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.
Nvidia’s CEO has been taking calls from the president recently, including two days ago when he put Trump on speakerphone on a conference stage. Now CNBC reports Huang is expected to attend Trump’s state dinner next week with Chinese President Xi Jinping. Someone may be getting pretty nervous about AI and data center regulation!
Nvidia’s Jensen Huang says AI safety is important, but agrees with Trump — the “STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT” that removed the word “safety” from the AI Safety Institute — that capitalism’s invisible hand is enough to protect us:
“The fact that we need new laws, new antitrust laws, or new regulations, so that these companies could do their fundamental engineering and do it properly before they release products, that is just completely unnecessary. We have plenty of laws. We have plenty of regulations that govern the reliability and the functionality of products.”
007 First Light is getting a major visual overhaul next week, thanks to path tracing and DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction. Nvidia is releasing a new Game Ready driver (616.92) today that’s fully optimized for the First Light update, as well as adding support for PUBG’s DLSS Super Resolution update. The driver is also Game Ready for Active Matter, Aniimo, and Wardogs.
HP is adding to the impending deluge of RTX Spark computers due in October with the OmniBook X 14, OmniBook Ultra 16, and the small form factor OmniDesk. My colleague Dom saw the Ultra among other Nvidia-powered laptops at IFA, but we still don’t know any prices.
Considering HP’s specs show both OmniBooks will start with 32GB of unified memory and 1TB of storage, signs point to them being expensive.
Only one of them switched on, and apparently it wasn’t even meant to, so I’ve got no deep performance insights about the first laptops powered by Nvidia’s RTX Spark chip. But Dell, Lenovo, MSI, Asus, HP, and Microsoft are all on board with hardware already — hopefully we’ll get the details on them all before too long.
Nvidia originally announced DLSS 5 would come to as many as 16 specific games from a wide variety of studios… but at its September 3rd launch, 2K Games’ NBA 2K27 is going it alone. Probably a smart idea to see how gamers react first? These do look better than before.
A show-and-tell with Nvidia’s controversial DLSS 5 neural rendering, launching this week.
Even if it’s Trump, stepping away from your company’s all-hands to take a call from the president makes sense. But it’s very funny, as Wired reports, that NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang was still mic’d up when he stepped away, letting some staffers hear Trump’s voice on the call.
Nvidia, which recently debuted “compute as an asset class” and definitely is not doing circular financing, is reportedly buying Hugging Face for almost $13 billion, according to The Information, which cites a single anonymous source. Almost an hour earlier, Business Insider reported that the two companies were in talks but had not yet reached a deal, also citing a single anonymous source.
That’s on top of the 1 million Nvidia GPUs it was already planning to add, before demand “exceeded” expectations. The two companies doubled down on their partnership as Nvidia announced record revenue yet again, and Amazon says it’s planning to bring Nvidia’s Vera CPUs to AWS.
Unlike the computer-controlling AI tool Perplexity launched earlier this year, the Portable Computer feature runs AI models fully locally and will ask for permission if it needs to access the cloud “for more advanced research and reasoning.” It will be available on Nvidia’s DGX Spark first, before rolling out to PCs with compatible Nvidia RTX GPUs.
[Perplexity]
Price hikes aren’t only for laptops, smart speakers, and game consoles, as Bloomberg reports that “some of Nvidia’s biggest customers” have been told that server prices are going up more than 15 percent. Those customers are the companies that build the AI data centers for Oracle, Microsoft, and others that have heavily contributed to the demand spike driving up component prices.
Nvidia has already raised GPU prices this year, and we may hear more about its changes when it reports Q2 earnings on Wednesday.
Jensen Huang wants you to think ‘ah, compute as an asset class’ not ‘oh no more GPU-backed loans.’
Nvidia’s cloud gaming service can now stream more than 5,000 PC games directly in the Mozilla browser, joining existing support for Chrome, Safari, Edge, and Opera GX. It’s the latest effort to get GeForce Now onto as many screens as possible, following its expansions to Linux and Amazon Fire TV this year.
The news comes as part of OpenAI’s plans to lease an Ohio data center being built by SB Energy, a subsidiary of SoftBank. The deal will allow OpenAI to secure 8 gigawatts of capacity, with the first 800 megawatts expected to come online in 2028. Nvidia will also invest $1.5 billion in SB Energy.
Nvidia says the app’s full release brings “a more polished experience, plus gameplay optimisation with better DLSS Frame Generation.” It initially launched in beta on Ubuntu earlier this year, and Nvidia said at the time that it plans to add support for more distributions in the future.
Nemotron 3.5 Lightning is designed to work alongside other models in AI agents, targeting specific jobs like code review, answering billing questions, and security alert monitoring. It’s the latest release in Nvidia’s Nemotron family of “truly open source” AI models, as the chipmaker champions open AI while its rivals develop their own silicon.
After reports of Nvidia in talks for deals worth more than $750 billion — with OpenAI, among others — insurance on Nvidia’s debt got more expensive. “There’s a fear of financial alchemy driven by opaqueness, off-balance-sheet transactions and intercompany relationships, which could result in credit rating downgrades,” Sal Naro, chief investment officer of Coherence Credit Strategies, told Bloomberg. Nvidia is at the center of many transactions that tie the AI ecosystem together.
SSI — helmed by Sutskever, who was a co-founder of OpenAI and famously clashed with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman — announced a “long-term strategic partnership” with Nvidia with a reported investment of $5 billion, which will allow the company “10x our compute in the next 12 months.” The company wrote on X, “We reached the point where our research is worth scaling.”
[X (formerly Twitter)]
Michael Kratsios, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy director, writes on X that Moonshot accessed Nvidia’s high-end GB300 processors in Thailand, which are subject to strict export controls. Kratsios also accuses Moonshot of distilling Anthropic’s Fable AI model to build Kimi K3, an open-source AI system claimed to rival flagship models from US companies.
The identity of the winning bidder hasn’t been identified, but they were among the 45 collectors who bid on one of the Nvidia CEO’s black Tom Ford leather jackets when it went up for auction. Originally valued between $40,000 to $60,000, it actually sold for $960,000 — roughly the same price as 480 GeForce RTX 5090 GPUs.
Xinzhou Wu on autonomy, Chinese cars, and if we really need lidar.
The company is celebrating the history of its GeForce graphics cards through a collection of new trading cards highlighting classic hardware, demos, and games. The GeForce Trading Cards: Series 1 packs will be given away for free at “upcoming live events” and as part of community giveaways.
Tomorrow you can buy a Tom Ford jacket worn by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang at auction, but you might have stiff competition in the bidding.
Blernsball:
NVIDIA is going to lend OpenAI 50K to buy this, then OpenAI will lease it to Coreweave for 10K a month on a two year contract. Coreweave pledges to buy twenty more jackets from NIVIDA in the future. In return, NVIDIA will lease the jacket from Coreweave for 8K a month over 5 years.
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If you’re a collector or are just on the hunt for an authentic Halloween costume, Sotheby’s is auctioning off a Tom Ford leather jacket worn by Huang worn during an event in Taipei in 2023. The jacket is also signed by Nvidia’s CEO and is estimated to go for $40,000 to $60,000 when the auction starts on July 7th.
