Blackwell Superchips. It can run up to 576 Blackwell GPUs connected as one with upgraded Nvidia NVLink interconnects.
What's Next After Generative AI?
At Nvidia GTC, the company is talking about the next era after today's multimodal generative AI. One next phase will be the ability to combine AI systems and large language models from different providers. Nvidia calls this phase a "mixture of experts."
Another new wrinkle for AI is Nvidia's inference microservices, or NIMs. These "microservices" will allow developers to quickly create and deploy "co-pilots," or AI assistants, using proprietary and custom models.
Nvidia launched dozens of enterprise-grade generative AI microservices that businesses can use to make applications on their own platforms while retaining full ownership and control of their intellectual property.
Among the first to access the new Nvidia generative AI microservices are leading application, data and cybersecurity platform providers. They include Adobe, Cadence Design Systems, CrowdStrike, Getty Images, SAP, ServiceNow and Shutterstock.
The Secret of NIM
"Established enterprise platforms are sitting on a gold mine of data that can be transformed into generative AI co-pilots," Huang said. "Created with our partner ecosystem, these containerized AI microservices are the building blocks for enterprises in every industry to become AI companies."
NIM microservices enable developers to reduce deployment times for AI services from weeks to minutes, he said. They provide industry-standard application programming interfaces, or APIs, for domains such as language, speech and drug discovery to enable developers to quickly build AI applications using their proprietary data hosted securely in their own infrastructure.
Customers will be able to access NIM microservices from Microsoft Azure AI, Google Kubernetes Engine and Amazon SageMaker.
'AI Woodstock' Begins
Dubbed "AI Woodstock," more than 300,000 people are expected to register to attend in person or virtually for GTC 2024. The four-day conference is the first in-person GTC in five years.
Ahead of the conference, Truist Securities analyst William Stein reiterated his buy rating on Nvidia stock and upped his price target to 1,177 from 911.
"Its leading position in parallel compute and AI is owing less to its chips and more to its culture of innovation, ecosystem of incumbency, and massive investment in software, services and models," Stein said in a client note.
Nvidia demonstrated the use of AI for such applications as drug discovery, weather forecasting, self-driving cars, and robotics.
AI Software For Humanoid Robots
Nvidia also announced Project Groot, a general-purpose foundation model for humanoid robots. Stylized as GR00T, the acronym stands for "Generalist Robot 00 Technology."
Groot-powered robots will be designed to understand natural language and emulate movements by observing human actions. They can quickly learn coordination, dexterity and other skills in order to navigate, adapt and interact with the real world. In his GTC keynote, Huang showed off several such robots completing a variety of tasks.
Nvidia is building a comprehensive AI platform for leading humanoid companies such as 1X Technologies, Agility Robotics, Apptronik, Boston Dynamics, Figure AI, Fourier Intelligence, Sanctuary AI, Unitree Robotics and Xpeng Robotics, among others.
As part of the initiative, the company also unveiled a new computer, Jetson Thor, for humanoid robots based on the Nvidia Thor system-on-a-chip, as well as significant upgrades to the Nvidia Isaac robotics platform.
Nvidia Stock On Five IBD Lists
Nvidia stock has a best-possible IBD Composite Rating of 99, according to IBD Stock Checkup. IBD's Composite Rating combines five separate proprietary ratings into one easy-to-use rating. The best growth stocks have a Composite Rating of 90 or better.
Further, Nvidia stock is on five IBD stock lists: IBD 50, Leaderboard, Big Cap 20, Sector Leaders and Tech Leaders. Nvidia is also one of the so-called Magnificent Seven stocks.
Follow Patrick Seitz on X, formerly Twitter, at @IBD_PSeitz for more stories on consumer technology, software and semiconductor stocks.
